by Richard Grayson: Although we'd read online that on the advice of doctors, an ill Sean Paul had pulled out of his appearance at the Martin Luther King Jr. Concert Series tonight,
we figured that would make Wingate Field easier to get into. Caribbean
Night was supposed to go on with the replacement headliner, Machel
Montato.

But along with hundreds of other people, we wandered around the area surrounding
Wingate Field, unable to get in.

We
got there around 7:45 p.m., walking up Winthrop Street from the subway
on Nostrand Avenue. The usual hawkers of bottled drinks, food, CDs,
etc., lined the nearby street, and we were prepared for the usual
entrance to Wingate Field, but police officers had gated off the street
and told us we had to enter a block north.

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Thinking
that was strange, a group of us went up New York Avenue to Hawthorne
Street, but cops had blocked that off too. Go one more block north to
gain entrance to the field, they told us.

Okay, we thought,
Wingate Field goes four blocks north of Winthrop, but the bleachers are
on the west side and we didn't recall an entrance there. Perhaps we
were remembering it wrong. So we walked another block to Fenimore
Street, where a group of us were told we would have to go to East New
York Avenue to get in.

That
seemed very odd. East New York Avenue was another four blocks north,
and two blocks north of Wingate Field's north side at Rutland Road.

We
just followed everyone else who looked as if they were going to the
concert. At each street, the road was blocked off, cops were checking
the IDs of people who said they lived on the block and letting them in
if they could prove it, and other cops were waving us north.

But
at Maple Street, we saw the cops open the gate a block south of East
New York Avenue, and a crowd of us went in. As we walked across, we
discovered a mid-block little courtyard, a street really, only totally
paved, called Miami Court, where neat little houses faced each other,
and then two more, Tampa Court and Palm Court.

The indispensible blog Forgotten NY's feature "Lanes of Mid-Brooklyn" says:

These are three tiny pedestrian alleys that were
constructed as part of a building project a few decades ago. They are
lined with attached two-story units between Maple and Midwood Streets
east of New York Avenue . . .

Anyway,
we ended up on the corner of Midwood Street and Brooklyn Avenue, and it
was still blocked off. People were getting annoyed, and there were a
lot of them. When people asked, they were told Wingate Field was
already full and we wouldn't be allowed in until people left.

We
asked a cop frankly if he thought it would be just easier for us to go
home. "Yeah," he said, so we walked back west, assuming we'd go to
Nostrand and back down four blocks to the Winthrop Street station.

But
at New York Avenue we saw crowds coming north, and they looked as if
they were going to the concert. Most everyone we saw knew that Sean
Paul wasn't performing and still wanted to go in for Caribbean Night.
At every street – Rutland Road, Fenimore, Hawthorne – cops were still
directing people north.

At
the corner of Winthrop Street and New York Avenue, we spoke to three
young women who'd been in Wingate Field. "It's not full," they told us.
"It's like half empty, way less crowded than usual."

So we
wondered what was up. We'd seen maybe 300, maybe 400 or more people
trying to get in. Had they canceled the concert? It wasn't clear. So we
just got on the subway – and yes, an officer was giving a young man a
summons as we entered – and returned to Williamsburg.

It
was all a blur, but we're grateful for the extra exercise and a chance
to see more of the neighborhood, we guess. We would like to know what
the deal was tonight at Wingate Field. Calling Marty Markowitz. . .

–Richard Grayson

I just got an email from Richard Grayson, a sometime contributor to OTBKB, about the 60th anniversary of his parents.

He says that he spent over an hour yesterday morning driving all over Mesa and the
East Valley in Ariszona trying in vain "to find a 60th wedding anniversary card (the
highest we could find in this part of Arizona was for the 50th), this
is the best we can do for our mom and dad, Marilyn and Daniel Grayson."

His parents were married sixty years ago today, on May 28, 1949 at the Park Manor
on Eastern Parkway and Rogers Avenue (now the First Baptist Church of
Crown Heights).

