I just finished reading Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters which is set in Brooklyn in the late
1960s. More on that in another entry
whenever I can get to it, but the novel
unfolds not only in the Borough of my past, Brooklyn, but mostly
bordering the downtown section which is my old home and haunt, beginning with
my student days at Long Island University.
For years my friend Bruce and I have talked about revisiting the university together
as Alumni, but we’ve never been able to coordinate the days. He’s not around the corner, living in Massachusetts
so I forgive him. But as I closed the
Fox book last Monday the urge was strong to revisit and I was compelled to act
on the urge as planning never seems to go right so I turned to Ann and asked
her whether she wants to go with me the next day. Why not give me a little advance notice (she
had an appointment) she asked, but she promptly cancelled that appointment,
agreeing to join me on my impromptu adventure.
I emailed my son Jonathan to ask whether he might want to meet us at
Juniors in downtown Brooklyn that day for lunch (revisiting would not be
complete without sitting in that landmark once again).
He was surprised by our plans and asked whether we’d be
driving in. No, I said, Metro North to
Grand Central and then the IRT #5 train to Nevins Street – needed to experience
it all (after all I commuted to the school by subway from Queens for the first
semester in 1960). We’re crazy he said,
too much to negotiate, too many stairs, the jostling crowds, etc. Crazy I am I guess but the trip to and from
was as meaningful as the visit itself, and less stress than driving and quicker
too. All part of the “fun.”
So we emerged from the Nevins Street station and were
greeted by a Brooklyn I hardly recognized.
Looking east and west on Flatbush Avenue revealed a skyline of a
different place although some of the same tired buildings were standing. I seem to remember a Bickford’s (or was it a
Horn & Hardart?) there, long gone.
Walking west towards the Manhattan Bridge there was the LIU I
remembered, the old Brooklyn Paramount building and adjacent Metcalf Hall where
all of our classrooms were.
The door to the Paramount was open, a guard manning the
desk, so we went in and showed him my “student ID card” – the last one I
carried during the 1963-64 semester year.
He looked at it in disbelief as If I was a Martian but
good naturedly directed us to the Admissions Office. As I student I worked there part-time,
processing applications and I worked in the library as well. The Admissions office is essentially in the
same place, but the entrance is no longer on Flatbush, but inside the campus
gates so we entered there and I presented my ID card to the receptionist. “Oh
my God,” was her response. “I have to
show this to the Associate Director,” which she did.
We were told there is a tour at 2 PM so before lunch we
had some time on our own to visit my old dormitory. Again, my card was greeted by disbelief but
that allowed me to look around at the cafeteria and the student lounge there,
all changed of course. I told the guard
at reception – pointing at the three elevators – that when I lived there they
were segregated. “Segregated?” he was
obviously surprised by the implication.
Yes, I replied, two of the elevators went to the men’s floors and one
was for the women. “Huh” he said, “there
were separate floors for men and women?”
Yes, in the early 60s, that is how it was. Times have changed.
Then I couldn’t resist getting a photo of myself in front
of 175 Willoughby Street, that old apartment house being my second residence
after graduating and the one I lived in with our young son, Chris, until I was
divorced. The building has been
refurbished and looks better than when I lived there some 50 years ago. Our apartment had a clear view of the New
York City skyline, but that is now blocked by a new apartment house.
So after these two nostalgic visits, off to Juniors. Same as I remember it, and the same late 50s
early 60s music playing, displays of Brooklyn landmarks, in particular the
Brooklyn Dodgers, or “dem bums.” There
we met Jonathan who was born long after I left Brooklyn. As in the past, Juniors serves way too much
food but even so we couldn’t resist capping off our lunch with a shared piece
of their famous cheesecake. Yum!
So, Jonathan went back to work and we walked back across
the street, way too early for the 2pm tour, hoping for a brief private
tour. They were waiting for me. “Here he
is!”
They had already planned a private
tour for an “old” alumnus, so were lucky enough that Tiarra, a student
admissions assistant, the same position I had, was available to take us
around. The change and additions to the
school were striking.
What impressed me most about the LIU of today is its
forward-looking, and application-results-oriented strategy, intended to give
its students the best opportunities for employment after graduation. It’s the hands on direction the school has
taken, with its life-sciences and entrepreneurship focus as well as the
facilities that students now have to maintain their health (what a gym
facility!) and their social lives (i.e. social media and the numerous cafés),
that really overwhelmed me, facilities which were unimaginable in my time. 
Nonetheless it was nice to see the humanities thriving
there as well, including its own theatre (in my day the theatre department
produced plays at the Brooklyn Academy of Music). It was quite a trip down memory lane seeing
the old Metcalf building, the Paramount, and my dormitory, but so impressive to
see the new campus and its flourishing multicultural student population getting
ready for the real world. I think LIU is
really in sync with the times and Brooklyn itself. It’s reinvented itself many
times during its nearly 100 years in the Borough, a resilient survivor and
innovator in the competitive world of higher education.
