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In 1976, I had a brutal second grade teacher. But before we get to her, let me set the scene. P.S. 100 was located 3 blocks away from my home on Ocean Parkway, which was the dividing line between Brighton Beach proper and West Brighton. The school was smack dab in the lower middle-class, white, secular Jewish ghetto known as [...]
My conversion to Judaism in 1977 began while having lunch with my girlfriend at the original Purity Diner on Seventh Avenue and Union Street.A few guys came into the diner who knew her and said hello. She introduced me to them, and one asked if I liked to play basketball. I said very much, and he said we have a [...]
I’ve always had had a complicated relationship with Christmas. I think my discomfort goes back to my earliest years and the collision between the sacred and the profane. Growing up Roman Catholic, Christmas was a deeply religious time of frequent church attendance and Christian iconography. But my family life and the larger world during the holidays were also immersed in [...]
Brighton Beach 1963 Facing the back of our apartment is the alley. Street games spill over into it, and we like to make up new ones: “Bet you can’t hit the wire with the ball.” Sometimes the super yells at us. There are broken bottles and smells from garbage cans. But the alley is our backyard— private, hidden from grown-up eyes. [...]
Self-portrait as a carpenter, wishing to be a photographer, 1981, in my studio. ___ As the Labor Day holiday approaches, I’ve been thinking of all the jobs I’ve had since I turned 24 in 1971, the year I began trying to “make it,” that is support myself, as a photographer in New York City. Between 1971 and 1989, I worked [...]
Do you have anyone in New York City who you are worried about running into? I interviewed people and asked them who they least want to see. Courtney is a sometimes playwright and is in her 50s. She lives in Fort Greene. H: So, who is the person who you least want to run into in New York City, you [...]
Back in the day, well, sometime in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was as far-out and far-right a president that the human mind could contemplate, you could still afford to rent your own apartment in Park Slope, and not shared with 15 other roommates, even though you were neither the employee nor scion of a hedge fund. I was living [...]
Did you have a favorite place in New York that’s no longer exists? I interviewed people about spots in the city that were special to them but are now gone. Ellen is 70 years old and was a lawyer. Henry Kaplan: What's your favorite store in your neighborhood that shut down or closed? Ellen: That is a very easy [...]
I first met Marina Gorodetsky when we worked for the City Planning Department. She was a clerk, and all the guys in my section were crazy about her. She had green eyes, blonde hair and a buxom figure. Although she was an immigrant from the Soviet Union, Marina spoke English with only a slight accent. In the Soviet Union she [...]
Excursion #2: Public Bodies, Private Meetings In my second walk through the neighborhood, I was reminded that the personal and political don’t just collide in headlines. Sometimes they brush up against each other in a spa room, a Starbucks, or the shoulder of a stranger on the subway. This time, my excursion took me through three very different stories, all [...]
When I was a boy in 1950’s South Brooklyn, Easter Sunday was a day of celebration for my family. Wearing our newest dress clothes, we went to the 11 AM mass at Saint Michael’s and then to my maternal grandmother’s apartment for a sumptuous dinner. My parents sat with my aunts and uncles at a large kitchen table, while my [...]
The Brighton Jubilee was a street fair started by a local Brighton Beach neighborhood association in the mid-1970s. At the time the neighborhood needed a good promotional effort — if not a friendly slap on the back— because it was, in many ways, a depressing craphole. Unlike today’s New York City street fairs, which are cookie cutter and filled with the same vendors [...]
The church was located in Hell’s Kitchen on 41st Street and 9th Avenue (Carroll Studios). A little guy named Jimmy made it possible for services to happen in a music studio. It brought him consistent cash, besides rehearsal rentals. It was convenient for me. My job with Carrier Travel was at 1040 6th Avenue on 40th Street. The church was [...]
And now, Ferdinando’s has closed. Last month its owner Francesco “Frank” Buffa announced the immediate closing of the 121-year-old focacceria on Instagram. This is a real loss. There are many “old school” Italian restaurants in New York City, but few Sicilian ones. Between 1907 and 1910, my maternal grandparents came to American from small towns near Naples and settled in [...]
One day back in the early 1980s, when I was a young teenager, I was hanging out at a friend’s apartment. We both had Atari computers, I had the 400 and he had the fancier Atari 800, and spent a lot of time copying games and trying to figure out how to play them. You see, if you pirated a [...]
I must have looked deranged when I walked into the café. Like a guy scanning the club at last call. No one struck me as particularly interesting, so I adjusted my standards and decided that everyone caught my attention. Wiping sweat from the back of my neck, I approached a pair of men. Probably colleagues. “Sorry to interrupt,” I said. [...]
image by Laurie Rosenwald When they say you have to love yourself first, before anyone else can love you, it’s just not true. I’ve had lots of boyfriends! And each of them has taught me something. From Joe I learned about architecture. From Steve I learned about music. From Anders I learned about art. From Gerard I learned about sadism [...]
It was 1978. Or 1979. I was 10 or 11 years old. I’m a little vague on the exact year, but I was definitely aware of the fact I was too old to be riding my Big Wheel around the block. Catching myself in the reflection of the windows of Speedway Drugs, as I scooted by, I realized I looked [...]
