Saying goodbye ...

Running in circles today, not being able to get to my work. Need to finish the last three chapters of something, editing a draft of something else. Got those low down, drive me into the dirt blues. It helps to work through those blue funks in the day, chase them at night.

The second day of Christmas didn't even help!

Like the banner, many of the selections I post here are from a collection of stories of Sunset Park. Naturally, I have loved finding the various Brooklyn Blogs, and there are many, and the hand full of them dedicated to our old neighborhood.

Today was the sign-off for a good Brooklyn Blog, The Best View in Brooklyn. These small pictures cannot do justice to the breathtaking views of the sunset, the panorama of the bay as it winds around the borough, blending with the Hudson River going north, emptying into the ocean going due west. As the boy said … "Straight out 'til morning."

A much needed voice for this all but forgotten piece of our history, I say goodbye to The Best View Blog. May all your endeavors be done with the same dedication.

Missing it today,
And wonder

Where are we now?
I am,
fOIS

From Sunset Park ...

The bike path along Shore Parkway ...

School was dismissed and the kids scattered. Some of them walked up the long hills and were never heard from again, many married young, birthing and raising a new generation.

It was a fresh start as the kids and their parents threw off the remnants of the yesterdays that defined them and embraced a vision of tomorrow they waited to realize.

For the kids who grew up in the areas surrounding Bay Ridge, the incredible vistas from a seven and a half mile bike path along Shore Parkway, adjacent to the Brooklyn Narrows, spanned these changing times.

It was in the ebb and flow of the waters, in the endless stream of people and traffic, the change began to define itself.

Dancing to a another beat, both parents and children had yet to learn, eventually everything old is new again.

The first day ...

She stood for hours lost in the steel gray colors of the bay smashing against the rocks until she could no longer feel her toes and at last gave in and went around the corner to the house and to her bed. Once again, sleep eluded her and at first light, she turned and looked at the clock on her night table.

She stood in her dressing room, half-awake and struggled into tight flannel long johns and then into jeans. All the layers and heavy socks in place she walked to the far side of her living room, opened the window and looked out at the Brooklyn Narrows. It was five in the morning. The lights on the bridge and the lights of the traffic shown against the dawn sky, guiding each traveler to their destination.

Standing near
The water wake
Holding a bit

Of heaven,
I am
fOIS

Back to Sunset Park ...

This is the steeple of St. Michael's Church. Like the park, the church was part of our lives for decades. From all three of us receiving First Holy Communion, to my wedding, Michael's Baptism and Communion, until the last time, my mother, Mary Fois' funeral mass and my niece, Laura singing Amazing Grace.

Sitting in the circle by the flag pole, watching the sun setting in the bay, the steeple rises like a beacon, showing us the way home.

From Sunset Park:

Seasons changed and changed again. Autumn leaves lined the long hills and pathways of Sunset Park. They blew in the wind and danced happily in the shifting currents, their golden, yellow bronze leaves spilling onto the narrow tree lined streets of the neighborhood.

Children rolled down the long slopes in the park, covering themselves with the colorful array of fallen leaves, breathing in the pungent scent, waiting for the long winter’s sleep.

Watch the next sunset

with someone you love.

fOIS

To understand the historic importance of the park for so many of us who grew up there and for many who still live there, read this blog and the others for the park. Three of my pictures of the park came from these dedicated bloggers. Take the tour and enjoy the pictures donated by the Brooklyn Public Library. It is for them I added the piece "So Long Frank Lloyd Wright."

So Long Frank Lloyd Wright ...

From Sunset Park:

The building, in the Sunset Park area of Brooklyn, was the last in a row of three houses, adjacent to the Greek Diner. These houses were cold flats where the current owners resisted installing radiators for heat or converting the old coal stoves to gas. The fronts of all three houses called “airy-ways,” were enclosed in ornate wrought iron fences. The windows looked out at a giant white factory across the street.

Across the trolley tracks, across the alley and reaching down three avenues, Bush Terminal Factory District spread like giant tentacles along the docks of downtown Brooklyn, creating jobs for thousands of blue-collar workers. The women sewing piecework in long lines on factory floors, heads bowed and backs bent. The men loading and unloading the countless ships from all over the globe arriving to the ports of New York, the longshoremen.


