EXPLORING BROOKLYN BY BUS: GUEST BLOGGER RICHARD GRAYSON

Richard Grayson is the author of "To Think He Kissed Him on Lorimar Street" and "I Brake for Delmore Schwartz," as well as other collections of essays.

The issue of Brooklyn College alumni magazine that arrived last
week contained an article by Richard M. Sheridan, "Their Avenue of
Dreams: Brooklyn’s Polyglot Highway of Tolerance," about how BC
Sociology Professor Emeritus Jerome Krase and two colleagues propose to
continue their study of Coney Island Avenue and explore how the
different ethnic populations of that "polyglot highway of tolerance"
have managed to create a harmonious relationship among themselves.
It
reminded me of a 2004 front-page article in the New York Times, "On
Brooklyn’s Avenue of Babel, Cultures Entwine," which featured my old
buddy from BC in the early 70s, Eloy Cruz-Bizet, whom it described
(accurately) as looking "a little like a mulatto Allen Ginsberg," and
who makes use of his fluent Russian, French, Haitian Creole, Spanish
and English in the Coney Island Avenue printing business with his
partnerfrom Pakistan.  Even as a teenager, Eloy was friends with
everyone.   

Both
the Times article and Prof. Krase described the B68 bus as the perfect
vehicle for observing the multicultural thoroughfare.  Since I moved
back to Brooklyn a year ago, I’ve been trying to recreate my feat
(okay, neurotic obsessive compulsion) to ride every bus line in the
borough, but I’d been on the Coney Island Avenue bus only for some
relatively short hops, not the entire length of the street. 
 

I thought I’d rectify that on Saturday morning, so at 8 a.m. I started
out for the northern reaches of the B68, figuring I’d get off the F
train at 15th Street for the start of the route at Bartel Pritchard
Square or at Fort Hamilton Parkway to get to the start of Coney Island
Avenue proper by the Parade Grounds.   

 
But
due to weekend service changes, the F had decided to become the express
train everyone wants it to be, and after Seventh Avenue, it skipped the
next two stops and didn’t halt till Church Avenue.  Rather than go
backwards, I decided to get out and walk to Coney Island Avenue, or as
we oldtimers mysteriously refer to it, CIA.  Even us Brooklyn natives
can always learn something new, and until Saturday I had no idea that
Beverley (or Beverly, depending on what subway line you’re riding)
Road, parallel to Church Avenue for most of the way, actually
intersects with Church near McDonald.

There
was a bus stop at CIA and Church, just where Albemarle Road begins, and
out of curiosity, I walked down the street to see the first house,
which I’d remembered as an elegant Victorian Flatbush "mansion" where I
had weekly sessions with my psychiatrist from age 15 to 18 in the days
of the Summer of Love and Woodstock. 

Sadly, the house was in a
terrible state of disrepair,with peeling paint and hedges overgrowing
the path that led to the addition that was the doctor’s office, filled
with African masks and next to the hothouse where he kept his beloved
orchids.  Somewhat more incredibly, the faded "Dr. LIPPMAN" nameplate
was on the door.  Abbott A. Lippman, M.D., a pretty orthodox Freudian,
graduated NYU Medical School shortly after World War I and was an old
man crippled by arthritis even when I was his patient.  He must be dead
for at least a quarter of a century.

I
ran to catch the bus, one of the little squarish hybrids, and got a
window seat in the raised portion in the back.  Soon I could see, amid
the auto repair shops and double-parked vans, the diversity of the
street, told in its signs: the Jerusalem Palace, Pak-o-Hind Groceries,
"authentic" Chinese and Mexican restaurants, glatt kosher and halal
pizzerias, Turkish insurance agents, Bukharian bakeries, Italian ices
stands, a Chabad "Jewish Center" right next door to an "Islamic Center"
and day care center.  Signs were in Hebrew, Arabic, Yiddish, Urdu,
Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Turkish, Hindi, Punjabi and some languages I
couldn’t recognize.

As
the bus made its way south, with most cross-streets the lettered
avenues of southern Brooklyn, the neighborhood changed as Coney Island
Avenue made its way through the edges of Flatbush, Midwood, Kings
Highway, Sheepshead Bay, Homecrest, Gravesend and finally Brighton
Beach.  But the Orthodox Jewish, South Asian, Chinese, Latino (mostly
Mexican and Central American), Turkish, Slavic, and Arab stores and
businesses were never that far apart and often would be standing side
by side.

I was glad to see a revival in the
Pakistani community around Avenue I (the building on that street where
I took drivers’ education classes at the Yeshivah of Flatbush from my
Midwood H.S. economics teacher Mr. Mandel seems to have been
demolished).  After 9/11, residents were subject to harassment and many
fled back to Pakistan, but the immigrant community seems to be thriving
once again.

