Too Late to the Party

 First, a bit of housekeeping. Are you reading this in its original EastFlatbushMemories.blogspot.com ?

If you went to high school in the late fifties or early sixties, you may have missed the real Brooklyn. Our parents were invited to the party; we weren’t.

Brooklyn , the real Brooklyn, the Brooklyn celebrated in film and in novels had already changed by the time we came on the scene.  

At best we merely prolonged its death by trying to keep the memories alive. But to have grown up in the post-war years, the Eisenhower era, was to be cheated of the real glory days of Brooklyn.

The Dodgers had already abandoned Brooklyn; their home leveled to make way for a high-rise apartment house. Coney Island’s fabled Steeplechase had closed; Lundy’s was suffering through its last days. Ebinger’s would soon shutter its doors, taking with it the best black-out cake ever created by man (or woman); Brooklyn College embarked on a misguided open-enrollment policy guaranteed to fail. The subways, just beginning to be unsafe at night, required the presence of a uniformed cop on every train.

 

Closer to home, the Rugby Theater – on its way to oblivion - was first converted to a two-screen theater; ‘For Rent’ signs became more prevalent on Utica and Church and Flatbush Avenues and if lucky, the stores were finally rented as dollar stores; and Brooklyn’s Church Avenue trolley - the last line in the last borough to operate trolleys - had its swan song in October, 1956.

By the mid-sixties, New York City public school education, which had served our parent’s generation and us so well, was no longer the key for upwardly mobile kids like us. We were the last. The families of the kids following us moved upward – or more accurately, outward – to the suburbs, to Long Island or New Jersey. The move sent once-solid East Flatbush into a tail-spin from which it has yet to recover.

That was the final straw. Once urban flight took hold in the sixties, the last vestiges of our parent’s Brooklyn disappeared. I watched in amazement as six high-stooped attached houses on Rockaway Parkway near Linden Blvd displayed for-sale signs at the same time. I was too naïve to truly understand the ramifications of that sight, but to this day when I think of the one most significant thing that represented this abandonment of Brooklyn, and specifically my East Flatbush, I think of those ‘for sale’ signs on Rockaway Parkway.
 

By that time the streets and especially the subways had become unsafe. Until then we had been insulated from the Pigtown and East New York gangs; from the drugs; from the poverty. Having already given up teaching, first at Meyer Levin and then at Tilden High School, I too, became part of that flight as my young family moved ‘to the country’ from Avenue H.

Current residents can claim they know our East Flatbush, but it’s a different neighborhood they're describing.

 

Brooklyn, and specifically our neighborhood, had lost many of its 'institutions' by 1970:

Garfields on Flatbush and Church – gone

The Tower of Pisa on Utica and Vincent’s on Church – gone, gone

The RKO Kenmore, Loews Kings, the Carroll theaters – gone, gone, gone.

Even Tilden – gone.

 

But Brooklyn's most important loss in this period was a loss of confidence. In the 1950's alone, the borough lost more than 135,000 residents.  They were buying the hype about the suburbs, they were buying cars, they were moving out to the 'sticks'.  Filling the housing vacuum in our neighborhood were, for the most part, first generation Americans from the Caribbean islands seeking the same good life, a better tomorrow, that our grandparents were looking for when they moved here.

 A drive down Church Avenue reveals only a few vestiges of the Church Avenue of my youth. A ride up East 57th St from Beverly Road to Kings Highway bears witness to the change. The typical East Flatbush homes built in the years just before and after World War II– the attached, brick, high stoop design - now include the obligatory wrought iron gates and window bars. 

The Brooklyn that brings us to websites such as this one is the past, recorded on curled black and white photographs with scalloped edges, faded slides, brittle home movies and clouded memories of innocence, childhood, family and above all – a safe place and to think back on how life had once been in Brooklyn.

From the vantage point of a half century later I realize the neighborhood of my memories no longer exists. It, too, is gone.

 

Brooklyn is the precious thing we’ve lost. And for a lot of us, that's how Brooklyn ended.

 

I welcome your response.

N.Berger                             nberger1@outlook.com

Remembrance of Things Past - with a nod to Marcel Proust

"Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were."

                                                                                                               -  Marcel Proust 1871-1922

Okay, folks. We’re going to take a slight detour down memory lane. The nostalgia-laden among us will appreciate it more than, say, the purists, who come to this site looking only for things East-Flatbush. Actually, the events depicted in this blog took place in East Flatbush and in the middle of the last century.

Think back to your high school days.  Some lucky souls just put in their four years, graduate and that's that. But for most of us our adolescence occupies a prime piece of real estate in our memories.  Give an adult a series of random cues and odds are he or she will recall a disproportionate number of memories from adolescence.  The summer you fell in love while working as a counselor at Camp Equinunk or while in summer school so you could graduate early and your new soul mate could retake Geometry. Whatever the case, your time together was magical, it ended prematurely... but you never forgot.  And maybe a half century later, when the routine of your daily life starts to get to you, you find yourself wondering what kind of a glamorous life he/she is leading now.