The docks and the Bush buildings remained for decades, abandoned like unwanted children, only to become the center of controversy. The center of a zoning battle to restrict the number of stories the developers can built up. The original plans would have blocked the beautiful vistas from Sunset Park and Owl's Head Park. The vista along the Narrows that stretches from downtown Brooklyn, adjacent to the Belt Parkway, under the Narrows Bridge and moving out to sea.

Progress wants more tall buildings to block the sun and ruin the landscape. Progresss hasn't done enough damage. It wants to see how much more it can exact from the land before it implodes.

Ironic. We thought we grew up in a slum. Now progress has found the small row houses on 39th Street and the areas of Lower Sunset Park near the waterfront and wants to install fast food chains and factory outlets for cheap shopping.

Someone out there still believes we can shop our way out of this mess.

It was the Brooklyn Garment Center, the hubb of activities, the inside of an intricate bee hive, alive and buzzing, producing sweet freedom for thousands of immigrants. It was for decades the gateway to middle-class. With its demise we witness the end of an era.

Looking back to understand
Where we are going,
I remain,
fOIS

Time It Was ...

There was a girl, an amalgam of any other group of little girls. Her image remains small and tender and untouched, locked in a treasure box, with buttons and bows and ribbons for her hair.

I see her looking back at me from a photograph, her face still soft and innocent.

Time cannot be measured between the last days of innocence and the insinuation of adulthood.

Nor can anyone explain or remember where the shortest moments of their life, their childhood, vanished, or when they ceased to believe in magic.

Over the rainbow
I am
fOIS

Old friends …

I think I'll make the stories and pictures of Sunset Park a blog series. We lived below and above and around the park for my entire childhood, my teen years and a good part of my adult life. The neighborhoods around the park have changed, different groups settling in, other groups leaving. The big pool was originally a lake.

So much of the old ways are gone. Yet thanks to people like Peter Allen, Jacqueline Kennedy Onasis and other brave souls, some of our landmarks will remain. We will continue to enjoy the spectacle of The Radio City Music Hall and the splendor of Grand Central Station.

I watched in horror the day the wrecking ball took its first hit on the old Metroplitan Opera building in mid-town.

Time it was

and what a time it was,

A time of innocence,

A time of confidences,

Long ago it must be,

I have a photograph,

Preserve your memories,

There all thats left you...

Paul Simon

If you are lucky, you can dig through your mother's, grandmother's or some other older relative's trunk, find a shoe box tied with faded ribbon and you can find some of the past.

fOIS

Stories you think you remember …

Having children
is like
having a bowling alley
installed inyour brain.
Martin Mull

You want to write about your family, but you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. So you mask it in another town or city, you change their names and you think you're safe. Maybe.

According to family lore, I was the unexpected, late arrival, accident of my family. The two who had been around for years weren't sure if they were thrilled by this surprise event.

The story goes something like this …

My poor mother while seven months pregnant with me, journeyed in the sweltering heat, long and arduous hours from Brooklyn to the Shrine of St. Ann in Quebec, Canada.

There she said the stations to the cross and several Rosaries, on her knees, while seven months pregnant, in the sweltering heat. She purchased special Holy Water and crushed rose petals for insurance and to place in front of her statue at home.

St. Ann is the Patron Saint of Mothers, and mine wanted her last and most “unexpected” pregnancy to be a girl child. For as she told my brothers many times, a girl child is the only real comfort a mother can ever expect to have.

I can never be sure if these family stories are true.
I might have made them up.

Recollections from the edge,

fOIS

A gift …

This piece of prose is a memory from 1952, written as a gift in 1975, kept and used again recently …

It was late and she was tired. The sticky August heat and the buzz of a mosquito kept her awake. She sat up waving her arms to ward off the attack. Exhausted, she fell back on her pillow and watched the shadows on her ceiling, worried the shadows would suddenly change and become demons.

Then slowly the sounds, soft and low, began to float through the air and into her room. The sounds of Andrew’s harmonica as he sat in the big parlor chair and played. Often Andrew would wait until the family was sleeping and the lights were out. Wait until only the rays of the streetlights lit the room, streaming through the tiny panes of the living room window, small, square like prisms catching the yellow light and bouncing it back against the parlor walls in a brilliant splash of color.

In the background she heard the faint rumble of a freight train, its whistle long and mournful as it sped through the night. She heard a tug boat out in the bay, its horn on and off in the summer fog, the sounds of a slow summer night, the clang of a trolley car passing by and the sounds of his soulful tune. The sweet liquid sounds of Andrew’s harmonica.