The facilities as I noted are phenomenal. A new gym, Olympic size swimming pool and
endless exercise machines beckon.
I was
wondering about the need for a second gym but Tiarra said the old Paramount (above) was
going to be restored to its former splendor in conjunction with the Barclay’s
Center as a theatre for events, the students getting discounts. Smart strategy for income methinks, sort of
functioning as an endowment for the university.
Still the past has not been forgotten as the gym pays
tribute to athletes of years gone by. I
liked the billboard sized poster of some of the basketball stars I saw play, including
Ed “Cornflakes” Johnson, Luther Green, and Albie Grant. Albie was a small center / power forward who
I grew close to in my senior year. A
wonderful person -- a great optimistic
personality – who died way too early in life.
To watch him play was among the more significant moments in LIU athletic
history.
After a couple hours of touring, we were beat, but happy,
and headed back to the IRT just as the #5 train pulled in, nearly full but we
managed a seat until Grand Central, and then back “home” to our boat. I’m proud to be a LIU graduate, a school
which has managed to adapt to and change with the times, giving its students an
opportunity to succeed in the 21st century world, as I like to think
I did in the 20th.
I’ve written several pieces about my Brooklyn years in
this blog, but the one which is most relevant to LIU is this link. Included there is a piece I wrote for Confrontation Magazine about 10 years
after graduating. It still says it all
about my experience then, and for convenience sake I repeat it below.
L.I.U.-My World in the Early'60s
Downtown Brooklyn
sandwiched between the placid decade of the 50s and the Vietnam War was not
unlike other communities in having a sense of optimism about its future. A
thriving commercial center for small merchants, it had major islands in the
same sea: the New York Telephone Company headquarters, the Brooklyn Hospital,
Abraham and Straus department store, the Fox and Paramount movie theatres, the
Board of Education, Fort Greene Park, and Long Island University.
It was September
1960 when I emerged from the DeKalb Avenue subway stop and made my way for the
first time to L.I.U. Standing at the comer of Flatbush Avenue Extension and
DeKalb Avenue, waiting for the light to change, Junior's and the Dime Savings
Bank behind me, I faced a drab office building rising above the ornate but
faded Brooklyn Paramount movie palace.
Farther behind me
was a middle-class Queens community, my universe until this moment: a community
of hard-working people imbued with the conviction that all things were possible
in this society if one tried hard enough; it was with this sense I was going to
college to learn business. But this seeming past eternity of punch ball; the
Bungalow Bar man; picture-card trading; piano and guitar lessons; grammar
school report cards that included grades for penmanship, neatness and posture;
the Bunny Hop, Elvis ("a-wop-bom-a-lu-bop ... "); Ike; and high
school (" ... if you don't take Latin, you won't be able to get into
college .. ") was possibly fading, for I stood on the border between two
lives, two cultures: was my background going to be my future, could I emerge
out of this bland and benign landscape into myself? Brooklyn would have much to
do with the answer.
Sitting in my first
class on the 8th floor, becoming a regular occupant of that same seat, I could
see the digital clock on top of the Dime Savings Bank blinking at me. This and
another clock on top of the Williamsburg Savings Bank farther up Flatbush
Avenue became lighthouses in my Brooklyn experience. When, the following year,
I lived in the dormitory, returning late in the evening from a night in
Manhattan in a blinding snowstorm, I sensed these silent timepieces watching me
scurrying home.
In later years I
lived in downtown Brooklyn, worked in Manhattan for a publishing firm, and
regularly flew to the mid-west. Coming into LaGuardia Airport, we would sweep
over Brooklyn and see the downtown area reaching out to Prospect Park while the
fingers of the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges bound Brooklyn to
Manhattan. Below was the beacon of the Williamsburg Savings Bank clock. Then,
as now, I am drawn to that unique community I once called home.
I remember the
student union on the ground floor of the small building adjacent to the
Paramount building. Smoke hung in the stagnant air, bodies slumped on worn
lounge chairs and elbows rested on Formica tables. Nixon versus Kennedy was the
subject of heated discussion. These students, mostly from Brooklyn, seemed
confident in their belief that politics could remake society. Eventually I
found myself caught up in political causes as my apathy of the past waned.
With John F.
Kennedy our new President-elect, the campus had a new vibrancy. A professor,
delayed by listening to Beethoven's Eighth Symphony in his office, entered the
classroom gesticulating those glorious rhythms. One professor challenged us to
an exam: think of a question and answer it, the grade being as dependent on the
nature of the question as on the answer. Another accepted a twisted pretzel
from a student on the school quadrangle and published a poem on the experience.
Meanwhile I moved
into the dormitory, severing remaining ties with a prior somnambulistic life.
My room faced the front of the campus, with the monolithic slab of a factory
that would become the shell of the architecturally renowned Humanities Building
to be constructed a short time later. Behind the factory stood downtown
Brooklyn, my microcosm of the real world.
