My Brooklyn

AH, Brooklyn my hometown. How I miss it. Atlantic Ave. with all its antique shops. The Brooklyn promenades over by the Brooklyn Heights, and how about Coney Island—one of Brooklyn's hottest spots.

Brooklyn is a place where my friends and I can have coffee in the morning on the stoop, and say good morning to all our neighbors. Where we can hang out and do almost anything. Everything is in walking distance, and if we want, we can walk to the deli on the corner and get an ice. Thank you for taking the time to make a Brooklyn homepage. Peace.

My Brooklyn is Bay Ridge, home of the Verazzano Bridge, Welcome Back Kotter, and, of course, the best movie about subcultures, Saturday Night Fever.

I used to be able hear seagulls from anywhere in Bay Ridge when I was growing up. Now I don't hear them anymore.

Windsor Terrace, that exotic and fabled strip lying between Prospect Park and The Green-Wood Cemetery (and slashed in half by the Prospect Expressway), was my kleine shtick fun deh velt back in the 1940s and 50s.

I left it for a young adulthood in Manhattan, kicking the dust of Brooklyn from my sandals, for a bigger, brighter world. Now I'm an exile from New York, living in Philadelphia. (So this is living?)

Now that I'm sliding inexorably into that status we call senior citizenhood, my thoughts go back, more and more, to Brooklyn and that little corner of it that I knew and failed to appreciate.

I wonder, sometimes, who might be out there in the Windsor Terrace diaspora (or even still there?) whom I might talk with from time to time.

My grandfather (Olev HaShalom) was a butcher on Reid Avenue. On spring Fridays, after school, I would deliver Kosher meat with my little red wagon. I would go up and down Van Buren, Patchen, Greene, Kosciusko and Lafayette, delivering the weekend orders.

After that we'd go home to his apartment on Montgomery, 3 blocks from Ebbets Field. Before sundown, he'd stop and buy 2 tickets to Saturday's Brooklyn Dodgers game.

On Saturday mornings we'd go to shul together. Then back to Montgomery where my bubbe had a picnic basket for us. We'd eat lunch in the Botanic Gardens, and then go to the Dodgers.

My last delivery on Friday was always in the saloon across from the store. There was always a good Kosher steak for the Democratic Party district leader, Mr. Corso.

Thirty years later Mr. Corso was Judge Corso of the Brooklyn Supreme Court, and I was an Assistant D. A. trying murder cases before him.

Those steaks did in more murderers than Kojak.

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