My Brooklyn

Readers Report


JEB

Great web page! Great tribute! I was there too. Nostalgia.

Live upstate now. Still visit. Came to appreciate Brooklyn long after I left. Grew up in Manhattan Beach in the '50s — P.S. 195, 225, Lincoln H.S. Fond Brooklyn memories.

Most everyone worked hard, stayed married and believed in the future. Travel anywhere day or night without transit cops. Nobody did drugs. Schoolyards always open, stickball, punchball, stoopball, pink Spauldings, trading bubble-gum baseball-hero cards, clamp-on roller skates, street hockey, Schwinn adventures, Good Humor everywhere. Coney Island Steeplechase, Cyclone, penny arcades, Nathan's hot dogs and real fries. Dem Bums (gave up baseball the day they left), bakery smells, cherry cheesecake, still-warm corn muffins, rye bread and bagels. Doo-Wop a capella groups in D-A haircuts smoking cigarettes and harmonizing in high-school bathrooms, Elvis-like motorcycle jackets with white T-shirts, drag-racin' almost-hot-rods with straight-pipes, submarine watching, convertibles with fins and white-walled tires, Friday-night cruisin' King's Highway with carefree friends, candy store hang-outs, soda fountain stories with egg creams, 45-rpm jukebox, Alan Freed's dancin'-in-the-aisles rite-of-passage Paramount rock-'n-roll shows. Sheepshead Bay fish bought from boats just in, Lundy's Sunday-night dinners (have found no clam bisque or blueberry pie to compare, just reopened after 17 years), Brighton Beach boardwalk old-folks, babyoiled sun-worshipers crowded on hot sand, lemon ices, Humorettes, Mrs. Stahl's knishes (she's gone but the store and tastes remain).

Cradle of incredible diversity and achievement—my school pictures and yearbooks attest. Tough guys and Nobel laureates indeed. Anything seemed possible then and there, and everything passed by (all too quickly) with a special attitude, flavor and excitement I have not known since. And, oh, that music. You had to be there.

Thanks for the memories.

;)

12 February 1996


Steve Goldberg

Kings Highway/P.S. 208/Meyer Levin J.H.S./Tilden H.S. (1966). I have lived in Philadelphia for 20 years, and have lived in Nebraska and North Dakota. When people ask me where I am "from," the answer is always "Brooklyn."

18 February 1996


Shelley Weiner

My Brooklyn is Sheepshead Bay—Avenue Y between Batchelder and Coyle, more like '60s Brooklyn. Went to Sheepshead Bay H.S., and hung out at the McDonald's that opened up on Nostrand Avenue (it was a big deal for us city kids). Fond and weird memories of eating sand-flecked knishes on the packed beach at Bay 6th Street, and watching crazy kids (not Jewish, as my parents always said) go diving for coins off the Manhattan Beach bridge (don't know its real name). And, of course, Lundy's—the shore dinner for, what?, $7.95, with biscuits, celery tray, clam chowder, steamers, lobster, apple pie a la mode and great coffee. I remember all kinds of unpleasant things happening in my Brooklyn, but these are the best of times.

21 February 1996


Norbert Nowotsch

"Only the dead know Brooklyn."
The living keep tryin' to. . . .

26 February 1996


Readers' reports continue . . .


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