Talk:Vanderbilt Avenue/Archives/2016

3 Boros; 1 namesake

C'mon, people; discuss it. The mergers should have been proposed beforehand. No, not in a common merger request forum which is overkill for such a small question. Each little article should have had a {{Merge|The Other Article}} tag some days ahead of time. Anyway that's how I do a merger. So, having suffered a bit from that misstep, let's sit back and discuss it. I'm partial to having separate articles, since I visit two of the streets a few times per month, but can also see a benefit in a merger. But please, present your arguments either way. Jim.henderson (talk) 13:51, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

I apologize for being bold and not proposing a merge before actually doing it, but think it is best if the three articles stay as one being that they are all relatively short (and the streets themselves are not that long) and all three streets are in the same city and named after the same person. The truth is I have not been able to find anything significant about these streets other than them being named after the man who built and designed Grand Central Terminal. The one in Manhattan is only four blocks long, two lanes wide and has nothing significant on it except for a couple of semi-notable buildings (there are no subway or bus lines running on it). I think the only reason this street was named Vanderbilt Avenue is because it runs alongside Grand Central. The street in Brooklyn is a little-known residential street and suffers the same problem as the Manhattan one, having nothing except a few schools and local churches built on it with no public transportation service. The street in Staten Island is also a meaningless residential street with two bus lines running on it. That is why the odds of these articles being expanding in the foreseeable future are very slim. To be perfectly honest, these streets could qualify for an Articles for Deletion, but I am reluctant to do that knowing inexperienced editors, including the one who reverted the Manhattan redirect without reading the main article first, will vote to keep them thinking that a street named after a major figure in history is automatically notable for Wikipedia, regardless of how big or important the street is to the neighborhood it serves. Just because something is "notable" for Wikipedia does not always mean it has to have its own article. Also note that when we merge articles, the original ones do not get deleted, just redirected, so it is easy to revert the merge when needed. If in the future, whether it would be one week, six months, or three years from now, someone is able to find significant information about the streets that would make the articles long enough to be by themselves, all they have to do is undo the redirect and add whatever they found with the proper sources. Until then, though, having all three streets in one article is the best thing to do to keep Wikipeda up to far. We cannot have stub or poorly written articles sitting around like this forever. The reality is many street articles on Wikipedia are flawed and do not get edited or monitored often because the only people who know a lot about them are those who live or work near them. They often create articles using original research without providing reliable citations. The Legendary Ranger (talk) 00:39, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

All righty; no arguments have yet been offered to the contrary. I only put the notices on the Brooklyn and Manhattan article talk pages last night after returning from a Wikiphotographic expedition through southeastern Queens / southwestern Town of Hempstead, seeking in vain the First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica for which Wikipedia had two conflicting locations, both erroneous including one near Vanderbilt Ave Brooklyn (but I found a place to photograph Space Shuttle Enterprise when flies into JFK Runway 22 next Monday). Perhaps a defender will speak up in the next couple days; if not my mind will be made up in favor of the prosecution.

I expect to crew an astronomy table at Earth Day Vanderbilt Ave Manhattan this coming weekend but my greater fondness is for the Brooklyn one. Alas, we cannot design an encyclopedia upon such private sentiments which in any case I do not have for Staten Island.

WP:BOLD I figure is mainly to encourage newbies; more experienced editors like ourselves should be expected to balance more finely between that idea and collegiality. Yes, on the whole, we have too many articles, either because of topics worth a mere few sentences or paragraphs being the subject of a full article or because of an inadvertent WP:FORK. Either case should get proper warning before repairing. Last week, as an example of the latter, I discovered Osborne Apartments and The Osborne. Clearly, at least to me, this is due to a mere oversight, but I expect to take all week to remedy it; a slow sequence of prior notices costs little and leaves fewer hurt feelings and little excuse for dissent after the fact.

