Going Back to Brooklyn

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to
him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
Virginia Woolf

"You have to accept this place on its own terms," Mort was saying, "but you seem to be on some kind of nostalgia trip."

The flags at Rockefeller Plaza were snapping in the chilly wind, and it didn't feel like springtime at all, despite the April date. I had returned to New York after many years, an errant daughter searching for the kingdom I had abandoned. But as usual, what one yearns for is more often a time than a place, and I was certain to be disappointed if I expected to find things as they had been forty years earlier. Mort himself had grown up in the Bronx, the last of the "schoolyard generation," as he called it, and though he cherished his lifelong friendships and memories of stickball in the streets, he had made peace with the city as it is.

We had just been to an exhibit of Walker Evans' photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Evans' pictures of New York City resonated with me more than the contemporary reality I had thus far encountered. There was a familiar sense and clarity to his black and white images of waitresses carrying steamy platters in coffee shops, a tailor-tapered jacket in a Third Avenue window, subway riders in their winter coats, a young couple at Coney Island, she in her backless summer dress, he in suspenders and white shirt. I loved the thick-glassed sugar bowls and salt shakers and heavy china cups; the shiny wicker subway seats, like woven maize baskets; the art deco edging to everything. The world had solidity and roundness to it, and details mattered.

Now it all seemed jangly and hastily done, like an exam you had to finish in fifteen minutes. To be sure, I may not have been fair in my assessments, for I had come to the city with grief in my heart. Three months earlier my sister had died, she who had been my dearest childhood playmate, and the only person who would have remembered exactly what is was that I was hoping to find. But the true measure of what had been lost or salvaged would be the neighborhood in Brooklyn. Heidi and Jennifer, my two patient friends, agreed to accompany me, along with my daughter Miranda, who had no choice.

We got off the subway at Beverley Road, and I was reassured to see the beautiful old mosaic tiling that formed the letters of its name. The station itself was exactly as I remembered it, with its sky-lit stairway, tile roof, and aqua trim. Adjacent to the station was a house that I knew for the violets that had grown against a black iron fence. There were no violets today, but there was a border of daffodils, pansies, and irises. It was a garden that someone still tended, and this was good.

The elegant homes in the neighborhood near Flatbush were as beckoning as they had always been to a girl who lived above a store in a railroad apartment on Coney Island Avenue. They are grand old houses with porches and pathways, no two alike, and I recalled every particular of walking along these streets pretending I belonged here. No one knows the lay of the land as a child does. There was the short brick wall upon which I had to tread, the steps I must climb to a certain secret walkway, a rise in the sidewalk, a railing from which to swing. I remembered the dignity of the dark siding and black rooftop shingles, and the house that seemed to smile, its windows lit yellow at night with warm lamps.

It was raining now, a cold inhospitable rain, but springtime in Brooklyn was always ambivalent. It would creep in and dart away a few times before it finally got comfortable and settled. We would encourage it with songs about bluebirds and robins, for we were tired of the winter grown dreary and wet. Spring's calling cards were crocuses, followed by pussy willow, hyacinths, and the yellow forsythia that seemed suddenly to be everywhere, just as it was today. At Easter time, ladies would wear white shoes, spring coats and gloves in pastel colors, and hats that sprouted flowers, birds, and bees.

Now the streets were deserted, but the barren treetops had grown lacy with spring green buds, and pastel blossoms dripped delicately from their branches. It was lovely, despite the damp. My mission, however, was to gaze upon the very building in which I had grown up, so I led my companions four blocks to Coney Island Avenue, an abruptly less genteel locale. The litany of what was no longer there is long. Anthony's Beauty Salon, where it took an hour to untangle my hair and ten minutes to cut it, had metamorphosed into something else. As had Dave's beverage, cigar, and candy store -- where we used to read as many comics as we could without buying them, until cantankerous old Dave would kick us out. Peter's Antiques was no longer there, nor of course the sign my father had lettered for the owner, Pete Caccio. Harry's grocery store had vanished, and Joe's corner candy store and soda fountain, Mr. Herman's clock shop, Mr. Thorner's hardware, Mr. Blitstein's lumber yard, Tobin's Furs, the tailor around the corner - all gone.

The avenue had transformed itself into a bleak stretch of auto part shops and discount stores with bars across the windows, and there was a clamor of cheap signs that seemed to shout and collide. The stoop was still there, being a fundamental part of the topography of the avenue, and remarkably, there was still a Mobil gas station directly across the street from my old address -- it was a streamlined version, stripped of the handsome red Pegasus which I used to view from our front window, but despite its newer appearance, it has remained what it was for at least fifty consecutive years.

