Readers Report
I'm Stu Hoffman and lived at 1529 42 Street in Boro Park until 1954 and then returned to the fair Borough in 1961 in Bensonhurst. Still have great memories about stickball, punchball, Dodgers, and the gang at P.S. 164.
30 September 1997
1942-52
1375 St. John's Pl., Brooklyn 13, N.Y. (between Utica & Schenectady Aves.) The Utica Theater across the street on St. John's; Sam Ash's music store around the corner on Utica; the fruit & vegetable stores, butcher, fish store, dairy shops on Schenectady across from P.S. 167's schoolyard (where I went to grade school); the magic doorway into the Universe in that mini-Monticello-like library on Eastern P'kwy & Schenectady; Eastern P'kwy in the Spring! Walking the Parkway from Utica to the Botanical Gardens, through them into Prospect Park—at age 9 in an era when parents didn't have to worry about such an adventure! Going to Ebbets Field to see our beloved Dodgers play. (My heart goes out to all who never had the experience—this is one of those "You had to be there" kind of things to grasp what it was about, and what we lost.) My Brooklyn in those years was also being shlepped by trolley to subway in order to get to Coney Island or Brighton Beach for the day: who had a car?, who knew how to drive? And speaking of limited conveniences (we never thought of that way), Brooklyn then was having only one telephone line in the house (mine began with PResident 5). The trolley cars I loved (a recent trip to New Orleans, and the closely named St. Charles Ave., brought the trolleys with their polished wooden seats and brass fittings back to me). Through that time, before there was cholesterol, nitrites, food dye, etc. (right?) we ate all the deli our hearts pleased, and suffered nothing that would last any longer than heartburn. There was also being shlepped "downtown" to Fulton St. to make the rounds of A&S, Namm-Loeser's, Martin's, and other patience-trying places.1952-56
1529 77th St. (between 15th & 16th Aves.). The family needed a bigger space, and here's where we landed before the inevitable move to Long Island. Shallow Jr. H.S., New Utrecht H.S. The era of my Bar Mitzvah. Master of the subway system and a bicycle adept, the borough was mine. Meeting friends for an afternoon of swimming at that classy indoor pool at the St. George Hotel in B'klyn Heights. Fishing in Gravesend Bay next to the Bay 8th St. entrance ramp to the Belt P'kway when porgies and fluke were plentiful there. A roll of friction tape was the puck for a game of street hockey—we all wore metal clamp-to-your-shoes skates tightened with a key, and tuned with a can of 3-in-1 oil to play block against block in the middle of traffic. Punch ball, stick ball, stoop ball, "Chinese" handball, "two-hand touch" football—they all had their season, and we somehow collectively knew the day on which each season began without a word between us.What a great time, what a great place.
2 October 1997
Brighton Beach 50s and 60s. You would wake up in the morning and wait. Soon you would hear, "Hey Kenny, could you come out?" If your parents were up, you would say, "Ma, can I go out and play?" In about 20 minutes, you had about 10 to 20 friends trying to figure out what to do first. Sometimes it was stickball, sometimes dodgeball, sometimes it was skelly or chinese handball. If it was too early in the morning, water would be flying out of somebody's window and they would yell, "can't you kids play elsewhere, it is too early in the morning." No matter what, you were with a group of friends. This lasted till your mother popped her head out of the window and yelled your name to come home.
4 October 1997
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