Actually I spend more time on splitting articles of excessive WP:SIZE than in merging little ones, due to my sometime use of little portable computers that present poorly a big page. Obviously each of these types of operation, judiciously applied in different circumstances as appropriate, can make our product better. We do have to give dissenters a chance, however. It helps guard against error and promote friendliness. Jim.henderson (talk) 13:07, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Bergen Street Three Generations of my family have lived on Bergen Street. My Grandparents on my Father’s side came to New York from Sweden. Dad told me his father was a big man who spoke little English and toiled as a stevedore doing unskilled and physical work to earn enough money to buy the house on Bergen Street. In 1943 my Dad left my Mom and Sister in a cold-water flat in Brooklyn to join the Ninth Army, 536 Engineering Company and fought his way across Europe to free the world from Hitler in WW II. Like many of his generation he did not speak much about his time there, but said "Before the Marines hit the beach, it was the Engineers who were there to clear it for them". After four years of separation caused by the war, I was born as one of the Baby Boomer generation.

My dad was given Battle Participation Credit for Ardennes, Rhineland and Central Europe. He came back with what they called shell shock. After the war he was given a job on Wall Street where he worked long, hard days to support our family on a meager salary. He never missed a day of work. I can still remember him coming up Bergen Street from the IRT station each night with a copy of the Daily Mirror and a bottle of Rye stuck in his pockets. The Doctors recommended he have two Manhattans a day for his nerves. It is called PSD now, Post-traumatic stress disorder. Mom thought this was a good idea and together they had cocktail hour every night before dinner. 1972 he died in the VA hospital of pancreatic cancer exacerbated by cigarettes and alcohol. My mom was a tough lady who raised a family in a place she didn't belong. A second generation German immigrant, she came from a family that would be considered ‘well to do’. Grandpa owned liquor stores and Aunt Sophie owned a lot of property in turn of the century Harlem. Mom moved to Bergen Street in 1943 with my sister because the Army only gave her $60 a month to support them while dad was in the Army. She couldn't afford to stay in Richmond Hill close to her family so moved in to Dad’s family home. The house was built sometime in the 1890’s. It had a sense of old world craftsmanship, with cherry wood doors, deep crown molding and in the public hallway there was a hand carved mahogany wood banister that went from entry way to the third floor. We lived on the second floor. My father’s brother, Uncle Al, lived on the top floor with Aunt Linda and Cousin Ellie. On the first floor lived our border, Mrs. Olsen, a widowed Swedish woman. Our floor had two bedrooms, I had the front bedroom overlooking the street, and my sister had the back room facing the backyard. When you came up the hallway stairs, the kitchen door was at the top of the stairs and became the main entry way. When we had company, then the door to the living room was opened for the guests. The kitchen was large and well lit with two large windows. There was a large cast iron sink with two tubs in it. The water heater sat next to the sink and a stove next to that. There was a large built in pantry where plates were displayed behind glass doors, the draws underneath held pots, pans and silverware. There was a walk in closet for the canned foods. In the center of the kitchen was a large dining room table that could seat the extended family when they came over on Sunday to visit. Dad always sat at the head of the table, and mom was always cooking, cleaning and never seemed to sit. Next to the kitchen was the dining room in the middle of the house. It was meant to be the dining room but converted to my parent’s bedroom as there was not a whole lot of space left to live for four people. Beyond the parents’ bedroom was the living room, with a couch and my father’s chair. It faced the TV, which in the 1950’s meant it was a black and white Westinghouse TV with a 9 inch screen, one of the few on the block. We had a marble fireplace in the room which was converted to a gas heater, the only heat in the place for all five rooms. The drawback to all this was not having a bathroom. We used a toilet in the hall the size of a closet with one of those overhead box water tanks with a pull chain to flush. Baths were taken in the kitchen sink and heat was provided by a kerosene stove. It was so cold and drafty in the house that a glass of water next to my bed froze on one particular cold winter night. That did not mean we were not clean. Every Saturday my mother would scrub the floors on her hands and knees and the house was cleaned from top to bottom. We had two sets of rugs. One rug was for summer, a thin, light blue rug, and the other was a heavy green Chinese rug that came out in the fall. My father was a stubborn Swede. When my mother would plead and cry with him to move, he would definitely state “If this was good enough as his father’s house it was good enough for us”. He did relent on one point, when my sister became a teenager and after many tears and fights with my mother, my dad had a real bathroom put in, with a