Andrew’s music filled the room like smoke and fragrance and imaginings of catching a freight train to faraway places, sailing off into the horizon to find mystery and adventure.

Carefully, Antoinette went to the foot of her bed and peaked around the corner of the open doorway to watch him, holding her breath for fear he would see her and break the spell. Andrew’s eyes were closed and his head pushed back into the chair, fingers and palms wrapped around the bright silver instrument, the low moan of the harmonica filled the room. Slowly she slipped back into her bed smiling as he made another dark night pass without shadows or fears.

Whenever Antoinette heard the sound of a harmonica she thought of freight trains to faraway places and sailing off into the horizon, of mystery and adventure and hot sticky summer nights. The buzz of a mosquito and young girls wide-awake watching shadows dancing on the ceiling, and feeling safe. Antoinette was indeed content to have her family around her, but it was Andrew that made her feel safe. When he was away the house was too quiet.

fOIS

Say Cheese!

Home

is having a large,

loving close-knit

family

in another city.

George Burns

The big one had a homemade dark room in our parent’s bedroom. He would disappear behind the screened wall with a makeshift red light, actually an old Christmas light on the end of an extension, but his signal never-the-less. Enter at your own peril.

Our mother. “I have to hang the laundry for the love of heaven. Aren’t you done yet?”

The big one moaning. “How can anyone ever get anything done around here?”

It was my ninth birthday party and my two best friends and one cousin sat on the floor in front of the sofa.

The middle one, fourteen, sat on the sofa, deep into his James Dean persona, pretending to be disinterested in such nonsense as birthdays, birthday cakes, candy or presents, caught forever on film with a candy bar clenched in his fist.

The big one, a good immitation of James Garner, sat next to James Dean, with an early Romona the Pest, that was me, balancing on his knee, my eyes crossed, reaching back with my free hand to make devil horns on the top of the big one's head.

Our mother barked. “You stop that foolishness and don't cross your eyes. One of these days you’re going to remain like that.”

She tried again. “I can’t get this darn thing. Honey (our father), can you do this? I think I hear the pot boiling over.”

She handed him the brownie. Without looking, honey snapped the picture the way we were.

And wouldn’t you know it? She was right. Even to this day when I look at that picture, my eyes are crossed!

Good Lord sometimes they were more fun than Lewis and Martin!

Look at those old photos. You know the ones? The ones where your ears stick out like the flag on a taxi? That wonderful, painful and most comical stage when you were all legs and arms and your face had not grown big enough to fit the big nose in the middle of it?

Use them to fill in the landscape of the cursed black page.

Free falling off the edge.

fOIS

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

The banner on the page is a photograph of Sunset Park in Brooklyn. I never stopped missing Brooklyn, though I think I got over living inside Bush Terminal.

I might do the unthinkable and reprint pieces of what has become a series of stories with the same name, Sunset Park and another series of stories about a small town in Duchess County.

I might use other pieces of the people and things I enjoy writing about. I've lived in some crazy places and intend to have fun with at least two of them. I began my life in a factory district, skirting the Brooklyn docks and ended the New York City part of my life in a crazy place called Washington Heights in Manhattan. I've met dozens of eclectic and marvelous characters, fodder so rich, how could I avoid using them?

I think of the disclaimer on The Naked City and Dragnet in the early days of television drama … the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

If you look on the copyright page of most fiction books you will see a similar statement. No resemblance to anyone living or dead I have ever known, now or ever, never, I do so swear.

Better leave them alone completely and write about someone else's family. It's safer and it prevents law suits or death threats.

If any of those persons, living or dead, see themselves in any of my characters, now and until the hour of my death, amen ... get over it.




My first homage is to Brooklyn ...


Sunset Park from Fifth Avenue to Seventh Avenue, from Forty-First Street to Forty-Fourth Street with its handball courts, huge pools and sloping hills. It was here that Toni loved to come for the namesake of the park, to watch the sun setting over the rooftops of the houses, the factories, heading down the long hills into the waters of the Narrows.

To the kids who grew up there with me ...

Sunset Park is where the kids grew up. Had they grown up in small towns or villages with funny sounding names like their parents, the kids might have known they came from the wrong side of the tracks. The families in the surrounding neighborhoods knew.

These kids lived on the wrong side, below the park and heading down to the Brooklyn docks, destined to find out later in life they were underprivileged.

Thanks for being here with me at the edge ...

fOIS