My
fellow bus riders reflected the diversity of the avenue.  My seatmate
wore the hajib and modest dress of a moderately observant Muslim woman;
we sat behind an elderly black lady and a Chinese teenager; a boy was
talking in Russian on his cell phone ("Da," he kept saying); and a
(married?) couple seemed to be having una disputa en espanol.  On the
street Orthodox familes were walking to Shabbos services and I could
hear the hip-hop music blasting from someone’s Lexxus.

I
passed some sites that I had personal associations with: the co-op
building of my friend Paul Schickler, who was my editor at the Brooklyn
College student government newspaper, where I stayed overnight after
attending my first Cyclones game; among the avenue’s many monument
makers and funeral chapels, my childhood friend Billy Sherman’s
family’s funeral parlor (I remember there was a "hot line" to the
mortuary in Billy’s basement), where I’d paid last respects to lots
of greata-unts and great-uncles; the 61st Precinct house, origination
point of the cops who came to investigate the considerable number of
times our family’s cars were stolen (sometimes with our, uh, knowledge,
but occasionally unexpectedly); my friend Stephen LiMandri’s house,
where his 14-year-old brother Joey decorated his bedroom with cut-out
pictures from Playboy Magazine; the Kings Highway store of my father’s
menswear customer Judd, who owed Dad so much money I was told to go
there and buy every item of clothing I wanted (I got a black leather
jacket that made me look so thuggish that elderly people wouldn’t get
on the elevator alone with me); and the only place near Coney Island
Avenue that I ever lived, off Avenue Z, on the next block, East 11th
Street, where I got to spend the summer of 1981 in my brother’s
basement after he had to hide out in his girlfriend’s parents’ house
due to an unfortunate dispute with a rival cocaine dealer (luckily some
Cubans shot my brother’s tormentor in the face and my brother decided
to move into a less lucrative, but more legal, line of work). 
And
after Avenue Z, with no more letters in the alphabet, the bus made its
way over the Belt Parkway and emerged in Brighton Beach (did you know
that there are streets named Brighton 10th Street, Court, Terrace,
Drive and Lane?), the Cyrillic signs and Russian stores announcing that
it was time for me to get off under the Brighton el in Little Odessa
and walk the last block of Coney Island Avenue to the boardwalk, beach
and Atlantic Ocean, passing elderly babushkas sitting out in their
folding chairs, two men talking Mandarin, and Hispanic workers eating
off of paper plates on the sidewalk outside the YMHA.  At a Brooklyn
College peace march in 1969, I’d carried what I thought was a whimsical
sign: ESCALATE THE BRIGHTON STATION, NOT THE VIETNAM WAR.  Well, they
finally took my advice.  I roamed the avenue and the boardwalk in
search of the perfect knish and strong tea. 
In a lot less than a hour, I’d covered a lot of the world.  And after a day at the beach, the bus ride back was even more fun. 
–Richard Grayson

10 thoughts on “EXPLORING BROOKLYN BY BUS: GUEST BLOGGER RICHARD GRAYSON”

  1. To solve Richard Grayson’s mysterious synergy CIA regarding the Brooklyn College Alumni Association story about myself and my colleagues who are studying Coney Island Avenue I should note that for his front page March 26th, 2004 “Tower of Babel” story in the New York Times I gave Andrew Newman and his photographer a tour of the Avenue. The summer before New York Times columnist Clyde Haberman did a wonderful job covering the bus tour I lead annually for Brooklyn College’s new faculty which covers similar territory. Stimulated by the articles, Larry Clamage of The Voice of America did a stimulating video “The People of Coney Island” which was featured by VOA and still can be seen by searching VOANEWS. I am a life long resident of the borough and continue to marvel at the changes. some of my work can be seen at http://www.brooklynsoc.org/blog. All the best, Jerry
    Jerome Krase Emeritus and Murray Koppelman Professor Brooklyn College, CUNY