shower and yellow tile floors. One of the best features of the house was a small yet abundant garden in the backyard. It was full of well-groomed bushes and trees and we each had small plots to plant seeds and grow flowers in the rich black soil of Brooklyn. To reach the back yard, you had to go out into the hall and down to the basement. The basement was a dark and scary place, with unfinished earthen floors and stone walls. My Grandfather had divided the basement into rooms, one room for each floor’s storage. In the rear was a work room, with old heavy rusty tools. It was one of my favorite places to take things apart and try to build cool things, like carpet guns and soap box scooters. A carpet gun was a two foot long piece of lumber with a soda cap for a pivot point and a clothes pin as a trigger. You would pull back a wade of rubber bands and clip them under the clothes pin, slip a small square of linoleum into the rubber bands as ammo and you had a carpet gun. The scooter was also easy to build. Once you found a wooden milk box, you had to nail a strong plank of wood to the bottom. The old metal roller skate, the kind you needed a skate key for, provided the wheels. Now a days’ you pay $100 dollars for something similar, but not as cool. The best part of building these toys was getting to play with your friends, who by this time had also assembled their own toy. These things came in waves according to the season. Bergen Street had mostly been taken over from the Swedes by the Italians; thought there was one Irish family. Marco, Joey, Louie and Leo were my best friends. There were always enough boys around to field a team to play baseball in the summer and football in the winter. The girls had names like Cuddles, RoRo, Tina, Lucy and Maggie. They played on the stoops and in front of the houses under the watchful eyes of the mothers who peered down on the street from their windows. There were always eyes watching. If not the Mothers, it was the old men who just sat on crates on the stoop from morning till night. Once a week the vendors would come by with things to sell. There was the old man who would yell “Fresh Fruit for Sale”, in both Italian and English. He was loud enough to hear him from the back of the house with the windows closed. He moved up and down the neighborhood streets with his old horse following along, pulling his vegetable cart with a scale swinging from the back. This was when the woman on the street came together to talk and squeeze the fruit. There was also the ice cream truck and in the summer the half-moon ride would come by at night. The street would turn into a carnival. There was also a beer deliver truck. We had two cases of Rheingold Beer delivered to the door each week for my Dad. Respect was a big think on our block. When you walked past the old men you always said ‘Hello Mr. and Mrs. Tardo”, or “Good Morning Mr. Flippo”. The Mothers had their own respect too. If I went home and told my mother that one of the other Moms yelled at me, my mother would punish me for making trouble, unquestioned. Mr. Tardo, our adjoining neighbor had an exceptional garden and pigeon coop. There were about a dozen pigeon coops on the block. My friend Louie tried to get me to fly pigeons, but my Mom put her foot down. While I admired their dedication at flying them in circles every day, I didn't get it. They would take the pigeons away on far trips and release them, then they would sit together to worry for hours on end if the pigeons would find their way home, which they did. I also found it a bit un-nerving when they would walk around with dead pigeons trying to decide among themselves which one could be eaten. The Old Italian men on the block would have wonderful gardens where they would grow tomatoes, peppers and grapes. The basements had a sweet smell. They would pickle the red peppers and vegetables in olive oil, with rows and rows of jars lining the basement walls. Some of the old men would even make their own wine, with homemade presses and bottles of wine stacked from different years. Play time started once the doorbell rang in the morning and someone would call out, “Can Richard come out to play?” That was about the time that the sun came up in the summer, and play time ended when the streetlights came on at night. Food was never a problem, whoever’s house we were running though when food was placed on the table, was where we ate. Lunch consisted of mostly fresh pasta with sauce and a glass of wine from one of the old grandma’s who always seemed to be cooking continuously, and would say “eat you look to skinny”. Me! I was 175 pounds in the seventh grade. Baseball was big on my street. We would climb the fence to the Mayflower junk yard where old rusted machinery laid abandoned. We would clean up the yard as best we could to make an infield, but some of the equipment was too big and we just had to play around it. The bats were splinter and had seen better days. The balls were a master piece of layered electrical tape wrapped around a core of forgotten material. We didn't have gloves for everyone, so each position had one glove shared between sides. The games had no end. We kept score in our head and became the source of heated debates as to how many runs were scored. We didn't need adult supervision to play. I would put our team up against any Little League team of today with their uniforms and overpriced equipment. There was a true love of the game.

