Dan, Dave, and Dad Do Brooklyn and Queens

Tues-Thurs, May 27-29, 2014

What follows is a detailed description of a three-day period during which Dad, David, and I drove all over Brooklyn and Queens, looking to uncover parts of our family history in New York.

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Tuesday, May 27

Dad came and met me at my and Leah’s apartment. After having breakfast at the Windsor Café (Windsor Terrace), we got in the rental car and drove to the old site of Ebbets Field, off Eastern Parkway. I had never driven down Eastern Parkway before. Beautiful!! We remarked that it feels like a European boulevard, as if it could just as easily be in Rome or Vienna (add to this the grandeur of Grand Army Plaza!). We wondered if it and Ocean Parkway, as they have similar sounding names and both flank Prospect Park, weren’t also designed by Edward Olmsted.

We then parked near the site of Ebbets Field. It is now a city housing project (has been a housing project for longer than it ever was a baseball field. We walked all around the edges of what would have been the stadium, reading as we went an article from the NYTimes (2013, on the 100^th anniversary of the Park) that described as walking tour around the old stadium. The article included many interesting facts about the players, managers, team, and fans throughout Brooklyn Dodger history. Dad was good at remembering the names of many of the players and managers. Dad told me the story (as he had told me before) of a time that he and his dad went to a Dodger game together.  (He estimated that he might have been 4-10 years old.) After the game (or maybe during?), his dad walked him over to Prospect Park Zoo. This was a fond memory for both of us, for me particularly because Leah and I live on Prospect Park. We remarked how small Ebbetts field was (it didn’t take long at all to walk the whole perimeter), and noted that older stadiums were built smaller—think, for example, Fenway. As we walked along the perimeter of the field, we noticed the Jackie Robinson Public Elementary School. We took pictures by a mural of Jackie and the classic façade of Ebbets field, while looking right across the street at the corner where the façade would have stood!! We went inside the school (with the permission of a security guard) and were greeted by the principle, who was very friendly and told us that he students (grades 3-5) watched the movie 42 when it came out, and the Jackie and his “Nine Core Values” are a part of the school’s curriculum. (Dad also mentioned to me a memory of once playing softball at the field by his apartment building, and how he hit a homerun while his dad was watching, and how proud he felt.)

We then drove down Ocean Parkway on our way out to Manhattan Beach. Ocean Parkway is also very beautiful. Like Eastern Parkway, it is quite wide, with a separated bicycle/pedestrian lane of the southbound side, and what was once a bridal path (dad told me) on the northbound side. On the drive down, dad told me that his grandmother (his dad’s mom) and other relatives used to live somewhere just to the east of Ocean Parkway. We couldn’t quite figure out where.

We arrived at Manhattan Beach, where Grandpa Harry, Grandma Sally, and dad lived from the time that Grandpa Harry came back from WWII until dad was five (1950). Harry was 39 when dad was born, Sally was 36—old for that time to first have kids; but then, they had waited until after the War to get married. There had been a military train facility there during the war, and it was subsequently converted to a housing unit for soldiers returning from war when the war ended. The space is now Kingsborough Community College. Outside of the college campus, there are some very nice houses in Manhattan Beach. Where dad remembers that his mom used to push him in a stroller. One day, he told me, they saw a big dog barking at him, and he remembers that they got scared. Dad had a picture of him as an infant (one year old, maybe) being held by his grandma (I think his dad is maybe also in the picture), and his cousins—at least one from each set of aunts/uncles (two others.) They are in Manhattan Beach, sitting on a piece of playground equipment in the form of a giant concrete cylinder on its side in which a small child might crawl. We walked all over the KBCC campus, hoping that we might find this piece of playground, but with no success. We went into the campus library and into the Office of the President, where we were able to get some leads on tracing the history of the space when it was still a post-war army housing complex. More on that on Thursday… We walked along the water at the edge campus, looking across at the Rockaways. We noted how seemingly fitting it is that the housing units should now be a community college—reflecting that many of the students at the community college might be first generation college students, and that dad’s dad was also a first generation college student in his family. (Although he was very bright, he didn’t end up finishing—his father got ill, and he started working to help take care of the family—what dad describes as one of his father’s big regrets.) We also walked along the north side of Sheepshead Bay, where there had once been some fancy restaurants.