Mom & Dad at the bungalows of Rockaway Beach, September 4, 1946

Mom & Dad at lunch, Apache Junction, AZ, May 27, 2009

Brooklyn author, Richard Grayson, remembers that day 40 years ago:

I can remember exactly where I was around on the Thursday evening forty years ago when, as a 16-year-old high school senior, I heard the news that Martin Luther King Jr. was shot.  It was around 7:20 p.m. and I was lying on the floor of my tiny bedroom in our house in Flatlands, my loose-leaf notebook in front of me, half-trying to answer some end-of-chapter questions for my social studies class (History of Latin America) at Midwood, half-watching channel 2’s CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.

The day’s main news over, they’d switched to a human interest story about a carpenter in England who’d designed a table he thought could be used at the Paris peace talks on Vietnam.  The talks had been stalled for months on the famous “shape of the table,” how to seat all the parties: the U.S., North Vietnam, South Vietnam and the Viet Cong.

Suddenly the filmed report (no videotape back in 1968) stopped in the middle and Walter Cronkite was onscreen, reading wire copy of the breaking news of Dr. King’s assassination in Memphis.

As I’d done five years before when, home sick from school, watching Nancy and Grandpa Hughes on “As the World Turns” when it got interrupted by Cronkite in shirtsleeves and wearing unfamiliar clunky black-framed glasses, shakily announcing the shooting in Dallas, I screamed for my parents.

As a kid, I worshipped Martin Luther King Jr.  A couple of summers before, working as the cashier in my uncle’s pants store on Fulton Street, I sold pen-and-ink drawings of Dr. King I’d made, amateurish copies of a Time Magazine cover done by Ben Shahn, to some of our customers.  (See “The Boy Who Could Draw Dr. King”).

As I write in that piece, King’s assassination devastated me:
I was depressed and too scared to go to school for the next week. There were riots. For some reason I wrote a letter expressing my sorrow and fear and sent it to Percy Sutton, the Manhattan borough president and the top black official in the city. His chief of staff called my mother while I was out and told her I’d written a beautiful letter. All I can remember about it is that I ended by quoting a corny speech from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” (I’d read it in Mrs. Sanjour’s ninth grade English class at Meyer Levin Junior High) that went:
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world “This was a man!”

This morning I read the rave review of the new Lincoln Center production of one of my favorite musicals, “South Pacific.”  The summer before King’s assassination, on July 4, my parents took me and my brothers, who were 12 and 6, to a holiday matinee of Lincoln Center’s last production of “South Pacific.”

We sat in the third row center of the New York State Theatre’s orchestra, close enough that I could see that the star, Florence Henderson as Nellie Forbush, had cellulite on the back of her thighs.  For me, every song in that show is a classic, but I mostly remember Henderson’s real shampoo in “Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair,” Giorgio Tozzi’s operatic “Some Enchanted Evening” and David Doyle’s comic turn as Luther Billis, cavorting in drag in grass skirt with coconut breasts.

But forty years after April 4, 1968, most of all I can recall the young actor playing Lt. Cable’s rendition of what at 16 I thought of as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s corniest song:
You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear
You’ve got to be taught from year to year
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You’ve got to be carefully taught

Here’s somethng new from author Richard Grayson, one of the Park Slope 100. He’s been busy teachng, like, 7 classes at 4 colleges. And he’s on hs way out of town. But he did take the tme to write about ths interestng gathering at Vox Pop.

Wednesday Evening at Vox Pop: Publish Yourself & Community Publishing Party by Rchard Grayson

On Wednesday evening, I went to Vox Pop, the amazing coffee bar/bookstore/performance space/community center and now instant-publishing center on Cortelyou Road by Stratford Road in America’s most diverse neighborhood, Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park. 

In 1966, when I was 15 I started hanging out around there because of my weekly sessions just up the block with my friendly neighborhood psychiatrist, Dr. Abbott A. Lippman, who got his medical degree from NYU during World War I and who grew orchids and taught me how to swallow pills without water. 

