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