Brooklyn Before it was Cool
by
Ellen Sperling
I grew up in Brooklyn before it was cool.
When I moved away from Brooklyn, I realized for others Brooklyn was a mythic place. Full of famous people and sites. The Brooklyn Bridge, immortalized by Hart Crane, Whitman’s Brooklyn Ferry, Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind and in film, Woody Allen and Spike Lee’s very different versions of the borough. When I tell my students or new acquaintances I grew up in Brooklyn, they always think: Wow, so cool!
I didn’t know about coolness then. It just was. Normal. My whole world. Tree-lined streets. Kids playing stickball, jump-rope, hanging out on stoops.Ordinary, not special. Or cool.
Both my parents were from Brooklyn, the children of immigrants. My mom’s parents, Ukrainian Jews, had fled, separately, from a small town outside Kiev. Working three jobs and studying English, my grandpa passed the entrance test for Cooper Union and got a degree in Civil Engineering; his engagement present to my grandma was her tuition to Columbia. Once he secured a job designing the subways with the NY Transit Authority, they married and moved to Brooklyn. They came for a patch of green, a view of sky, part of the “teeming masses yearning to breathe free.”
My parents grew up in Boro Park. As a kid, we sometimes shopped in Boro Park, particularly for electronic gadgets; I bought my first camera there, in a store run by Orthodox Jews. The cuff of the salesman’s sleeve got brushed up and I saw my first blue tattooed numbers. Chilling. But I didn’t really understand the significance of those numbers until I saw a documentary in my twenties at an arthouse theatre about a child of holocaust survivors. He talked about growing up in Boro Park, the largest community of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel.I gasped. A sudden glimpse of that neighborhood, my parents’ world, what shaped them before I was born. Before I was conscious.
The Brooklyn I grew up in was full of first- and second-generation Americans: Irish, Italian, Eastern European Jews, Puerto Rican, Chinese, Korean, Greek, from “the islands,” which at the time was referred to as the “West Indies,” a la Columbus.There was also a large number of African Americans who had made their way north as part of the Great Migration. Most kids I knew had grandparents who spoke a different language, or two, which sometimes we kids learned. I studied Russian with my mom’s mom, but didn’t get very far with it. I didn’t realize I had absorbed any Yiddish until a playwright friend asked me if I understood it before giving me her recent script. I said not really and then was surprised how many words I recognized as I read her play. Shayna meydeleh. Punim. A zillion words for different kinds of jerks. A colorful, earthy language. My generation mostly understood whether or not we were in trouble—through intonation, facial expressions and context.
The first place I lived was on Ocean Parkway. #716. An unremarkable six-story brick building, with other six-story apartment buildings lining both sides of the street. My dad’s dental office was on the first floor. We lived o nthe sixth floor, a two-bedroom apartment; my mom’s parents down the hall in a one bedroom. Across the hall were the Kelley’s, an Irish family with nine kids; the youngest slept in the bathtub. The oldest kids babysat us,moving down the birth order as they aged out. One of the middle girls, Peg, later became one of my dad’s receptionists. Her cop husband used to pick her up after work; once she called him to say they’d been held up. When he replied nonchalantly, she added “with a gun, stupid!” My first experiences of Halloween were going door to door in that apartment building, each apartment another world.I often took refuge in some of those apartments, attempting to escape bathtime.
Next to our building was Sternberg’s Pharmacy. Sternberg’s had the usual candy and greeting cards and a rack of toys near the door, as well as some high up on shelves, out of reach of curious kids. When I was young, it still had an old-fashioned soda fountain counter along one side, all shiny aluminum, complete with a mint green Hobart mixer, in which they made malteds and black and whites. My dad was a frequent customer; I remember spinning on those stools, sharing a few sips. When the soda fountain finally went, my dad was gifted that mint green mixer, a possession he prized.
Ocean Parkway was a boulevard with a service road parallel to it on either side with on-street parking. On the island between the side street and the wider avenue were benches and an iron rail, separating the space for the sitters and watchers from the walkers and bikers. There were trees on both sides of that island, Sycamores, Elms, Maples, Oaks, providing much needed shade. Only years later would I learn that Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux had designed Ocean Parkway! My grandparents often sat there, watching me ride my bike or roller skate, attempting to train me not to run into baby carriages and people walking their dogs.
