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Thursday, April 1, 2010

Thursday Afternoon in Williamsburg: April Fools' Day at Badame Sessa Triangle


This afternoon we walked up Leonard Street a few blocks to sit in the little park at Badame Sessa Triangle with some Diet Pepsi and a book (David Shields' Reality Hunger.)

It's a tiny park made by the intersection of Meeker Street, Leonard Street and Withers Street, created in the 1940s when they built the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

We used to think, carelessly, that it was Madame Sessa Triangle. We imagined Madame Sessa was a clairvoyant, like Madame Sosostris in "The Waste Land." April is the cruelest month on nearsighted eyes, but eventually we realized our mistake.

It's properly Badame-Sessa Memorial Square, named after two American soldiers in wars decades apart. Sergeant George G. Badame (1896-1955) fought in World War I and received a Purple Heart for his brave service in France. Private Michael Sessa, Jr. (1948-1967), a Brooklyn native, was killed in Pleiku, Vietnam on May 18, 1967. The memorial also honors fifteen other neighborhood guys, presumably around our age, who died in Vietnam.

Anyway, today some teenagers were texting on a bench and this youngish guy was playing with his Boston terrier when he wasn't doing dips on another bench.

This little dog wasn't responsible for the pile of shit too close to us. Calling Miss Heather!

Still, it got up to a sunny 70 degrees today, which was a good start for April.

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