Stick Ball (n),. When we could afford a pink Spalding rubber ball, cost about 25 cents and they were not dead, we played stick ball. To buy a ball was not taken lightly. Many stores on Vanderbilt Avenue sold pink balls, but it needed to pass inspection from a team of expert friends before one would be considered worth of buying. Stick ball was a night time game. We played it after dinner, but before dark. Traffic on Bergen Street would slow down to a few cars lumped together in passing. That gave each batter a fair chance at bat. A car door, a manhole cover and an occasional piece of cardboard would make up the bases. The object was to bounce the pink Spalding rubber ball a few feet in front of the batter who would take a swing at the ball with a broom handle. If you caught the ball just right, you could hit it a half block away and the fielder had to run and get it before it disappeared into a sewer hole. The game would be started by the younger kids, after a few swings the adults would come out and take their turns. Even my dad would take a turn and it was the first time I heard him called ‘Ace’ after an exceptionally well hit ball. Seems he was a good ball player in his youth and people on the street knew about it. The Pink ball was also used for games of King and Handball. Kings was best played in front of the garage across the street. It had a long flat wall. The sidewalks were cut into squares, with each square being a box representing the King, Queen, Jack and so on, for as many squares as there were players. The object was to be King. The King would start by bouncing the ball against the wall and having it land in another player’s box, the ball had to be bounced first before striking the wall and bounce once more in a square before being struck by the owner of that square. You worked your way up to King by making the person to the left of you miss the ball. When you missed you went back to the last square on the right. The factory building where we played kings was a one story factory where the Daily News kept their trucks. In the 1950’s the trucks were opened cabs without doors. We quickly found out that if you put them into first gear, and hit the starter button on the floor, the truck would jump forward a few feet. This became a sport to us young ones, of maybe seven years old, and we would race the trucks down Bergen Street to see who was fastest. Our play area was between Vanderbilt Ave and the paper factory half-way down the street. There was another group of kids who lived on the end of the street closer to Carlton Ave. Some were cousins of my friends, and some were known to us from Saint Joseph’s Catholic School where everyone but me went to school, I went to P.S.#9, I will explain this later. We loosely hung out with them, mostly to played ball, but they hung out together on their end of the street same as we did. The factories in the middle of the street were two stories high and never had anyone around which made it a good baseball field to hit fly balls against. We painted in the home plate across the street and second base in front of the building. There was no outfield, but you would catch the ball off the wall for the out. If you hit the ball over the wall up on to the roof, that was not a Home run, that was an out. We only had one ball and whoever was the hitter was expected to go get the ball while there was a delay of game. At some point a security guard showed up in front of the building. He told us we could not play there. He told us we could not even walk there when he was around. That was a mistake. My friend Joey had a bad temper. He was my best friend and I was his, but there were fist fights between the two of us that went on for an entire afternoon. After a week or so all was forgotten and we would go back to playing. Joey decided to fix this tough-guy rent-a-cop. We got up on the low roofs of the factories across the street and with a boost from me he climbed up on the second story roof and threw a rock into the sky-light. This set off alarms and the police arrived. We all sat on the stoop in front of my house and watch the goings on down the street. After a short talk with the guard, one of the police cars backed up and hauled Joey and me off the block. We thought for sure we were going to the 38th Precinct Police Station. The cops pulled around the corner, told us not to bother the guard again and let us go. The block had seen what was going on and by the time we got home everyone was out milling around, even my father. Everyone cheered us as the conquering heroes. Dad took me home without saying anything, He seemed proud. That was about as bad of a thing we ever did. The only other run in with the police was because of the fire hydrant being turned on in the summer. They would pretend to be mad but were happy to leave once the water was turned off and they took our wrench. As one of the only Lutherans living on my street, I attended the P.S. #9. The P.S. stood for public school. P.S. #9 was actually two buildings. Kindergarten to sixth grade went to the little building on the corner of Sterling Place and Vanderbilt, and the seventh and eighth grade went to the big building across the street. About the time I was going to the big school, the little P.S.#9 was being changed into a Detention School. That was where they would put the kids with discipline problems who could not go to regular school. Mrs. DeBell, my fifth grade teacher was made the principal of that school. Mrs. DeBell was scary tough. She would walk the halls looking for a fight. Fortunately for me Mrs. DeBell and my mother were good friends. My Mom was active in the PTA and my smarter than the average sister had gone through her class too. My big problem was I was always “Inez’s brother”. I was not as smart; I was dyslectic. My weekday would start about 7:30 when woken by the sound from the trucks leaving the garage across the street rolling out for a day of work. By 8:30 I was walking to school down Vanderbilt, passing the small store windows which were our shopping area. There was Sam the Butcher, the laundry, and Vegetable store where sometimes my Mom would make me stop to pick up the groceries on the way home. She would call the order in, I would