We drove from here through Brighton Beach (his grandma had lived in a small house on Brighton First Place, or Brighton First Walk, or one of those little streets), under the elevated train line (fun!), to Coney Island. We parked, and rode the Cyclone!! We both agreed: wooden rollercoasters and better and more thrilling that metal, upside down ones. Dad said, as the car came coasting to a halt: “They don’t make rollercoasters like that anymore!”

We ate at Nathan’s (the original location, on Ocean Ave, not the one on the Boardwalk). We then walked along Ocean Avenue, over towards the Brooklyn Cyclones stadium, and down to the Parachute Jump.. It is surprisingly tall!! 26 stories. We called mom from there. She recalled that she had always wanted to go on the Parachute Jump, but by the time she was old enough (or tall enough?), it had closed down. [We read later that the Jump closed down in 1965.] Mom also recalled that once, Grandma Betty had ridden the ride, and that she had lost her shoe! (In funny Betty fashion.) We walked out onto the Pier, which was nice.Then back down the boardwalk, where we looked at the interesting, now-vacated building of (what we later discovered had once been) Child’s Restaurant. We then noticed that a gate to Brooklyn Cyclone’s stadium was open for a little league practice/game, so we walked in. Very nice—the ballpark overlooks the Boardwalk, the Paracute Jump, and the Cyclone, the Wonderwheel, and the rest of the Coney Island attractions. We saw a cool quote inside the stadium from Walt Whitman about baseball when it was first being played in Brooklyn. We walked back up the Boardwalk, took a picture in front of the Wonderwheel (original structure, opened in 1920).

We then drove up to New Utrecht High School, in Bensonhurst, where Grandpa Harry graduated from High School in 1926(7?). We saw the cornerstone on the building—1922-3, which means that Grandpa Harry would have been in one of the first graduating classes, if not the first graduating class to go through all four years at the school. Beautiful school—looked like Leon High in Tally. Stately, brick architecture. A quote above the doorway: “Tyranny begins where law ends.” We walked around the new sports field, where there was a cool school mural and we took a picture. The security guard inside the school told us that it has a reputation as a good school. There were a number of signs written in Chinese in the neighborhood, and we saw a variety of ethnicities at the sports field. A security guard told us that this is where they filmed Welcome Back, Kotter. We remarked that we wished we knew where Harry had lived.

We then drove out to Mill Basin, where dad’s Uncle and Aunt Lou and Min Scheinberg used to live. (Min was Grandpa Harry’s younger of two younger sisters; the older of the two was Anne; the sister who was older than him died when he was a young man—maybe in his 20s. Min introduced Grandpa Harry to her friend [Grandma] Sally Finkelstein.) We drove around looking for where we thought Lou’s first house was out there, but we couldn’t quite find it. We then drove into Mill Basin proper, and as soon as we passed the park near the front of the neighborhood, Dad’s sense of direction immediately kicked in. He recognized the park and the playground, and in no time had navigated his way to the street where Uncle Lou lived. We rolled down the window and asked a man (maybe about 50-years-old) sweeping his driveway: “Did you know Lou Scheinberg?” Immediately, the man pointed out the house to us. We talked to the man (his name was Nicky) for a while; he, along with Uncle Lou and family, was among the first families on the block to buy their houses. He knew Uncle Lou well, and did know that he had died; he told us that Michael (Lou’s son) owned the house now, but rents it out to tenants. (Michael lives in Jersey.) Dad reminded me of the story from about 10 years ago (approximately 2004) when he drove out here looking for Uncle Lou’s house. Back then, as now, dad asked a stranger on the street which one was Lou Scheinberg’s house and the person told him. Dad knocked on the door, and as soon as Uncle Lou opened it, at age 90, he said: “Robert!” They went inside the house together, which was not in good shape—seeing many pictures of his parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents all around the house, dad burst into sobbing. Uncle Lou gave him that day a picture of his family (which must have been from the 50s or 60s), which dad then copied and sent to his cousin (Marion?). Unfortunately, he has since lost the picture.