I’ve always loved the neighborhood, even before Sander Hicks brought Vox Pop there and lots of other exciting places lined Cortelyou Road. 

Apparently lots of other people like the neighborhood too.  To celebrate Publish Yourself, Vox Pop’s new community book printing and publishing center around the corner from the coffee bar, they’ve published What I Love About This Neighborhood, a 48-page paperback featuring “a collection of memories” by residents of Ditmas Park/Flatbush and other Brooklynites.

Leading off the collection is contributor Marty Markowitz, whom I first met at Brooklyn College back in the 1970s when he was head of the Graduate Students Organization which had its office where I hung out with other undergrad student government/newspaper/radical types, and who went on to become a community organizer, state senator and Brooklyn Borough President for the past six years.

Marty was on hand for the party, though a bit late because former President Bill Clinton had asked Marty to introduce him at a fundraiser that evening.  His reminiscence of Flatbush and Ditmas Park resonated with me, although I’m kind of shocked that Marty actually managed to eat the dish called “the Kitchen Sink” at the old Jahn’s ice cream parlor on Church off Flatbush back in our day. 

The other contributors to What I Love About This Neighborhood share memories of the neighborhood, which now features groceries and eateries from the far ends of planet earth.  Oldtimers who can recall stores I used to go in during the 1960s and 1970s and newcomers from rural America and even Manhattan all have distinctive voices, and all share their love of Ditmas Park/Flatbush and similar-but-distinct Brooklyn neighborhoods.  I wonder if the Glenn Feingold who describes eating his way through Windsor Terrace (“If you want to eat tofu, go to L.A. and meditate”) is my old friend whom I last recall driving home from Brooklyn College to his parents’ apartment in Bergen Beach in, oh, about 1974. . .

Sander, founder of Soft Skull Press, showed me around the Publish Yourself store.  It’s a print-on-demand micropublisher, and the bookmaster Gabriel Stuart let me watch the magic as he produced a professional-looking paperback with his InstaPrinter machine within a few minutes.

Around the store are many paperbacks published there, and all look as good as the much more expensive small press paperbacks I used to see at our New York Small Press Book Fairs thirty years ago.  If you’re interested in publishing a book, Sander told me his prices are better than those of some of the more established POD firms.  Check out the websitefor more info.

Thanks to Sander, Gabriel, and the other great people associated with Vox Pop and Publish Yourself for a fine evening and a nice little book about Brooklyn.

Now I’m leaving Brooklyn, heading out west for some holiday tofu and meditation

.

Aside from teaching seven classes at four different local colleges, writer Richard Grayson is the author of “I Brake for Delmore Schwartz,” “With Hitler in New York,” and “To Think He Kissed Him on Lorimar Street.” OTBKB is honored to present his ocassional columns. What a gift.

by Richard Grayson

Several bus routes go east-west through nearly all of Brooklyn; closest to the center of the borough is the B35, Church Avenue/39 Street, which stretches from Brownsville to Sunset Park.

Many Brooklyn bus routes are based on the old trolley routes. The Church Avenue trolley is the only one I can recall riding; it was one of the last routes to go, lasting until I was five. On trips from her house to ours, Bubbe Ita, my great-grandmother, would let me stand on the wicker seat and pull the cord to request the stop.

The B35 begins at Mother Gaston Avenue, but I walk a few blocks up to where I began – at Brookdale Hospital, Beth-El Hospital in 1951, where I was delivered by the same Park Slope GP who’d delivered my mother twenty years before. I pass streets reflecting the earlier neighborhood ethnicity, Herzl Street and Strauss Street – but at Rockaway Parkway, Church Avenue’s alternative name is Bob Marley Boulevard.

I once told someone in South Florida who asked me where I was from in Brooklyn, “Around Church and Utica,” and the guy, a Jamaican, said, “That’s not Brooklyn; that’s the West Indies.” The familiar colors of the Jamaican flag are on local storefronts and posters.

