April 29, 2015--The Dead Who Know Brooklyn

We've been to Brooklyn four times this month. To the new hip Williamsburg Brooklyn and the other of my childhood neighborhoods, memories, and misdemeanors

There's a garden center we've been back and forth to right by Kings County Hospital where my gang used to hung out by its lunatic asylum wing--no euphemisms back then--to shamelessly taunt residents who, to get a breath of air summers, in their pajamas and robes, would come out onto caged-in terraces, screaming at the elements in their private languages. It was a first experience with unfairness and inhumanity. Ours.

Deeper into Brooklyn there is Butler Street which, opposite the toxic Gowanus Canal, was where the borough's ASPCA was located. it was one of my father's favorite places, not because he was an animal lover, quite the contrary--we were forbidden to have pets-- but because after a week of not being adopted, dogs and cats were, he said, gassed.

To exorcise that memory I drove-by last Sunday and brought to vivid recollection how my father used to take me there after I had seriously misbehaved to let me know that if I didn't shape up, he would drop me off there and after a week . . .

He would pull over in front and we would just sit in the car for half an hour with the motor turned off and the windows rolled down, in any weather, so I could hear the desperate yelping leaking through the door.

I got the point and instantly stopped my misbehaving. Or at least continued it more surreptitiously.

I found that the ASPA is no longer there--the neighborhood is fully gentrified--and the old dog pound has been converted into million-dollar, open-space lofts. The Gowanus, however, is still nearby and deadly to all forms of life.

Not far from Butler Street is Sterling Place where, at 7th Avenue, my father owned a four-story parking garage. He should have held onto it as real estate values subsequently soared but his partner, Uncle Herman, decided he wanted to cash-out and my father couldn't pay what he asked. Just another in a series of failed ventures. All involving family-member partners.

The Sterling Place Garage, while still in my father's and Uncle Herman's hands, before its conversion also into lofts, had a brief history in the tragic and morbid.

On December 16, 1960, high over Staten island, a TWA jet crashed into a United Airline jet, with the fragments of one plummeting onto the Island while the other, the United flight, crashing in Brooklyn, the fuselage and body parts, falling in Park Slope, most right at the corner of 7th Avenue and Sterling Place.

There was only one survivor, an 11-year-old boy who was thrown clear of the wreckage. He lived only one day and then succumbed to his injuries, saying, before he died, from his hospital bed, that moments before the collision, he had looked out the window at the snow falling on the city, "It looked like a picture out of a fairy book. It was a beautiful sight."

One hundred-twenty-eight were killed. Most had been on the United plane. My father's garage became their temporary morgue.