Leaving Mill Basin, we headed downtown to the Main Branch of the Brooklyn Post Office, where Grandpa Harry would have worked for 30-some-odd years. Dad had never been there with him. The building is bueatiful—right in the heart of downtown Brooklyn, next to Borough Hall. It was a lovely, breezy summer evening. We remarked what a nice place it must have been to work—to come out of the post office and be in the beauty of downtown Brooklyn. We also remarked how incredible it is that the post office is housed in such a grand building. This seemed to fit with our other reflections on the Postal Service of the 1940s-50s, how the postal workers used to wear ties to work, that it was a job they were proud of.

Wednesday, May 28

We drove out to Queens. Dad showed me around in Forest Hills, where there were some magnificent homes. As a young man, dad worked as a stage guard at the music venue at Flushing Meadows Corona Park. He recalled for me some of the concerts he guarded at, and about a time when a big fellow, who told dad that he played football for Cornell(?), tried to rush the stage. Unclear if dad tried to stop this person or not. He also recalled for me how during the US Open, they used to position young men as guards in front of the houses in Forest Hills, to keep people from wandering into these gorgeous homes. I can’t recall if dad served as one of these guards.

We picked up David at the Continental Avenue-Forest Hills subway station (E/F). We started the morning by driving to the pharmacy where dad had worked as a young man as a medicine delivery boy (he was likely in High School). He split the part time job with two of his friends, rotating days. The pharmacy is still there, slightly bigger. We then were able to find where he used to go to the doctor. The doctor that he used to visit, dad recalled fondly, used to make home calls, even for an illness as slight as a cold. The doctors—a married couple—who now practice in dad’s doctor’s office also still make house calls, we learned; they also still had dad’s doctor’s little black bag. One of the nurses retrieved it from a hallway closet to show us, and we took some pictures with it. We couldn’t find any sign of the doctor’s name or initials inscribed on the bag.

We then drove to the little shul where dad had his bar mitzvah ceremony (Beit Knessent Tikvat Yisrael Shalom). Dad told us that he had stopped going to religious school as a young boy (his parents were not religious), but before his bar mitzvah, he started tutoring. The bar mitzvah was held on the ground floor in the rear of a private residence, in what is still today a small shul. We were able to get into the entry hallway, but not into the shul.

We then drove to the Pomonok housing project, where dad lived for 20 years—from age 5 until the day he was married at age 24 (including through college). This was dad’s world! It was here that dad and two other boys formed the Pomonok Bicycle Association—or, their code name for it, PBA: Pears, Bananas, and Apples. Pomonok is (as I understand it) technically a part of Flushing—just south of the Long Island Expressway. Dad lived at 67-08 Parsons Boulevard, Apt. 5C. We remarked that the housing complex had “aged well”—especially in comparison to some other areas we visited. The building is one of several on dad’s side of the street, that all share a small paved and green space between them. Here, dad used to play ball in the small parking lot, at any number of stoops, or on the game-boards painted on the concrete. They would play punchball, slapball, stoopball (number of bounces = number of bases), pitching, touch football, a hop scotch-like game involving the throwing of a little tab and hoping over the square on which it lands, and a game in which you filled a bottle cap with wax and flicked it around a square game-board, trying to hit all the squares in their numbered order. We had bought a Pensy Pinky-type ball earlier in the day, and we played a round or two of several of these games. This is the same play space from which dad would (famously) shout up to Grandma Sally: “Ma! Throw down ten-cents! (Jack) The ice-cream man is here!” I was overcome with amazement that dad spent 20(!) years of his life, in this apartment and around this common area. There was also, between another set of buildings, a little paved space with benches where dad said they used to hang out as teenagers to talk to girls and what not.