West Indians started to move into East Flatbush in the late 1950s, about the time we left our apartment on East 54 Street just south of Church for our new house in Old Mill Basin. All our relatives left the neighborhood as “blockbusters” came in and scared the white people into moving. Both sets of my grandparents left in 1967 for Rockaway.

The last time I went to our old block was in 1980, when black friends brought me along to a party given by Carol, whose Jamaican father, it turned out, owned the apartment building on the corner. When I told Carol that I’d lived on this very block until 1958, she said, “Oh, I envy you. It must have been beautiful here before the Haitians came and ruined it.”

Around here, as in other places, Brooklyn’s varied street numbering patterns collide: on one side of Ralph Avenue, it’s the East 90s; on the other side the East 50s.

We pass the East Flatbush branch library, hair braiding places, Jerk City and the Brooklyn Jerk Center, and an inspirational mural of a (Caribbean?) beach with manna from heaving falling upon it. I spot, behind a car wash by Kings Highway, the third-story window of the bedroom where I misplaced my virginity in the spring of 1971.

Storefront houses of worship, like the Reviving Revelation Revivalist Pentacostal Church, its sign decorated with a crown, a cross, and a star of David, line Church Avenue. On lampposts are many signs of the times, all with some version of AVOID FORECLOSURE! By now the bus is jammed.

Most of the stores from my childhood are gone, of course, but SilverRod Pharmacy at the corner of Utica and Church, the crossroads of our neighborhood, still stands. As we stop, the driver calls over the PA system:

“Does anyone know where Kingsbrook Hospital is?”

I hesitate, then yell out, “Get out here and take the Utica bus four or five blocks north and then go left a few blocks.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure,” I yell. I decide not to add how I know: “My grandmother had rectal surgery there.”

I’m the only non-black person on the bus.

In the East 40s we pass restaurants like Linda’s Guyanese, West Indian and American Cuisine. Every three or four blocks, the numbered streets are broken up by streets named after cities: Utica, Schenectady, Troy, Albany, New York, Brooklyn (Saratoga, Kingston and Buffalo don’t go down this far).

We see more churches – Eglise Baptiste and Iglesia Pentecostal – as well as day care centers, a fast-food vegetarian restaurant and a storefront P.S. 245. At Nostrand Avenue lots of people leave for the subway. The corner Granada Theatre is long gone, in its place the Guyana Gold jewelry store. Banners decorated with a palm tree on a beach proclaim “East Flatbush, the Caribbean Heart and Soul of Brooklyn.”

Soon East Flatbush becomes Flatbush, and we’re at Flatbush Avenue, across from the old Dutch Reformed Church that I assume gave the avenue its name. This area was the Broadway of Brooklyn, with seven or eight theaters that no longer exist. The Kenmore, right by the bus stop, is a Modell’s Sporting Goods store.
On the other side of Ocean Ave, near the B/Q train station, is West Indian Farm, a great place to buy Caribbean produce. At the subway stop, an Indian woman in a sari gets on, along with Hispanic people and old Jewish man who sits beside me, replacing the woman who was reading the Bible in Creole.

On the south side of Church, brick stanchions with the PPS crest signal Prospect Park South, and both the fronts and sides of Victorian homes line the street. For a few blocks, English street names displace the East Teens: Rugby, Westminister, Marlborough, Stratford, Buckingham, Argyle.

Past Coney Island Avenue and where Ocean Parkway becomes the Prospect Expressway, the signs proclaim Kensington’s ethnic mélange: Transfer D’Argent Haiti, a taqueria, a giant yeshiva, Mazowsze Polish Deli, Plaza 5 de Mayo, Productos Mexicanos, Pinosha Albanian Village, Kadima Cell Phones, food from Russia, Israel, Ukraine, Poland, Turkey. Just past Yummy Taco by McDonald Avenue’s F train el, a woman in a burqa pushes a shopping cart past Bangladesh Hair Design.