  2. Ann, thanks so much. That’s a terrific story about the ’77 blackout.
    Unlike the more recent blackout or the 1965 one (when the lights went out then, I was reading a comic book and my first thought, typical of a hypochondriac 14 yo, was that I was going blind — even though I knew enough that it couldn’t be caused by what some people’s grandfathers told them it was), the ’77 blackout was strictly Con Edison. So people in Rockaway, which then got electricity from the old Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO), never lost power. When my grandparents’ TV stations went dead, however, though they all had power, my grandfathers — who lived across the street from each other in Rockaway Park — called each other and one told the other that Manhattan must have been hit by a nuclear weapon and had been destroyed.
    Living only about 15 minutes by car from Rockaway in my part of Brooklyn, we just drove there to experience my grandparents’ air-conditioning in the terrible heat or to buy food in stores that had working freezers and refrigerators. My friends and I drove there to go to a restaurant for dinner.
    My brother, then about 22 (I was 25) had a girlfriend who was somewhat intellectually challenged. When the reports came over our transistor radios about “looting” in Bushwick and elsewhere, Donna said, “Why is everyone taking Quaaludes?” She’d heard it as “‘luding.”
    Oh, and you know, there’s no Avenue Q outside of Broadway musicals, or at least there hasn’t been since it was renamed Quentin Road shortly after World War I in honor of Theodore Roosevelt’s youngest son Quentin, who was killed in action in France. He’s buried there, next to General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., his oldest brother, who died of a heart attack in France during the Normandy invasion in 1944.
    As far as I’ve been able to tell, there is no Avenue G either.
    Thanks again for the kind words, Ann.

  3. I love CIA! Nice blog.
    I often tell the sotry of the last blackout, when was that, 2002?, when my ex and I and my son lived in Ditmas Park. When the electricity went out, I leapt into the car to drive down to the gymastics class where he was with his nanny, chasing away apocalyptic post-9/11 fears with a fiercely felt need to just Go Get The Boy.
    As we drove down CIA, in that first hour or so after the electricity went, at every major corner, some local had taken it upon themselves to stand in the middle of the intersection and direct traffic.
    So first there was an older Pakistani man, white gelabiyya flapping in the wind, arms waving, dancing in the intersection, traffic masterly in hand.
    And then 5 or 10 blocks later, a group of 3 young ultra-orthodox teens, black hats akimbo, tallis peeking our from under their coat jackets, serious expressions on their old bofre their time pimply faces, in gracious control of the honking cars at Coney Island and Avenue J.
    Twenty blocks later and we’re nearly to the water, and big-belled Russian men with chains have taken it up around Avenue Q or so.
    It was such a great reminder of those first few weeks after the attack when the feeling of kindness and care to one antoehr was so palpable here.
    Just neighborhood guys, making sure everyone passed through okay.

  4. I just remembered that Mr. Berger who commented here gave me the only demerit I ever got in junior high. For those interested in seeing what counts as horrible student behavior in the early days of the Johnson administration and the Beatles’ first trip to New York, he was trying to teach a lesson on prefixes such as un-, im- and ir-.
    “What’s the opposite of regularity?” Mr. Berger asked.
    Of course I knew he wanted the answer “irregularity,” but something made me shout out, “Constipation!” The class broke up into laughter, Mr. Berger looked very grim, took out his pen, and wrote the demerit then and there.
    I was only two witticisms away from expulsion, so I learned impulse control.

  5. Mr. Berger,
    My old eighth grade English and homeroom teacher from Meyer Levin JHS!
    Having just taught “Twelfth Night” last week to college students who said it was too hard for them to read, I told them, “Well, we read it in Mr. Berger’s class in eighth grade back in 1964 when I was twelve.”
    I remember once seeing you outside the classroom for the first time. On Saturday morning my father took us to get haircuts at George’s Barbershop and Beauty Salon (men in front, women in back) on Church and Troy Avenues. And while George was cutting my hair, you — wearing not a shirt and tie but a sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers like me — sat down in the next chair with Jack, who I recall asked you if you thought “Catcher in the Rye” was too dirty for his son in high school to read. You said no, of course. It was a wonder in those days to see our sainted teachers outside the school in normal clothing, as we assumed you just disappeared into the blackboard after 3 pm and reappeared at 8:30 am the next day. After my haircut, I met Billy and Eugene Lefkowitz, also from 8SPE, at Buddy’s Fairyland arcade and fast food place a few blocks from my house at the intersection of Flatbush, Fillmore and Utica. I excited told them, “I saw Mr. Berger getting a haircut! Like a regular person does!” We had burgers and fries, played skeeball, and when I refused to go on the roller coaster, Billy said I was a neurotic scaredycat. He threw up twice walking the seven blocks to my house.
    Mr. Berger was one of the greatest English teachers I ever had. Certainly a lot better one than I’ve ever been.

  6. Richard – I responded a while ago to another one of your stories. CIA is more diverse than Church Avenue – which (forty years ago) was our lifeline to the outside world. Billy Sherman was in my 8SPE official and English class at Meyer Levin. These Flatbush/East Flatbush stories get sent to me automatically -I’m always looking for ammunition for my East Flatbush Memories blog. There’s a certain grim nostalgia that holds me captive. Would like to hear from you.

  7. Too bad this now-sanctioned-by the-Times blog can’t take a joke.
    RE: Mr. Grayson: Nice slice of Brooklyn as shown on this blog.
    At least he got outside PS, and interacted with real folks, not other bloggers.

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