You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Coney Island.”
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 [...]
It’s a bone chilling day in winter as I park my car on a side street next to the Cyclone roller coaster. My head is spinning with all these old Brooklyn memories, and I’ve come back here now looking for signs of them, looking for pieces left behind from the sad sweep of time. Sometimes, when the sky is just [...]
“It was 1958,” my father says, “the year my dad opened Marcelle’s Jewelry Store on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island. You should have seen this place. I wish there were pictures now, but who would have taken pictures of some shoddy storefront on Mermaid Avenue? Displayed in one window were all the pieces of costume jewelry my dad had made [...]
I always woke up early the last day of school. My eyes would jump open and I’d sit up and look toward the windows in my parents’ bedroom to see if morning slid through the thick wooden blinds and thin white curtains. I’d jab the bottom of the bunk bed above where my older brother Johnny slept. Hey wake up, [...]