We went up into the dad’s building and took pictures in front of his doorway. He described for us their four-room apartment (as I remember it): a living and dinning space on either side, immediately as you come in. On the right side, behind that, a kitchen, and then his parent’s room. On the left side, his room. We then went up onto the roof, where dad pointed out Queens college, Kissena Park, the direction towards mom’s house, and across the street, Elechester—another housing project that was owned(?) by the electrician’s union, where several of dad’s friends lived. Dad showed us the little window by the elevator from which he used to look out into the parking lot to see if anybody was playing. He recalled for us dreams—which, subsequently, have been very affective and resonant to me—of looking out this window to see who was playing, and that there would be no one there.

We then walked down to where dad went to elementary school (from the 2^nd grade onward; he had gone to Kindergarten and 1^st elsewhere) and was part of the school’s first class. We remarked that it seemed fitting that dad was in the first 2^nd grade class of his elementary school, and that Grandpa Harry was in the first (9^th grade?) class of his high school. We went into the school, where, after signing in with a security guard, we were able to meet the principal. She was very welcoming, and gave us a tour of the school. She seemed to be thrilled to be meeting someone who attending the school in it’s very first year! The gym was exactly as dad remembered it, and she showed us a new (and nice!) library. We went into the cafeteria, which dad said “smelled exactly as he remembered it,” and then into a 4^thish grade class assembly. They were watching a film, and the principal introduced dad and several teachers and the assistant principal. The assistant principal seemed even more thrilled than the principal had! She got in the microphone in the auditorium and introduced Dad to all the students. Dad said a few words to the students too—that, along with his fond memories of attending the school, the school was part of what made him a good person today, and that he hopes that the school will have the same effect on them. Before we left, the principal mentioned that someone was working on a documentary about the school, and she asked dad to give him her email address, which he did.

We then went out to the big playground where dad used to hang out. It’s a concrete space—with a section shaped like a softball field with an infield painted on the ground, and several basketball and handball courts. On Saturdays, this was the place to rush to as early as possible to see what games guys were playing and if you could get in one. Dad has a memory of having one day had a particularly great afternoon, and hitting something like seven big shots (a few homers, plus?) in a game.

We then ate at a little deli (new) down the street.  We then drove into Queens College, where we walked around campus. We went into the gym, hoping to see the display case that talked about a famed women’s basketball coach at the college, and in which mom, as a PE major and team manager to the team, was pictured. We had seen this display case the last time we were at Queens college (maybe 5-10 years ago). The display was still there, but mom’s picture was no longer in it. This is also where dad took mom on their second date—to a college basketball game!

We then drove to where dad had worked as a full-service gas station attendant (at the corner of Horace Harding Expressway and Fresh Meadow Lane). It was here that (famously), after dad had had a successful first few weeks on the job, one of his co-workers said to him: “Stop working so hard, you’re making the rest of us look bad.” The gas station is now a Dunkin’ Donuts.

We drove to the Housing Plan where dad and mom first met. A Housing Plan was something like a fraternity—guys would go in together to rent a house near campus where they could hang out. Maybe one person lived in the house. Dad’s housing plan held a road rally, to which mom was invited.  The minute she walked in the room, dad said to his friend: “That’s the girl I want to spend time with.” Mom had made sandwiches (tomato and cheese), which dad ate and pretended to like. They were assigned to the same car for the road rally; but she had been paired off to sit with dad’s friend, and dad had been paired off to sit with another girl. Dad asked his friend if they could switch seats so that he could sit next to mom. The house didn’t look quite as dad had remembered it.

(Can’t quite remember the order here, but I think that next…) We drove to a little picnic spot underneath what had long ago been the Long Island Motor Parkway (1908-1938), and that when dad was a kid was a nice pedestrian/bike trail. This had been the first limited-access freeway in the US, modeled after similar highways and raceways in Europe. Here, dad and his parents used to have little picnics, and he and his dad would throw the ball. We threw each other some pop-flys to catch, and also had a little pitching game along what is now the bike trail. (Later on in the afternoon, we drove to another entrance to the Parkway, which was in a nice park.)

