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