Running north-south from Brighton Beach all the way to Prospect Park, Ocean Parkway was a main through street, wide enough to house grand parades. I recall one parade from when I was about five: No cars on this busy street for hours. Eerily quiet. Then suddenly, from the distance:a deep, booming, drumbeat. Raucous calls, like birds.Whoops. Flashes of color. Coming closer, a column of walking, leaping figures dancing to the percussive rhythm; a few sat tall in the saddle on horses, their feather headdresses fanning out, others crowded into large convertibles. An unusual combination of joy and solemnity. Dignity and playfulness. It was a parade of indigenous Americans. I was surprised; I had only seen indigenous Americans, then still called Indians, in movies about the west, had no idea they too lived in Brooklyn. Holding down jobs, paying rent, taking the subway. Having survived our invasion of their land, our divvying it up into squares and rectangles that were sold and paved. After the many changes their home had gone through, here they were, somehow living amongst us, Lenape, Canarsee, Mohawk people, wearing their traditional clothing, dancing their traditional dances in the middle of Brooklyn.
When I was six, we moved from Ocean Parkway to a house in Mill Basin. Definitely not a cool neighborhood. As suburban as you can get still living in Brooklyn. When my dad came back from World War II, he had a job taking the census; they sent him to this area. It was pig farms, he said. But they filled in part of Jamaica Bay and built a development on pilings; the houses on our block all looked alike, the only variation was some had the garage on the left and some had it on the right.Boring. But it was what my parents could afford, and home ownership, not living in an apartment, was a big deal to them. The American Dream.
Though even then I thought it was a nondescript area, our life there had some redeeming features. First off, my mom’s parents lived with us. My grandma woke me every morning, braided my wild curls; my grandpa, the engineer,did my math homework alongside me every night, not telling me the answers, but providing much-needed confidence.
Another redeeming feature: Mill Basin was surrounded by water. Marsh grass grew wherever the pavement stopped. My friend’s house on the next block was on the water. After school, we’d take off our shoes and walk in the sand of her backyard, the bay stretching out before us as far as our eyes could see. Big sky. Planes from Kennedy Airport flying overhead. I saw my first horseshoe crab in her backyard. This prehistoric creature, right here in tame metropolitan Brooklyn.
Fortunately, I was not stuck in my neighborhood. My dad’s office remained on Ocean Parkway, but two blocks downon Foster Avenue and we continued to return to the old neighborhood to shop, to 18thAvenue, with its A & P, fruit and vegetable stands,pizza parlors, Chinese laundromat, kosher delis, and hardware stores. We did much of our clothes shopping on King’s Highway and occasionally in A & S downtown.
But perhaps my most important forays out of my neighborhood were my weekly trips to the Brooklyn Museum where I attended art classes. It was all the way on the other side of Brooklyn. I took a bus from the southernmost part of Flatbush Avenue, by Kings Plaza,all the way to Eastern Parkway, getting off at the main branch of the Brooklyn Library at Grand Army Plaza.As the bus moved through different neighborhoods, I was exposed to a wide variety of cultures.
Mill Basin and nearby Marine Park and Bergen Beach were predominantly Jewish and Italian, with a sprinkling of other ethnic white and Asian families;the racial and ethnic makeup of neighborhoods changed, as the bus made its way north along Flatbush Avenue, becoming increasingly diverse and colorful. Staid storefronts, with their neon or plastic signs, gave way to bustling outdoor markets, the type I would later see in the Caribbean, in Africa. Stalls lined the sidewalks and filled side streets; a wide array of wares were displayed on folding tables under tents, on boldly printed cloths on the sidewalk. Delicious smelling Caribbean street-food was sold, the fragrant spices filling the air, drifting into the bus. Vendors displayed tropical fruit: mangoes, pineapples, plantains, and some which I couldn’t identify until I was older: papaya, starfruit, guava, passion fruit. Jewelry and textiles, clothes and home goods were laid out and being hawked over loud, lively reggae music blaring from cassette players. As we approached Church Avenue, shoppers spilled out into the streets, slowing the progress of the bus. Live steel bands played, with spontaneous dancing occasionally taking over the streets. It might seem like chaos, but it was joyful chaos, a festive, vibrant celebration of life. This community, transplanted from Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, was making a home in Flatbush and in the process, reinvigorating the neighborhood.
