NYC – THE CITY KEY

“Don’t Cry for Me Ocean Parkway” by Debra J. White

Growing Up in Brooklyn, New York

Bill Clinton was president when I last lived in Brooklyn – Forty Ocean Parkway was my only address there. (I still love Brooklyn, even though I doubt I’ll ever live there again. In fact, it’s doubtful I’ll ever move back to New York City.) I moved to Phoenix in 1997, and it’s likely I’ll die here.

I grew up in the scrappy, working-class section of Astoria. Back then, we rode the GG line that went from Queens to Brooklyn. (No doubt that train line is called something else now. Has any subway line kept its original name?) We transferred at Queen’s Plaza for the F train to Brooklyn to visit family friends on Flatbush Avenue or to look at the rats in Newtown Creek. Maybe we transferred to another line. I don’t remember. The subway cars in my youth looked like cast iron, black and ugly. Seats were made of rattan and coated with shellac. When the seats frayed, bits of rattan poked you in the butt or scratched your leg. Sometimes, a good pair of panty hose got snagged by the unruly seats. Air-conditioned cars didn’t exist. Overhead fans swirled hot stuffy air around.

In summertime, my dad took me to Brooklyn’s Coney Island via subway. Once the crowds poured out of the station, everyone headed to rides and the fun began. I always wanted to ride the Steeplechase, but my father said I was too little. Instead, we rode the famed Cyclone rollercoaster together. I loved the thrill of zooming up and down then flying around curves. We also rode on the carousel and bumper cars. Once I exhausted myself on rides, Dad treated me to a hot dog heaped with mustard, sauerkraut, and onions at the famous Nathans. Afterwards, I begged for super sweet cotton candy. I loved our trips to Coney Island even though the ride from Astoria took over an hour. On other days, we rode the train to Brighton Beach.

From Astoria, the only seafront views were looking at the East River swill. I preferred the smell of salty air over the stench of rotting garbage in the alleys by our tenement building. Sometimes, the drunken superintendent was so hungover, he would forget to haul the cans out to the sidewalk on Sanitation Department pick-up days. Once my dad rented an umbrella, and we spread out our blanket. Waves picked us up, tossed us around like basketballs, and we loved it. After we dried off and ate sandwiches Mom had prepared, we built sandcastles with our plastic buckets then watched as the waves washed them away. A day of fun in the sun with real sand and surf was much better than tar beach, the city term for sunning on apartment buildings rooftops. Days at Coney Island with my dad were special, even if all the sweets gave me a mouth full of cavities.

I attended Mater Christi High School (now known as St. John’s Prep) in Astoria Queens from 1968 to 1972. A sizable number of students hailed from Greenpoint, a section of Brooklyn. In freshman year, I befriended a lovable nut named Helene who lived on Dupont Street. Assigned to every class from English to algebra, we became inseparable. She was the Abbott to my Costello. We shared chicken-salad sandwiches at lunch, hung out after school in a donut shop on Ditmars Boulevard, and talked on the phone at night. If I cracked a joke in class, Helene upped the ante and made the girls laugh even harder. I’m surprised we were never kicked out. Helene invited me to visit her family’s third-floor, walk-up railroad apartment with the tub inside the kitchen. If her Italian mother offered food, Helene said to agree, even if I wasn’t hungry. Predictably, her mother asked if I wanted a bite to eat. “A little something,” I replied.

Within minutes, the kitchen table was filled with a spread of salami, ham, cheeses of all kinds, crisp bread, olives, pickles, cannoli, and more. Wow! I couldn’t possibly eat that much, but I tried to make her mother happy. I left that night ready to explode. I tried to walk all the way home from Greenpoint to Astoria to relieve my aching stomach, but it was just too far.

During the massive construction project to build the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, linking Staten Island with Brooklyn, Dad would sometimes take us on the subway all the way from Astoria to Bay Ridge. Mom packed us a picnic lunch for the afternoon. We sat in a park watching the workers toil away slapping concrete and steel together that would one day become a world-famous suspension bridge. When the Verrazano finally opened in 1964, I was in the fifth grade. We watched the grand opening festivities on TV. After all the publicity died down, Dad drove us across the bridge just for fun.

“Brooklyn Royalty” by Steve Slavin

As someone born and bred in the borough, I am well acquainted with Brooklyn royalty. In fact, only great modesty prevents me from even mentioning my own royal blood.

Brooklyn, of course, was once part of the British Empire, and many reminders can still be found. I grew up just a block from our neighborhood’s main shopping strip, Kings Highway. Just off the Highway is a well preserved pre-Revolutionary farmhouse, the Wycoff-Bennett mansion. In recent decades, it was owned by Annette and Stu Mont, who sometimes called their home the Wycoff-Bennett-Mont house.

Annette and I met at James Madison High School and became friendly again about twenty years ago. She invited me to monthly political meetings and occasional parties at her home. She and her husband had restored the house to look much as it did during colonial times. There were even numerous oil portraits of the home’s earlier residents, as well as furniture and farm implements dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

When new guests arrived, Annette graciously showed them around. Sometimes I could not resist telling the more gullible among them that I too had descended from the Wycoffs or the Bennetts – or even both families. Annette smiled when she overheard me, but she never bothered setting the record straight.

Another structure surviving from colonial times was a store on Montague Street, in historic Brooklyn Heights. If you looked in a Brooklyn phone book from the 1970s, you’d find a listing for King George Pizza. It’s still whispered that after their victory in the Battle of Brooklyn, scores of Redcoats stopped in for a celebratory slice, while Washington’s army escaped to New Jersey to fight another day.