"You can't go back home to your family, back home to
your childhood, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once
seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time - back home to the
escapes of Time and Memory."
“You Can’t Go Home Again” – Thomas Wolfe
It happened, as Ernest Hemingway wrote, "gradually and then suddenly."
If you went to school in the late fifties or early sixties, you missed the real Brooklyn. Our parents were invited to the party; we weren’t.
Brooklyn, the real Brooklyn, the Brooklyn celebrated in film and in novels had already changed by the time we came on the scene.
At best we merely prolonged its death by trying to keep the memories alive. But to have grown up in the post-war years, the Eisenhower era, was to be cheated of the glory days of Brooklyn.
The Dodgers had already abandoned Brooklyn; their home leveled to make way for a high-rise apartment house. Coney Island’s fabled Steeplechase had closed; Lundy’s was suffering through its last days. Ebinger’s would soon shutter its doors, taking with it the best black-out cake ever created by man (or woman); Brooklyn College embarked on a misguided open-enrollment policy guaranteed to fail.
Closer to home, the Rugby Theater – on its way to oblivion – was first converted to a two-screen theater; ‘For Rent’ signs became more prevalent on Utica and Church and Flatbush Avenues and if lucky, the stores were finally rented as dollar stores; and Brooklyn’s Church Avenue trolley – the last line in the last borough to operate trolleys – had its swan song in October, 1956.
By the mid-sixties, New York City public school education, which had served our parent’s generation and us so well, was no longer the key for upwardly mobile kids like us. We were the last.
The families of the kids
following us moved upward – or more accurately, outward – to the suburbs, to
Long Island or New Jersey. The move sent once-solid East Flatbush into a
tail-spin from which it has yet to fully recover.
That was the final straw. Local jobs, especially the small manufacturing jobs, were disappearing and the white middle class flight from the neighborhood was underway, helped along by real estate brokers who warned about our neighborhood's future.
Once urban flight took hold in the
sixties, the last vestiges of our parent’s Brooklyn disappeared. I watched in
amazement as six high-stooped attached houses on Rockaway Parkway near Linden
Blvd displayed for-sale signs at the same time. I was too naïve to truly
understand the ramifications of that sight, but to this day when I think of the
one most significant thing that represented this abandonment of Brooklyn, and
specifically my East Flatbush, I think of those ‘for sale’ signs on Rockaway
Parkway.
By that time the streets and especially the subways had become unsafe. Until then we had been insulated from the Pigtown and East New York gangs; from the drugs; from the poverty.
Having already given up teaching, first at Meyer Levin and then at Tilden High School, I too, became part of that flight as my young family moved ‘to the country’ from Avenue H.
But, before long, new waves of immigrants washed over the remnants of our borough and specifically our neighborhood, remaking it in the image of strivers from the Caribbean and China and Russia to become as vibrant and diverse as it had once been. And young people - at least those who could afford to - began to move to sections of the borough from which we had escaped.
So much for nostalgia. The new residents claim they know our East Flatbush, but it’s a different neighborhood they’re describing.
Garfields on Flatbush and Church – gone
The Tower of Pisa on Utica and Vincent’s on Church – gone, gone; as well as the kosher butchers and delis.
The RKO Kenmore, Loews Kings, the Patio, the Granada, the Rugby theaters – gone, gone, gone, gone and gone.
Even Erasmus and Tilden and Wingate and Jefferson – all great high schools in their time - gone. (At least ‘gone’ as we remember them.)
From the vantage point of more than a half century later I realize the neighborhood of my memories no longer exists. It, too, is gone.
A drive down Church Avenue reveals only a few vestiges of the Church Avenue of my youth. A recent ride up East 57th St from Beverly Road to Kings Highway bears witness to the change. The typical East Flatbush homes built in the years just before and after World War II– the attached, brick, high stoop design – now include the obligatory wrought iron gates and window bars.
The Brooklyn that brings us to websites such as this one is the past recorded on curled black and white photographs with scalloped edges, faded slides, brittle home movies and clouded memories of innocence, childhood, family and above all – a safe place.
Brooklyn is the precious thing we’ve lost. But, nostalgia maintains its grip on the imagination.
Am I right? I welcome your response. Read the next story.
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