It wasn’t until I was in high school that I began to explore Brighton Beach and Coney Island. I attended John Dewey High School, a new public “experimental” school. It was located one stop on the B train from Coney Island. Many of us switched there for the D train to our neighborhoods all over Brooklyn. My marine biology class, designed by two of our teachers, early ecologists, had Friday labs at Coney Island. That was enough of a reason for me to sign up for the class. As a senior, restless, keen to be independent, I sometimes would get off at Coney Island on crisp spring evening, walk around until dusk before going home. Coney Island was a little seedy then. Run down. Under the boardwalk, you sometimes were surprised by people sleeping, homeless people, although there was no word for them then, this invisible population.
Walking the boardwalk all the way to Brighton Beach, you heard Russian and Yiddish as often as English. Since the beginning of the century,Brighton Beach had attracted Russian and Ukrainian Jews. They opened stores and bath houses, met at trade unions and political headquarters, hotbeds of radical ideas.In the mid 70’s a new wave of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants came to Brighton, due to a change in Soviet immigration policy. The new immigrants brought energy to the aging population of the neighborhood. Eventually almost every store and restaurant sign was in Russian; the area became known as Little Odessa (unlike now, there was more of a feeling of a shared culture between the Ukrainians and Russians) and being in the neighborhood truly felt like being immersed in another culture.
The mix of cultures in Brooklyn growing up was so pervasive that I took it for granted, expecting to find it wherever I went in the US. My first trip into the Midwest was unnerving.Almost everyone was white and blonde; I was asked why my curly hair was like Black people’s. I hadn’t realized that I hadn’t grown up in “America.” I was Brooklyn, born and bred.
It was not all copacetic, I know. When busing started when I was in junior high in the late 60’s, there was this anxious vibe. Parents in our neighborhood said it was OK to bus kids in to our schools, but they didn’t want us bussed to other neighborhoods. There were whispered discussions, parent-teacher meetings. I heard our supposedly liberal neighbors use the word schvartze, Yiddish for black. It had a definite derogatory tone. When fall came, I was the only one of my five friends who stayed in public school. The others went to private schools downtown or to Parochial school. Some families left, the beginnings of “white flight.” I recall seeing kids get on and off the buses, mostly kids of color. I thought they looked tough. Later, when I was older and came to know kids who had been bussed, l learned how terrified they were.
Though people speak about how Brooklyn is flourishing now, a home for creatives, unprecedented in its richness, I recall my mom talking with pride about Brooklyn College in the 40’s, how it was full of European intellectuals who had fled Hitler and the war. The spirited, urgent discussions about politics and literature and art were not at all abstract. Not just about style, or how to get published, but taking principled stands with real-life consequences.
People talk about where to raise kids, speak glowingly of small-town familiarity, growing up in the country close to nature. It’s true: I did not learn about growing food or taking care of animals in the city. The cycle of life or the seasons. I grew up with pavement under my feet.
But there is something to be said for a gritty urban upbringing too. The exposure at a young age to people from all over the world. The up-close view of our diversity as a species; the deeper connectedness despite the superficial differences.What we can learn about what it means to be human. People of all colors, all languages and customs, jostled together in the same subway cars and buses, in the same streets. With similar hopes and aspirations for their children. Everyone from “away.” None of us could claim our families were here for generations. We had no roots, no stakes in the ground marking off our territory. Our parents, grandparents came with aching desires, dreams, passions. Fear, the wind at their backs: leaving behind war or famine or prejudice or a combination of all three. Everyone from someplace else.None of us” belonged.”So all of us belonged.
And in that sense, Brooklyn was always cool.
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