pick it up and at some point my mom would settle up the bills once a month with the shop owners. That was before Master Card. I knew all their names and they knew me by name. Sam the butch would always give me a slice of meat or cheese as a treat as I sat there watching him masterfully sharpen his knife and make cuts of meat on his wooden butcher block. Next to the butch was an ice cream parlor run by an old couple who were going blind, Mr. Bozie’s. I remember the fancy tin cup with a scoop of ice cream covered with hot chocolate, whipped cream, and a cherry on top. It was a gloomy place with a dark, heavy wooden counter and booths. The older kids would go there to hang out, play the jukebox and dance. It closed up when I was still very young. I think the old man died. Another of our favorite stores on Vanderbilt was Finkledey's bakery. It was one of those old style bakeries where the cake came in a pink box with thin string wrapped around it. They would give us kids a cookie while mom was getting waited upon. There would be big lines on Sundays with cars double, and sometimes triple parked outside the store. There was also Bernie’s Dry Good. This was the place to go when you had some extra money for a toy. He had it all, rows of stuff - anything from a toaster to toys. It always smelled funny in there because Bernie smoked a cigar. Life got better when the Bohack's Supermarket opened up by Prospect Place. Some items and food were still being rationed with the Korean War going on. It was large, and well stocked with those things we didn’t usually get to have. My mom would still buy her fresh food and produce from the local small businessmen, but you could see the loss of business had a negative impact on them and the neighborhood. One business that did not seem to suffer was the saloon on the corner of Bergen Street. It was an old brownstone building with a heavy carved wood vestibule where people waiting for the bus on cold wet days could stand inside. The saloon itself was Dark, an old, thick, well decorated wooden bar where men would stand to drink, talk and smoke. There was a counter on the side where free food was place. The floors were a white marble inlay; I always thought it was a cool place. On summer days the doors would be swung wide open and the sounds of music and men talking and laughing would spill out into the street. It was a fun place to play. There was a back door that allowed a quick getaway when playing tag, or if the bar keeper would yell at you to get out. My dad would send me down to the saloon with a quarter to buy him a draft beer. They would fill a cardboard tube with quart beer and hand it over to me. Across the street from the saloon was a Drug store on one corner, a clothing store on the other and a business that went thought a lot of changes over the years. The last I remember it was a night club with shooting every weekend. We did not get a telephone until the mid-1950’. It was a party line we shared with four other families. It was considered impolite to listen in, but who didn’t? The Number was Sterling 9 5559. You had to dial the ‘ST’ phone exchange first, that is why there are letters and numbers on phones today. Joondorph's was the drugstore on the corner. It had a pay phone Mom would use for her rare calls to her sister. The Avenue really had everything we needed. Across the street from our house was the Atlantic Yeast Factory. It was a massive four story building. One of our most fun places to play. The downstairs was the parking garage for the trucks and the garage door was mostly left open as some of the Dad’s on the street worked as truck drivers there. It was a stinky wet place with tunnel hallways, different rooms and turns that zigged and zagged its way out to Dean Street the next block over. We learned how to use the freight elevator and the men working there would send us out to pick them up their lunch or sodas. In a small building behind the yard next to the factory was the boiler house. Hector was the boiler room operator. Every night Hector had to start up the electric generator and fire up the boilers. The boilers went down two stories into the sub-basement. Sometime he would let us help him punch the boilers and oil the equipment. He would sit at a table next to the door and drink coffee as the evening breeze would cool the room. We could go hang out there anytime. Over on Dean Street there was not much to see. The street was mostly filled with trucks backed up to loading dock that blocked the side walk. With trucks double parked and cars trying to make their way down the street, it was not easy to walk around there. There was a Banana distributor on Dean Street and some of the moms would send us over to buy bananas. There was also a factory that made ‘Chunky’ chocolate bars and a beer distributor on the corner. With beer trucks driving in and out all the time, they did not like us play in there. On the other side of Vanderbilt on Dean Street was located the Saint Joseph’s Catholic Church and school. To avoid running into any of the Priests or Nuns from the school, we didn’t go down this side of Dean Street. Even as a Lutheran I was scared of the Nuns. They were the scary kind of nuns with the long black robes, dangling cross and hood habits. Joe Pepitone of the NY Yankees lived on Saint Marks and his family owned a restaurant on the corner of Dean Street and Vanderbilt. Joe would have the Yankee players come over for a meal, he was Joe and Joe was older and went to Manual Trade High School. It later became John Jay High School after Joe got shot there. I went to school with Billy Pepitone, Joe’s younger brother. Joe was famous, older and from a different block, he might as well been a thousand miles away. There were not many other restaurants in the area. The neighborhood was mostly working class and consisted of newspaper stores and soda shops where you could get an egg cream and sandwich at the counter. The exception being a restaurant called Michel's. It was on Flatbush Ave near Grand Army Plaza. Our family would go there for special occasions. This was a fancy place where we would dress up in our Sunday clothing to go for dinner. It had starched white table cloths and waiters in tuxedos.