Coney Island Avenue in the 1950's had been a walking street and a playing street. Its residents were predominantly Irish, Jews, and Italians -- and there were scores of children, most of whom attended either P.S. 179 or the Catholic school at Holy Innocents. There was always someone "downstairs" with whom to play. Irritable old Mrs. Milici kept vigil from a window, her elbows resting on a pillow placed upon the sill. She was not shy about interjecting her opinions and reprimands, but the zone in which we wandered freely was impressively large. It was not difficult to transport our adventures "around the corner" or to walk towards Flatbush Avenue and pretend we lived in a finer neighborhood.

Perhaps it was the gloomy weather, but I was struck now by the absence of pedestrians, and there was not a child in sight. No jump rope songs, no popsicle boats sailing in the gutters, no one sweeping the ship's wet deck. I remembered men tipping their fedoras as they passed, young housewives walking briskly to the market pushing baby prams, small knots of men conversing outside the stores, people walking their dogs, and nosy old women watching it all from the windows. The curb was now lined with parking meters, all the cellars were wet with rain, and there was a cluttered unkempt feeling to the neighborhood, as though folks had given up.

Was it only Saturdays I was remembering? Was everyone now in school? At work? Where had they gone? My own family had been part of was later described derisively by sociologists as "the white flight" into the suburbs. For us, the incentive was a small brick house in Long Island with a large yard, tall trees, and scrubby pine woods on either side which my father bought for $12,000 in 1962. And I suppose there were similar inducements for others. New populations replaced us -- I was told that my old neighborhood was now Pakistani, but I could only guess. Everything today seemed forsaken and strange.

But I recognized the black and white checked tile facing below the window of what had once been Mr. Thorner's store, and beneath the dull black, chipping paint, I saw the ornate shapes of vines and flowers carved in bas-relief around the doorway of "624", my old address. Above the door, now locked and barred, there was a graceful stained glass window I had long forgotten, and next to the entrance was the thick, curved pipe which my sister and I used to sit on, but whose true purpose we never knew.

The store below my former apartment was now "Scottie's Antiques," and as we peered through the window, Scottie himself returned from a coffee break. He was a thin African-American man, somewhat bemused by the sudden appearance of four effusive white women treating his tiny crammed shop like a tourist attraction. His demeanor was understandably cool and reserved until he began to realize that this was a place that meant something to me. And as befits an antique dealer, he was a man who valued the past. As it turned out, he lives upstairs in what had been my family's apartment, and my grandmother's before us; I told him how I remembered it, and he nodded with recognition. He pointed to the beautiful hammered tin ceiling above us that he had taken care to preserve and reveal. He unlocked the door to the apartment and let me see again the pattern of the yellow and black tile in the lobby where I had once read comic books and played with my dolls. I pointed to the curved pipe by the door and told him how we used to sit there. "What's that thing for, anyway?" I asked. "I guess it's for sitting," he replied, "That's what everyone does."

Scottie understood that even this ugly street had a history and a life. He lamented the indifference with which the elegant details of old neighborhoods have been concealed or destroyed. He seeks and treasures the remnants and in fact has built a livelihood around this affinity. "These things matter," he told us, "the past has value."

We decided to head for Prospect Park, a 526-acre refuge of wonder where perhaps the past would be more evident. And indeed I was immediately cheered by the familiar sight of the triumphal arch at its entrance; the arch was erected in 1892 as a monument to soldiers and sailors who fought to preserve the Union during the Civil War. And there were the old park benches that appear in so many of the black and white snapshots that my family took during the 40's and 50's. I trod upon walkways paved with octagon-shaped tiles exactly as I remembered them and walked through the old tunnel in which we always shouted hellos. The park was as grand as always, and everywhere there were people strolling, jogging, playing and picnicking.

The exquisite old boathouse was closed for restoration, but I heard the strains of pipe organ music and was delighted to find the carousel running and more beautiful than I remembered it. Built in 1912, its magnificent horses (not to mention a deer, a lion, and dragons) are the work of a Russian-born woodcarver named Charles Carmel who apparently lived on nearby Ocean Parkway. On this particular day, the carousel was being operated by Joey Cavello and Mary Ring, friendly and enthusiastic people who seemed to love their work, the park, and life in Brooklyn. Remarkably, Mary had been a student at Holy Innocents and knew some of the kids from Coney Island Avenue. When I told her that my last ride on this carousel had been about forty years ago, she treated me like the prodigal daughter returned. I was immediately led to the special black horse, into whose gold saddle Carmel had meticulously carved the beautiful face of his daughter nearly ninety years ago. I climbed on, took hold of the brass pole, and happily regressed as I rode around -- and up and down.

And perhaps we should leave me there, for it was my giddiest moment. From my vantage point on the carousel horse, nothing about Brooklyn had changed. The same laughter remained in the air, and the blur of children around me might have been my own brothers and sisters, classmates and friends. Beyond was a watercolor canvas of green and the newness of spring.

Cynthia Carbone
2000