But now we can find out. Somehow we stumble across an email address and compose the ideal email to send to someone we haven't seen in fifty years. And, if we're lucky. maybe we get a  chatty response  and all of a sudden  the grass we have is as green, if not greener, than the person's grass we remember from a lifetime ago.

Researchers refer to this phenomenon as the 'reminiscence bump'  suggesting that memories from the ages of 15 to 25 are most vividly retained.

Here's another piece of news.  Teenagers are lousy at assessing the behavior of others.  When teenagers in one study were asked to name their closest friends, for the majority the results were not mutual.  The person you listed as your best friend probably did not name you as his/her best friend - proof that high school is a time of unrequited longings.  A lot has to do with the fact that teenagers cannot tell when they are being rejected - or accepted.

OK.  Armed with these studies when I first embarked on this 'blog business' I researched to see what 'non-scientific' information was out there that would/could jog my memory. I noticed a common thread.

Person A (the Rememberer) sees Person B’s name on a site. Person A has a major attack of nostalgia resembling something along the lines of: “Holy ____. I know that person. He/she sat behind me in ___ and I/we___ . Wow! I remember it like it was yesterday.”

What usually follows is a written litany by the rememberer (you) of events to legitimatize the relationship, to prove you’re not some kind of weirdo.

Now, you probably know where this is headed, but hold on, buckaroos.

Person B’s (the Rememberee) responses fall into one of two categories depending on the emotional level invested in the original relationship:

Category 1:

Rememberer: “Hey, you lived across the hall from us on Linden Blvd and your mother played maj jong with my mother every Tuesday. You were in high school and you usta babysit me."

Or, “You lived on East 52nd Street and I lived on Beverly Road and we played punchball on East 53rd Street because it was a wide street.

Rememberees in this category remember every minuscule detail. Wanna know the color of your mother’s kitchen wallpaper? Yellow. How many Twinkies you had before you puked your guts all over the living room carpet while watching Milton Berle? Five. Who hit the brand new 'Spauldeen' down the sewer and had to retrieve it or get the ____ beat out of him? You. (As a bonus, the Rememberee will tell you how much the ball cost fifty years ago and where he got it and who supplied the coat hanger so you could retrieve the ball from the sewer and that you still owe him fifteen cents for the ball.)

Category 1’s are easy, because deep down, there ain’t no deep down. You remember or you don’t remember. No big deal. Yeah, it would have been nice if B remembered but if not, tough!

Category 2:

Category 2’s are a whole ‘nother story. Ah. I sense some smiles forming already.

Category 2 remembrances are usually emotionally charged.

Now we’re talking serious, heavy-duty, life-altering, potentially embarrassing stuff that, in retrospect, makes us wonder how we ever climbed out of puberty, sloshed through our teens, and made it into semi-adulthood. Somewhere in this scenario is the recurring phrase “unrequited love.”

Let’s face it. By sixteen you knew what love was. You knew you had found it. Case closed.

And for the next forty or fifty years every once in a while in the privacy of your own mind, you would conjure up that image of that person who truly shaped your life. And, since your mind can be your best friend, your mind wouldn’t let that person get any older. In essence, it's a story you've rehearsed and memorized and played back to yourself a zillion times.  You knew that person as a sixteen year old and, wonder of wonders, that person is still sixteen! And she still wears her blond hair in a pony tail or you can still fit into his team jacket that he let you wear one Friday night when you were shivering outside Vincent's Pizzeria.

Typical Category 2 scenario: “Do you remember me? We went steady during the summer of '60. We both worked on Flatbush Avenue that summer.  I gave you my ID bracelet. You were the first person I ever … and you said I was the first...

Typical response: “No. And don’t write to me any more.”

I marveled that two people who shared the same  experience could remember it – or not – so differently and attach such different significance to the event. What a loser. She didn’t even remember him! Whew!

Until…

About a year ago I came across a great site where people wrote about their memories growing up in Brooklyn.

There, tucked in among all the unimportant things about far away places like Coney Island, Bensonhurst, Sheepshead Bay and Williamsburgh was a short piece from someone describing growing up in Flatbush. Everything she mentioned I knew. The people she talked about and the places where she hung out, I knew. And when she listed her name, I knew her!

Not only did I know her, but she was the first girl I dated. It was my sophomore year in Erasmus Hall; we dated for about six months. I mean serious, steady dating. I finally understood why my friends said dating was cool. Holy! I can still remember her.

And, in my mind, she was still fifteen.

So, I wrote to her. I mentioned our mutual friends, the neighborhood, the places we went together. This was sooo cool.

Sure enough.  About two weeks later, I get a long, chatty email from her in which she tells what she’s been doing since high school and updates on the neighborhood, some of our mutual friends from a half-century ago and her brother who grew up to own a major league ball club. Yeah, yeah. Get to the point where you remember me, too.

And finally, in the last brief paragraph the information I had been waiting for...

she politely apologizes for not remembering me.

Judy, Judy -  say it ain’t so.

P.S. I’ve sent this blog on to some friends. Each has come back with a similar story. What’s yours?