The next block over from Dean Street was Pacific Street. It was a lot easier to walk down the street over there without having to dodge the cars and trucks, and it had two interesting buildings. There was a bread factory that always smelled wonderful and the Daily News Printing Press. The Daily News always seemed to have a lot of excitement with trucks speeding into the loading dock, loading up and getting away fast. The only time I had to go over that way was to go to the YMCA on Hanson Place for Summer Camp. 

My Mom was one of the few women at that time working at a job. She would work part time downtown on Broadway for the Moore-McCormack Steamship line typing the manifests for the freight ships sailing out of New York harbor. My mom only worked the hours we were away in school. In the morning she would see us off, and she was there when we got home at 3:00. She didn’t want me home alone in the summer so shipped me off to day camp at the YMCA. It was a long walk over towards the Williamsburg Bank building, and I remember having to pass through the Brooklyn meat market with the men in white jackets and meat hooks unloading big slabs of meat. Not only was it crowed with workers and trucks, it stunk and the ground was sticky. We were a big walking family. My Dad had a 1953 Nash Rambler he kept parked in a lot down the street. We only used the car to visit my Mom’s family in Richmond Hill Queens or take our summer vacation in Vermont. I could take the bus to go to our church over on 3rd Avenue and Pacific, but I enjoyed the walk. You could go Bergen Street to 3rd Ave, or walk to Flatbush Avenue and cut down Pacific or Dean Street. I liked Flatbush Avenue. There was the Triangle Hunting and Fishing store on corner of Dean Street, and further down were more stores that sold sporting and outdoor camping equipment. I liked to bow hunt and camp out with my friends from Boy Scouts, Kenny Carlson and David Klang. We bought our camping gear in the Army and Navy Surplus store and our bows and arrows on Flatbush Ave. Close to the L.I.R.R. Station was a little orange juice and hotdog counter. It was about half way to down town and a good place to stop for a drink. I remember the hotdog rolls were flat toasted bread on each side, kind of stupid I thought, but good tasting just the same. The square was hard to cross, with the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic. The news stand on the triangle was also a good place to get a cold bottle of soda. I went by this spot a few years ago and was shocked how it had become a shell of itself. It looked like the bombed out center of Biuret. I wondered how such valuable property like this could be allowed to go into such disrepair.

