You are currently browsing the stories about the “Brighton Beach” neighborhood.
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
“If I had a dollar for every dead Subaru battery, I would be a millionaire”, the roadside assistance man tells me in a tone that is both wishful and annoyed. "Since Subaru started manufacturing their own batteries, people keep on calling. If it’s not recharged frequently, the battery will run out of juice, especially in the winter. Keep the engine [...]
Editor’s Note -- These poems emerged out of oral histories of the American Left that Paul Buhle conducted forty years ago. They are not literal transcripts, but lyrically condense the stories he heard. Buhle traveled New York from Coop-City to Ozone Park to the Lower East Side to Brighton Beach for this project. The old leftists were octogenarians when Buhle [...]
On the Saturday evening of Memorial Day weekend, I found myself seated at a snow-white draped table next to a card featuring my first and last name in italicized letters. The joyous occasion was the wedding of a childhood friend. It was no different from the other weddings I've attended, except for a violinist, who entertained guests as they were [...]
Long lines at Whole Foods in Union Square again. It feels like the Russian bread lines, but no, it’s another snowstorm shopping spree. I’m not the only one anxious about running out of food—even though the streets are always plowed before my stomach growls uncomfortably. Everyone is complaining. Too cold, windy, snowy, sleety, Too much lashing out about de Blasio’s [...]
We move the summer before ninth grade from our four-room apartment in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, to a four-bedroom Colonial house with a two-car garage on the south shore of Long Island. A town where every street is a drive or a place or a court. A place where kids play softball in the street and basketball in their driveways and [...]
He sat sprawled on the furthest side of the Q train, nose plumped with alcohol and ears flushed a chili-pepper red -- laughing so hard his breath left two giant spheres of fog on the window. The rest of us were bunched on the other side, in an attempt to escape the stench of human grime and drink. Outside, the [...]
When I was a young man—no bigger than this A chocolate egg cream was not to be missed Some U-bet’s chocolate syrup, seltzer water mixed with milk Stir it up into a heady fro—tasted just like milk You scream, I steam, we all want Egg Cream. --Lou Reed from the song [...]