The toddler is off, fully clothed, racing into the sprinkler, while the mother yells, “no!” Clearly, she came unprepared. It is a balmy Sunday after Labor Day and the sprinklers in the Park Slope Playground at Lincoln Place, with their calming, water sounds are usually off by now. Today is steamy, however, and perhaps the Parks Department has decided to [...]
I was going through some old family papers recently and chanced upon my father’s New York City peddler’s license. It is a document not just from another time, but also another world. He is wearing a tan Big Apple hat and a black shirt and stares straight at the camera, looking incredibly fresh and handsome. The address on the license [...]
I got the scalper’s number from a neighborhood friend who worked for him. The tickets I wanted were for Rush’s 1986 “Power Windows” tour, and this scalper was the guy who could help. When I called him, it was immediately one of these frantic and sketchy “Who are you? Why are you calling?” things. I mentioned my friend’s name, and [...]
Trainer Teddy Bentham (in suit), Pellone, and Manager Tommy Ryan (Eboli) ____________________________ I did not expect him to answer the door in his underwear. He was sixty-something, and I was seventeen and lacking direction. My father had just died, and high school was about to end. Instead of thinking about college, I wanted to be a boxer, like the ones [...]
It was 1985 and the “Jewish Club” was a social club that seemingly popped up from nowhere at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn. One day, we were told this club existed and that a woman named Akiva would be coming to the school every few weeks to run the club’s meetings. Akiva wasn’t a teacher, and this club was [...]
ROUND ONE: JAY Walking out of the crowd, my ears are still ringing. It’s late. I’m more than tipsy, but I haven’t felt tired in hours. I bounce down the stairs that lead from the East Village dance floor and head to the bar. There, I shift my weight around on the balls of my feet in my black knee-high [...]
It was 1982, and I was in junior high school. Beven was a new kid, and I didn’t know him besides seeing him in class. He seemed OK, but quirky. Like the way he carried himself, the stains on his clothes and — most notably — the odd, beat-up briefcase he had with him at all times. While the rest of us had basic [...]
President Truman with Charles Luckman, right, head of the Citizen's Food Committee. _____ On October 5, 1947, two years after the end of the War, President Truman was to address the nation on the world food crisis. It was to be the first televised address by a President in history. People were going to see the President of the United States [...]
Fireworks meant many different things to me as a kid. They were what you saw on TV when Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops performed the “1812 Overture.” Fireworks showed up over Popeye’s head if he kissed Olive Oyl or if Bluto punched him in the face. On special occasions, fireworks would be in the night sky when my dad [...]
It was around 1975 and I was maybe 8 years old. My $2 a week allowance worked well for my humble needs, and I didn’t necessarily want or need a job at that age, but my dad would ask me to run errands every now and then and let me keep some of the left-over change from the transaction. The [...]
In the fall of 1980, The Empire Strikes Back had already come out and while I was getting tired of my Star Wars action figures, I really, really, really wanted a Millennium Falcon spaceship playset. It was huge, cool and could fit my 3.75” action figures without issue. But at $29.99 it was expensive for a 12 year old kid with a meager $2 [...]
If you want to call me a cool kid, please do. You see, back in 1975 when I was seven years old , I visited Tribeca for the first time…with my mom and dad. We didn’t go to the Mudd Club or Artists Space or anything like that; instead we went to a factory just south of Canal Street. One Saturday [...]
It was raining, and I was tired and drunk, well let’s say high, walking home at 3 AM from a party in Sunset Park when I saw a blown-out umbrella between two parked cars on 5th Avenue. I was about two blocks from my parents’ apartment on 40th Street. I was 23 years old and had returned to Brooklyn a [...]
I have no idea where Bill came from, but one spring, sometime in the late 1970s, he showed up and started hanging out every day on our Ocean Parkway block in Brighton Beach. He was a white guy with a red haired, frizzy Jewfro, and he wore a denim jacket. Bill would stand out there on the block all day [...]
At the Prospect Park station, I sit across from a Hasidic couple on a three-seater bench on the Q train. Parallel to them, in a wheel-locked stroller, is a toddler with unshorn blonde hair, dark eyes that reflect no light, and a suckling baby mouth. He has been dressed in a Canadian tuxedo of many layers: a miniature pair of [...]
We always drank beer from stemmed glasses in Farrell’s. We were college kids, hair creeping down our necks, and we would meet in the crowded, gleaming bar in Brooklyn’s Windsor Terrace to plan the evening or the rest of our lives. Like our parents, we were from there—Holy Name parish—and attended local schools—Brooklyn College, St. John’s, St. Francis, ones that [...]
Big Eric is an alcoholic. I know this because he talks to me about his life when we work together. He’s 40-years old, and he tells me he’s feeling stressed and alone, and that the only time he feels peace is when he drinks. He lives around the corner from the café and sometimes in the middle of the night [...]
In 1979, when my boyfriend Bob bought the house, Park Slope had not yet exploded in a frenzy of gentrification. But change was on its way. Young professionals from Manhattan, starting families and priced out of Brooklyn Heights, were establishing themselves, transforming 7th Avenue with upscale specialty stores and busily renovating neglected brownstones with woodwork to die for. But the [...]
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