The East numbered streets are gone now as Kensington bleeds into Boro Park, and Church Avenue ends, diagonally interrupting the plain-numbered streets and avenues that dominate western Brooklyn.
The bus goes up 36 Street past auto body shops, a matzoh factory, the Heimishe Bakery a few stores down from a Mexican supermarket. Past Fort Hamilton Parkway, we pass Camp Warehouse, your spot to buy everything for summer campers.

The bus rides on 39 Street now, and I see some signs in Arabic, but also a kosher market with yarmulke-wearing customers, and a Mexican eagle in front of a barbershop.

It’s kind of industrial here: auto repair shops, furniture stores and factories. Passing Fourteenth Avenue, there’s The Largest Sukkah Manufacturer in the World, the Eretfsz Hachaim gas station and the Heimeshe Coffee Shop. But all the men with yarmulkes get off the bus and the only new passengers look Mexican or Central American.

Suddenly, the street is residential, mostly two-story brick houses, but there’s a brand-new five-story building too. At Fort Hamilton Parkway, there’s the mammoth white brick Lamp Warehouse, its sign featuring two portraits of Thomas Edison and the store’s founder and these quotations: “Let there be light.” – The inventor. “Let there be discounts.” – The Maven

At Eleventh Ave only Chinese people get on, and by Tenth Avenue and the New Utrecht Avenue el, we pass mostly Chinese venues like Long Sing Bakery and Q Q Poultry Market, though I spot Korean signs as well. Eighth Avenue is dominated by stores featuring furniture, plumbing and heating supplies and what appear to be factories for some kind of electric, glass and stone products.
We start to go downhill as we pass Sixth and Fifth Avenues, and there’s a weird Days Inn hotel tucked into a street otherwise filled with older houses with aluminum siding.

At Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park, we stop a long time for a switch of bus drivers as a crowd gets on: a woman wearing a hijab, Hispanic teens, an elderly Chinese couple, a black woman chatting on a cell phone, more Arabs, and white couple speaking a language I can’t make out.
Past the Gowanus Parkway exit, at Second Avenue, the cobblestone streets have old trolley tracks coming up in all directions. This area is industrial, with huge Mack tractor-trailer trucks, the Closeout Connection and the Eat It Corporation warehouses.

A two-story Costco has a parking lot huge even by suburban standards. Very prominent nearby is Peyton’s Play Pen, a Gentlemen’s Club that’s All Nude All the Time – not that I’ve ever been inside.

Getting off the bus, I walk to the barbed wire at the end of 39 Street. I smell the brackish harbor and look out at the water. The Bayonne Bridge seems surprisingly close. My journey across the heart of Brooklyn has taken over an hour and my unlimited MetroCard is ready to head back east

A bad cold, sinusitis and teaching six classes at three colleges didn’t keep RICHARD GRAYSON from attending the reading of the Brooklynites on Tuesday night at the Park Slope Barnes and Noble. And boy are we glad he did. Thanks Richard.

by Richard Grayson

ON TUESDAY EVENING: I attended a presentation at the Park Slope Barnes & Noble by Anthony LaSala and Seth Kushner about their excellent coffee-table book of photos and interviews, The Brooklynites. Casually dressed, they sat on either side of a screen on which they showed Seth’s photos of Brooklyn residents from the book and discussed how they went about developing and executing their project and gave interesting tidbits about their subjects.

The first photo that the pair of Brooklyn natives (Seth has never left the borough for more than two weeks at a time; Anthony went away only for college) showed was of themselves back in high school in Bay Ridge in 1991.

When the two friends started their project to photograph the people of Brooklyn, they had a hard time. The neighborhood young women at the annual feast on 18th Avenue, thinking the guys were “perverts” trying to pick them up, were suspicious – as were many others.