Further down Flatbush was where A&S was and where we went to buy our clothing and all the big shopping items. As a boy, I didn’t like going there with my parents too much, other than A&S which had a very cool toy department and a chemistry supply department where you could buy test tubes and chemicals. Some of which you could not get with your Gilbert Chemistry Set. Movies were a big part of growing up. We had two movie theaters close to home, The RKO Carlton Theater and the Plaza Theater, both on Flatbush Avenue on either side of Carlton Avenue. If you wanted to adventure downtown there was a Lowie’s Albee, Paramount and the Fox Theater. Those theaters were magnificent high, ornate multi-balcony palaces. There was also a Howard Johnson’s downtown on Fulton Street with great hot fudge sundaes for after the show. With excellent subway connections and the IRT and BMT stations right there only a few blocks away from the house, it was easy to go into Time Square. When I was ten I took the subway into Time Square on my own to see a movie. The subway was only cost fifteen cents to ride. Around sixth grade the neighborhood started to change. The Dodgers move out of Brooklyn and there was change off the block at school. I was going into my teen years and when I got to middle school, most of the kids in my class were black. Of the 35 students in my eighth grade class only five of us were white. There was white flight as a lot of the white families transferred my friends to P.S. # 51. My parents would not do that. We always had black families living on Saint Marks Place. My Den Mother in Cub Scouts was Mrs. Jackson, Michael Jackson’s mother, no joke. They lived directly around the corner from us on Saint Marks. I could see Michael’s fourth floor apartment from our back window. We figured out a way to signal each other when we were leaving for school. Michael was my best friend in scouts and at school, up until the third grade when he moved. We attended a progressive school as my first grade teacher was a black woman named Mrs. Moses, very loved by the parents and students. My friends from parochial school had a problem with race, and would not play with the black kids in the neighborhood. The four years between my sister and me marked the decline of the area. When she graduated Grammar school, P.S.# 9, was an academic leader, many of its graduates went into the most prestigious Arts and Science High Schools in the city, like Brooklyn Tech. My sister went to Prospect Heights High School, then on to Cornell and Harvard. When I graduated middle school, none of the students made the cut for those schools.

Most of my friends formed a gang called the Van Angel Boys, Everything got tagged (VAB) to mark their territory. The Black Boys went into a gang called the Bishops. Most of the boys as teenagers went to jail, died of an OD or dropped out of school. I would stay busy with scouts, DeMolay and camping. The gangs left me alone, mostly because we were friend when little, but also I was over 200 lbs and over 6 feet tall.

My Aunt came home one night and had been beaten and robbed. There were the occasional break-ins to our home and we installed more locks. From our roof you could see the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. In 1965, you could see fires burn from the riots in the black neighborhoods in the other direction. I went on as an Engineer with Honeywell and left the city.

My Dad died in 1972 and my Mom sold the house soon after and moved into New York City. We sold the house for $35,000, which at the time was about the cost of a Cadillac.

24.251.124.53 (talk) 00:26, 15 March 2016 (UTC) Richard Holmstedt Glendale, Arizona