Readers Report
Miller—Great job!—deserves a web page Pulitzer—I am not a big internet fan (in the old days we would have no use for it—we'd be out in the streets) however for a diasporic culture it is de rigeur. My only complaint: our Brooklyn is not theirs—we're Park Slope, Crown Heights, Ebbets Field—you have people signing in from Brooklyn parts I've never heard of let alone visited. Miller, there were no Italians within miles—let them get their own Bay Ridge site. Anyway I was in SP English at Lefferts J.H.S., when the teacher walked out for a smoke, came back and told us President Kennedy was shot. Every few years I have to go visit the Bklyn Mus and the Botanic Gardens (Strawberry Fields). I now live in New Orleans because it has a park designed by the same guy who did Prospect and has many other Brooklyn features (like you can walk and don't need a car to go everywhere). I would still rather return to the homeland. Could it ever be restored? On my last trip back my wife insisted on seeing Coney Island.
22 July 1997
David (didn't have your first name handy yesterday)—I wanted to supplement and clarify my remarks of last night: First of all you get all A's for inspiration and concept—to have a bklyn site is great but one for my old neighborhood and so well conceived and professionally maintained is a spiritual occurence. Anyway, I didn't intend for my remarks about Italians (I was raised Catholic and my wife is part Italian) and Bay Ridge to sound mean spirited, if it did. It's just that I didn't think OUR Brooklyn (and you know how provincial we were) had any Italians (except maybe working the pizza places). Maybe they were there and I didn't notice them because they were all in parochial schools (I was excused wednesday afternoons from P.S. 241 for "Religious Instruction"). And I was only poking fun at other Bklyn neighborhoods because after all the site says PRESIDENT St. Let's face it: we grew up in the culturally richest neighborhood in the Western world—and with due respect to the rest of the borough—there is an immense difference between visiting the Botanic Gardens or the Museum with your 5th grade class and having them as your own personal Shangri-La.
As penance here are two "generic" Brooklyn stories. The first is second hand: In one of his books, Larry King tells of a kid from California who visits his grandmother in Flatbush. One day she gives him a dime and tells him to go down to the store and "get me a Mirror." The kid returns with a little 10-cent glass mirror.
Next story later
Owen
23 July 1997
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