Even Seymour, their local hardware store owner, was so dubious about what seemed to him a “not very successful” idea that he refused to be photographed – and would not agree to be until after a year had elapsed and the duo had already shot celebrities like Spike Lee (their first big “get,” Spike led to others), Rosie Perez (who drove Anthony’s car “with a very heavy foot” to the marqueta in Williamsburg where she posed), Jonathan Lethem (who also rounded up Brooklyn’s other literary Jonathans, Safran Foer and Ames) and Marty Markowitz (photographed at his table at Junior’s, where he posed with a slab of cheesecake that he would not eat – at least in front of them – but did take home).

Seth and Anthony said they gained of weight from all their travels around the borough: they got steaks at Peter Luger (whose chef is seen on the Williamsburg Bridge), pizza at Totonno’s and DiFara’s (Dominick DeMarco has his floured hands, as usual, taking his pie out of the oven), and cases of Fox’s U-Bet syrup at the Brownsville factory where the crucial ingredient in eggcreams is still manufactured and which is permeated by the smell of chocolate.

They also got to go behind the scenes at Brooklyn’s cultural and historic attractions. The pair got into the Brooklyn Museum on a Monday or Tuesday, when all of us natives know it’s never open, to take a photo of director Arnold Lehman in the famed Egyptian room. They also went to Green-Wood Cemetery on a bright snowy day when it too was closed, to shoot director Ken Taylor – who told them it was often hard to convince pizzerias that, yes, the delivery should come to his home in a graveyard.

And that shot of Otis the sea lion and his keeper at the New York Aquarium also allowed Seth and Anthony access to places usually off-limits to the public. They even managed to get past the gate in Sea Gate, which Anthony said was unlike any other place in the city, when they shot gymnast Olga Karminski doing contortions on a ledge in front of the Sea Gate lighthouse.

Other photos we saw featured the Coney Island freak show’s The Great Fredini, swallowing a sword on a street corner in Greenpoint; writer David Lefkowitz and his young son, who actually live on a Gowanus Canal houseboat; one of the young players for the Cyclones in Keyspan Park, with the Parachute Jump in the background; and singer Sufjan Stevens, photographed on the Brooklyn Bridge in one of the most artistic shots in the book (thanks to the wonderful geometric patterns of the bridge’s cables).

They were most pleased to shoot Steve Buscemi on the block in East New York where he grew up; they were invited to his old apartment, which he hadn’t been in since childhood and where he did his first acting for his mom and dad. But of course many of the portraits in the book are not of famous Brooklynites but of the regular people we pass on the street every day. In the book, all of them get to talk about what makes Brooklyn special to them. (When asked by Southerners to say something in Brooklynese, one wise guy photographed in the book said he told them, “Hand over your wallet.”)

After the presentation, a lot of us lined up to get our copies of The Brooklynites signed by Seth and Anthony. I’m sending mine to my father who may have lived in other states for the past 30 years but who’s still a Brooklynite at heart.

–RICHARD GRAYSON (author of With Hitler in New York and And to Think That he Kissed Him on Lorimer Street.

Look what the critics have to say about RG: “Where avant garde fiction goes when it becomes standup comedy.” — Rolling Stone
“Grayson is shaking funny ingredients together like dice.” — Los Angeles Times
“The reader is dazzled by the swift, witty goings-on.” — Newsday
“Really funny” — New York Daily News

Richard Grayson went to the funeral of a friend’s dad instead of the Met’s season finale. The funeral was a whole let less depressing.

For those of us who’ve been Mets fans since the days of Marvin E. Thornberry in hapless 1962, last Sunday’s season finale was depressing.

My old friend Mark – whom I used to tease about being the only Puerto Rican kid in the Bronx to prefer the Mets to the Yankees – called to say he had an extra ticket for the game.  But I had to go to somewhere less depressing than I knew Shea Stadium would be: the I.J. Morris funeral chapel back in my old neighborhood.

As I rode the Flatbush Avenue bus there, I couldn’t help remembering that it was on the B-41 bus that I’d met Sol’s son, going to Brooklyn College on our first day as freshmen in late September 1969.