We then drove to Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, Queens, where Grandpa Izzy, Grandma Betty, and Aunt Stella are buried, and where many of dad’s relatives are buried in the Suchman Family Circle—Grandpa Harry’s sisters, their husbands, dad’s cousin, and dad’s grandparents. We placed stones at all the gravesites, and dad said a few words for each of them.

We then drove to one of dad’s aunts’ house, which was near the cemetery.

After this, we headed out to where mom grew up in Little Neck, just beyond the Cross Island Parkway, the last neighborhood in Queens County (and thus, the city) before Nassau County (Long Island). Mom lived, from the age of 3, at 58-42 251st Street on the ground floor of a duplex. Mom’s neighborhood, we noted, has “aged very well,” to the point that dad thinks the area looks even better now than it did when mom lived there. He explained that at some point, the buildings went from rental condos to being up for purchase. The space really looked good, with nice landscaping and well-kept buildings. Mom’s building was situated as one of six-or-so on a cul-de-sac, which they called a “court.” It is here that mom (famously), when riding her bike one day around the median at the center of the cul-de-sac, crashed into the egg man as he was making his deliveries. Mom was very embarrassed. The couple who now own what was once mom’s apartment were very friendly and let us in. They said that they had bought the apartment in the early/mid-80s, from a young couple (whom we figured must have bought the apartment from Izzy, and lived in it only a few years). When you enter the apartment, you are in the living room (which faced towards the door when it was mom’s). Behind the living room, a kitchen and what is now a dining room (which, as I understand it, was Aunt Stella’s room). To the left of that and next to the living room are a couple of bedrooms, one of which was mom’s, the other Grandpa Izzy and Grandma Betty’s. We called mom from the living room, and she asked if there was still “the giant wall mirror” in the living room—which there wasn’t. Outside, we Face-Timed with mom and showed her around the court. It was in this court, walking around the corner to Aunt Etty and Uncle Hy’s house, that dad famously asked mom: “So do you wanna get married?” While Face-Timing, mom and dad disagreed about where exactly along the sidewalk this question was asked. (Dad thought closer to the apartment, mom thought around the corner.) We then walked through a little green space on the side of court, across the street to Etty and Hy’s place. Maybe a four-minute walk. This is where Cousins Randi, Carrie, and Stu all grew up. Dad showed us the places where he and little Stuart (who was three when dad met mom) used to play outside. We took a short video and sent it to Cousin Stu (who we had seen just that weekend when his family came to town to see Caissie in Les Mis). We remarked how nice it must have been to have had Ettie and Hy so nearby—that you could easily bake a dish and walk it over to one another’s houses for a holiday, for example. Dad reminded us of the story when it was snowing and he couldn’t drive to mom’s house, and how he walked there—about six miles. (“In the snow! Uphill both ways!”)

We then drove to Bay Side High School, where mom went. Really nice building—very much in the 1930s stately, classic, place-of-learning style that characterized Grandpa Harry’s New Utrecht High School (Leon High in Tally). After this we drove to Francis Lewis High School, where dad went. The school looked more like Lincoln High in Tally—less classic looking, more functional. We then drove to the first house that mom and dad moved into together after they got married (in August of 1971). They rented the bottom floor of a house from a couple with a hilarious Jewish name (Manya and Murray Mendelsson). The house is at 148-05 84^th Street, in Jamaica.

Dad then drove us through the heart of Jamaica, where the elevated train used to run above Jamaica Avenue. You could tell where the elevated line ended, because the street got wider there. This neighborhood not aged so well. Dad took us to the banquet hall (Regency) where he and mom got married—a big multi-plex banquet hall (where dad celebrated his bar mitzvah too). Mom once worked at a department store near there (Mays), folding shirts. The space is now a public school. Across the street from the school was a neighborhood that had particularly not aged well.