The lack of
classroom space mandated that the university rent space at Brooklyn
Polytechnic, a neighboring institution where some of my classes were held. We
made our way there along Myrtle Avenue, the elevator line rumbling over our
heads, past furniture stores and shells of buildings. Decay was evident, but it
was defiant decay: people stubbornly made their homes and pursued their lives
here.
The return trip was
frequently along Fulton Street, connecting the City Hall area with Flatbush
Avenue and downtown Brooklyn. There, the cacophony of tiny record stores
blurted out" ... baby, baby, baby, baby don't you leave me ... "
merging with" ... be-bop-a-lu-la, she's my baby ... " The Chinese
restaurant on the second floor beckoned, but I moved on toward the Dime Savings
Bank, past shoe, appliance, fabric and other stores.
Across from the
Dime Savings Bank was McCrory's, which embodied most of the merchant's downtown
Brooklyn expectations. Here I was greeted at the door by the aroma of newly
manufactured goods mixed with those of different foods cooking in various
sections of the store. In the basement was a grocery where we bought food to
supplement the fare in the dormitory. Shoppers would scrutinize the merchandise
with almost-total seriousness as the IND subway loudspeaker announced, through
corridors connecting to McCrory's, a train's arrival.
Opposite Junior's
restaurant, then as now the neighborhood's most famous food emporium, was
another restaurant, Soloway's, a luncheonette run by a Greek family. Hamburgers
sizzled in grease while french fries were bathing in deep fat. Students gathered
around most of the tables and at the counter while strains of "Run Around
Sue" thumped from the jukebox.
Junior's itself was
reserved for special occasions when only the most obscene dessert would
suffice. Also, late at night, when we could study no more, some of us went
across to Junior's bar to chat with Pete, the bartender, who offered a
different education: would Maris hit 60 home runs? Mickey Mantle was the better
ballplayer, Pete opined. Pete had a thick neck with a trim gray crew cut. He was
a kindly father to us, probably not realizing the important role he played in
our student lives.
Manhattan was a
short shuttle over the Manhattan Bridge via the BMT, and occasionally we went
there. Perhaps on a date, sitting at the back of St. Patrick's Cathedral until
dawn to beat the curfew for female residents of the dorm; or to Greenwich
Village for a Black Russian or to see a production at Cafe LaMama or on the
second floor of Max's Kansas City restaurant, where the Theatre of the Absurd
played; but Brooklyn seemed to be all the world we generally needed and that
was where we usually stayed. We sat on the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, and
took in the vista of the Brooklyn Bridge, downtown Manhattan, the Statue of
Liberty, and further up, the spire of the Empire State.
During club hours
we crowded into the auditorium to hear Malcolm X speak. Or we listened to local
political candidates, heated debate overflowing the classroom after the speaker
left.
The Cuban Missile
crisis brought us back to days when, as schoolchildren, shades were lowered,
lights turned out, and we were instructed to get down on our knees below our
desks and cover our heads. Our mortality, and civilization's could be ended by
design or by caprice. We frantically darted about the dormitory, discussing
whether we might soon be drafted.
I remember other
areas I did not know until those days in Brooklyn. Working as a receptionist at
the Brooklyn Tuberculosis Center several evenings a week, I participated in a
too-common side of Brooklyn life: poverty. Sick, helpless people came, seeking
assistance. I processed forms and offered reassurance, but felt ineffectual.
As a dormitory
counselor I sometime had to accompany students to the emergency room at the
Brooklyn Hospital behind the university. I spent a week there myself, with
pleurisy, in a ward. The squalor and the human tragedy I witnessed are echoed
in the works of Theodore Dreiser which I read in the hospital for a term paper,
seeing Frank Cowperwood's lobster and squid locked in deadly combat as symbolic
of our struggle with life in this land of Brooklyn.
Next to the
hospital was a prison. There, from the upper floors of the dormitory, the
prisoners could be seen endlessly marching in circles. The prison was later
destroyed to make room for a bigger hospital, the demolition ball pounding the
19th-century slabs into rubble, crushing the infinitely trodden steps in the
courtyard.
Walking past the
Admissions Office one Friday afternoon, a friend came running toward me.
"Did you hear, Kennedy was shot?" Incredulous, I rushed to my dorm to
listen to the radio. It was true.
I had tickets for a
concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that night, one of the few cultural
events in New York City that was not cancelled. An unrehearsed version of
Beethoven's Egmont Overture was performed rather than the regular program. We
filed out, silent, stunned, weeping openly. In quick succession Oswald was
apprehended, and while we watched it on TV, Jack Ruby assassinated him.
With the advent of
these acts, in particular as the Vietnam War encroached on all our lives, I
knew the life I had known in Brooklyn could not remain the same. What changed,
some years later, was often for the better for me. But whatever the benefits
and the sad moments, I shall remember Brooklyn most as the place that allowed
me to change into myself.