I also knew Sol’s daughter-in-law at BC since she was one of the two best friends of my senior year girlfriend – at whose daughter’s bat mitzvah a few months ago I had last seen Mitch and Helen.  I’d also celebrated last Yom Kippur with them over dinner at Cortelyou Road’s The Farm at Adderly.

Mitch, a graduate of Brooklyn Law School, works as an attorney; Helen’s a journalist with the Courier Life newspaper chain, writing countless stories over the years about the people and happenings

They have a beautiful house in Fiske Park; their son goes to Brooklyn Tech and their daughter, a recent Murrow grad, got a full scholarship as a CUNY Honors College student at Hunter.

Sol was 84 and owned a hardware store.  He was a Brooklyn community activist, president of the Futurama Civic Association as recently as a few years ago, when he was quoted in a New York Times real estate article, “If You’re Thinking of Living in Flatlands.”

(The 1950s developers who built my old neighborhood’s semi-detached brick two-family homes with a finished basement called them ”futuramas,” and the name lives on.)

I’d met Sol only once or twice when I was at his house, brought there by another friend who was visiting Mitch’s sister Amy.  His generation of lifelong Brooklynites – now we call them the Greatest Generation – is slowly but surely leaving the scene.

I’ve attended two recent lectures – by the historian Mike Wallace on the future of Brooklyn and by Joseph Berger, author of The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through New York’s New Neighborhoods – that confirmed what my eyes have told me since I returned to the borough last year. Neighborhoods once distinctly “Irish” and “Italian” and non-Orthodox “Jewish” are becoming something else.

Other ethnic neighborhoods I knew as a kid, like Bay Ridge’s Norwegian enclave, seem to have completely disappeared.  “Lapskaus Boulevard,” that section of Eighth Avenue named for the salty Scandinavian stew – where I saw King Olav V 32 years ago this week – is now mostly Chinese.

I don’t see any signs left of the Mohawk Indian community of what we now call Boerum Hill, which I found about from Rainbow, an Indian kid in my neighborhood.

The rabbi began the service at Sol’s funeral by reciting that passage from Ecclesiastes that begins “To every thing there is a season…”  So we know that change is natural.  But there’s also sadness when things you knew and loved pass on.

Sol’s brother-in-law, who had known him since he was a kid in Coney Island, began his eulogy by saying that Sol would have wanted the Mets and Phillies scores announced at the cemetery.

The Mets lost, of course.  I guess some things do not change.

Wallace discussed Brooklyn’s past and future in terms of three currents in the river of history: Brooklyn’s relationship with Manhattan, its macroeconomic base, and the demographic flows in and out of the borough.

As a colonial city, Brooklyn’s role was to feed the profit centers of the British empire, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean whose land was too valuable to use for crops to feed the slaves who worked there.

Primarily agricultural hinterlands, Brooklyn also served as the port to send food and other supplies – some manufactured here – to the West Indies and in return to get sugar and rum.  (That explains why the Havemeyer’s Domino’s Sugar and Revere Sugar built huge operations in Williamsburg and Red Hook.) Back then, Brooklyn’s population was largely Dutch, English and African; slavery was widespread.

American independence cut off this trade was an economic catastrophe until Brooklyn found new trading partners in the Spanish Caribbean, primarily Cuba and Puerto Rico.  As the Erie Canal opened up New York’s access to the agricultural Midwest, Brooklyn’s farms were replaced by major manufacturing, with ironworks and furniture factories.

The industrial revolution eventually brought renewed trade with England, which got much of the cotton for its textile factories from the American South via ships from the port of Brooklyn. The port boomed, and around the same time, Brooklyn Heights became America’s first suburb, a bucolic alternative to overcrowded Manhattan.

Continue reading RICHARD GRAYSON ON GOTHAM’S PAST AND FUTURE →

Here’s another terrific story from frequent OTBKB contributor, Richard Grayson. Read a great interview with him here.