We then had dinner at a diner, where dad used to go. Dad showed us many old pictures of his family, from his dad and his sisters and their husbands, and even a few of dad’s grandparents. He showed us the very old-looking picture (the one that we have remarked looks as if it could be an immigration photo) of Grandma Sally’s parents and her older sisters and brothers. David noticed that, unusual for the time and unique in the picture, Grandma Sally’s father was smiling in the photo—he looked relaxed, happy, confident, as if he understood that smiling in photos was the thing to do.

Dad also happened to have a the torn-off cover to one of Grandpa Harry’s school notebooks. On the back of the cover, Harry had written his college schedule (at St. John’s College, which was then in Brooklyn and is now in Queens)—what classes he took, which days of the week, what time, and who taught them, and the year 1927. Dad had saved it for this reason. I noticed that if you turned the schedule around, you could see that he had written “H. Reiser” and then an address—as if to say “if found, please return to….” We looked this address up, and discovered that it was in Bensonhurst, right around the corner from New Utrecht High School, where Harry went to school. We figured that this must have been where Grandpa Harry lived—at least the year that he started college, if not before and after then as well. And just the day before, we had remarked that we wished we knew where he had lived! We planned to go there the next day.

Thursday, May 29

The address on the inside cover of Grandpa Harry’s school notebook read: 7324 18^th Avenue. After having a bagel at Connecticut Muffin (Windsor Terrace), dad and I drove down Ocean Parkway and turned right on 18^th Avenue.  After passing through the edge of Borough Park and a very Hasidic area, we drove through a highly Chinese area, until we got to the address. The building is three stories and on the corner, with a hardware store on the ground level facing 18^th Ave. We walked around to the back of the building, where there was a separate entrance for the apartments. The door was open, so we went in, up the slightly crooked stairway, and onto the roof. It was a very emotional experience for both of us, particularly for dad. We imagined Harry coming up on this same roof. From the roof, you could see the Verrazano Bridge (which wouldn’t have been built yet when Grandpa Harry lived there) and straight on to downtown Manhattan. New Utrecht High School stood out from among the trees a few blocks away. I wondered (to myself) if Grandpa Harry had ever snuck up here to smoke cigarettes—I also reflected (in a separate but related thought) that 1927, the date on the notebook, was in the Roaring 20s. Dad said he was trying to channel his father as much as possible. (Not too hard for a guy who, as I understand it, is just like him.) We talked about how this was likely the place where he lived even before starting college, in high school, possibly even as a child. I asked dad whether or not he knew if Harry’s father—dad’s Grandpa Alex (Alexander), after whom dad got his middle name, Allan—who was born in Lvov, Galicia (Lemberg, Ukraine), spoke English well; dad did not know (he died when Grandpa Harry was a young adult). We took pictures in front of all the doors in the apartment building (we didn’t know which one would have been his). We went into the hardware store, where we told several people (including the owner, who didn’t seem to understand English very well) that dad’s dad had lived there in 1927. A women shopping in the hardware store was pretty impressed. We took pictures by the building and by the street signs.

We then drove over the New Utrecht High School (would have been a 10 minute walk for Grandpa Harry), where we took a picture of the name of school engraved across the crown finish of the building.

Since our Tuesday afternoon at KBCC, we had received an email from the college archivist that she did in fact have a few photos and blueprints of the campus when it was still an army facility. We called her and planned to go meet her on campus. We drove down to Manhattan Beach, where in the archive room of the library, she showed us an aerial photo of the site when it was a military training facility (during the war). On a couple of early blueprints for building the college, there was drawings of how the army housing unit had been laid out (after the war). The blueprints mentioned that an army obstacle training course had been converted into a playground for the housing units. We suspected that this might have been the area in which the photo from Tuesday (of one-year-old Robert on a playground) was taken. The archivist was very friendly and helpful. Coincidentally, she had studied Library Sciences at Queens College (the area in which dad started his graduate studies at Arizona State University, but changed early on).