Tonight (September 20) at Barbes, you can catch Andy Statman at the 10 p.m. show.  The promo for his appearance says:

A truly extraordinary artist, Andy Statman began his career in the 70’s as a virtuoso Mandolinist who studied and performed David Grisman, went on to study clarinet the legendary Dave Tarras and became one of the main architect of a Klezmer revival which started out 30 years ago and has since informed and influenced folk, Jazz and improvised music forms. Andy draws equally from hassidic melodies, folk tunes from new and old worlds alike and Albert Ayler-influenced free-improv. The result reads like a very personal search for the sacred based both on traditions and introspection.

The “legendary Dave Tarras” was my Uncle Dave, called by Wikipedia “possibly the most famous 20th century klezmer musician. . .known for his long career and his very skilled clarinet playing.”

Uncle Dave and his klezmer band played at my bar mitzvah reception at the Deauville Beach Club in Sheepshead Bay back in 1964.  Many years before that, he played the clarinet at the wedding of my great-grandparents back in Ukraine .

Although he was my great-great-uncle, he was only 53 when I was born (in my family, we marry young or not at all) and was around till I was almost 40.  A couple of weeks after The Village Voice gave a nice notice to my first book in 1979, Uncle Dave trumped that with a Voice cover story that called him “King Klezmer.”

Married to my grandmother’s Aunt Shifra, Uncle Dave came to America with my grandmother and his in-laws, my great-great-grandparents, who’d later own a candy store on Stone Avenue in Brownsville .

At Ellis Island, they fumigated his clarinet and he was forced to work for his brother-in-law, my great-grandfather, a prominent furrier who’d been in America for years, until he could pay for a new one.

When I was a kid, Uncle Dave lived on Tilden Avenue in East Flatbush, just across the street from Tilden High School (closed last June and broken up into smaller schools).  At one point my mother decided I should have clarinet lessons and Uncle Dave came over and gamely tried to instruct me.

But I have no musical ability whatsoever and I hated the taste of the reed in my mouth. Although I loved Uncle Dave and wanted to please him, whatever came out of my clarinet must have sounded like a catfight.

After just a few weeks, he said, “You don’t like this, do you?”

I shook my head.

“What do you like to do?”

“I don’t know. . . writing?”

“Then you should write.”  He went downstairs and told my mother the clarinet was not for me.

Uncle Dave had come from a musical family, and his son-in-law Sammy Musiker, married to my grandmother’s cousin Brauny, was an ace on both the sax and clarinet.  A friend of Gene Krupa who played in Krupa’s band, Sammy brought jazz and swing influences into klezmer before his untimely death.

My friend Bert Stratton, a clarinetist with the Cleveland band Yiddishe Cup, once did research at the YIVO Institute and sent me a composition of Uncle Dave’s entitled “Richard’s Ba Mitzva,” though I’m pretty sure it was done not for me but for his grandson Richard Tarras or his grandnephew Richard Shapiro.  All of us were students at Meyer Levin JHS in the early 1960s, so the title could do triple-duty.

Although Uncle Dave was well-known in musical circles – he had a weekly show on a Brooklyn-based radio station when I was a kid – mainstream recognition came with the klezmer revival late in his life.  In 1984, the National Endowment for the Arts gave him a Heritage Fellowship in recognition of his contribution to traditional music.

After Aunt Shifra’s death, Uncle Dave lived with a widow whose family he’d known for many years.  To avoid losing social security benefits, they had only a religious marriage ceremony, not a civil one.  We celebrated their “wedding” at the Shang-Chai kosher Chinese restaurant on Flatbush Avenue .

The last time I saw Uncle Dave, he gave me a gift: a signed copy of an LP by Enrico Caruso.   I still treasure it.

Uncle Dave died at 95 and is buried next to Aunt Shifra in the family plot at Old Montefiore Cemetery in Springfield Gardens .  A musical staff adorns their headstone.

Andy Statman is carrying on and extending the traditions of klezmer music.  Catch him if you can.