A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late August, 1987 | Thought Catalog

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late August, 1987 | Thought Catalog

Late Thursday Afternoon on Ocean Parkway: Bay Ridge-Bound B1 Bus Stopping at Coney Island Hospital

(Video courtesy ProStealthSniper Productions)

A 26-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Early August, 1977 | Thought Catalog

A 26-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Early August, 1977 | Thought Catalog

Monday Morning in Sheepshead Bay: Walking to Coney Island

(Video courtesy Alexander E Poet)

Sunday Afternoon in Brighton Beach: Out Of The Blue with Heather Cuccia at the Brighton Beach Jubilee and Performers on the Boardwalk

Videos courtesy Mike Beitchman)
(Video courtesy iomega15)

A 24-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Mid-June, 1975 | Thought Catalog

A 24-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Mid-June, 1975 | Thought Catalog

Early Thanksgiving Morning in Brighton Beach: On the Boardwalk

Early this Thanksgiving morning we took the G and Q trains to Brighton Beach. It was very quiet and still as we walked up Coney Island Avenue the block to the beach.

On the boardwalk, the sand was high and spilling over. We spent a quiet (but cold) hour sitting on the bench in the sand, reading and drinking tea, and when we got up, there were already a good number of early birds (including one former BMCC student who came over to say hi) strolling and chatting in Russian.

Sunday Morning in Brighton Beach: The 34th Annual Brighton Jubilee at Brighton Beach and Coney Island Avenues

We wanted to go to the beach on a sunny Sunday this final weekend of August, and when we got off the Q train,

we realized we'd stumbled onto people setting up the 34th annual Brighton Jubilee, which to us looked basically like a collection of vendors

along Brighton Beach Avenue and Coney Island Avenue.

Okay, here's what the Brighton Neighborhood Association says:

The Jubilee is our only fundraiser and is a Brooklyn tradition that celebrates diversity. The multi-block festival features multiple entertainment stages and blocks of merchandise and informational booths, as well as kiddie rides and delicious food. Established 34 years ago, the Jubilee now attracts more than 125,000 people every year and is dedicated to bridging the communication gap through the international language of music.

We were there way too early for the music. Too bad. What it did seem early for was the smell of fried flesh: a little overwhelming before 9 a.m., the official start of the Jubilee. But then we're vegetarian.

Our family - two brothers and our mom, our dad enlisted on weekends sometimes - were vendors at The South's Largest Flea Market, Preston Henn's Swap Shop, on Sunrise Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, through most of the 1980s. Our memories of it are hazy but not pleasant.

We lived nearby and taught at Broward Community College and we hated when someone was sick on the weekend and we were called to substitute, so we now have an aversion to events with outdoor vendors. Our brothers and mom, though, were good at it and sold really nice shirts, too, from a Korean manufacturer in Queens.

The life of a vendor can be lonely.

We don't mean to take anything away from the Brighton Jubilee. And we saw real bargains here, actually, especially on fairly decent clothing.

And how can you go wrong with ceramic vegetables?

Or all these makeup things for people who wear makeup?

This was like an infomercial come to life.

This girl was really eyeing those dolls.

This vendor didn't even bother with a table and just sat on her merchandise. She made two sales while we were standing there, too.

And of course there were the madcap Lawrence Welk-like bubbles in the air.

But still, we were grateful to get onto the beautiful beach for the rest of the morning.

Is it our imagination or did the boardwalk get lower or the sand higher?

Friday Morning in Manhattan Beach: Good Friday Breakfast at Manhattan Beach

On this beautiful Good Friday morning we made it to Manhattan Beach in less than hour from Williamsburg, thanks to quick connections on the B48 bus at Lorimer and Metropolitan, the B train at Prospect Park, and the B1 bus on Brighton Beach Avenue after we got a bialy and iced tea to take to the beach.

So we were here before 8:30 a.m. and it was beautiful to smell the salt air and see the ocean again.

This was "our" Brooklyn beach in adolescence and our twenties and was pretty much the same for kids like us who lived in southeastern Brooklyn and were driving in our teens. We remember one time when we'd driven here alone when we were about 20 and started chatting up the two girls at the next blanket. Finally one said, "You don't realize how old we are" and told us they were married women around 30. (Of course they'd assumed we were about 17, not 20.) We have a June memory of someone's transistor playing Beatles songs, and later, "Band of Gold." Today the bare trees made it clear that it is not yet June.

We first came here with our ninth grade friends from Meyer Levin J.H.S. 285 on the Brooklyn Day holiday in 1966. Unlike Coney Island or Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach didn't have a subway right there, nor stores or amusements. In those days the B49 bus, which we took on our way back, to the Sheepshead Bay Road Q/B station, didn't go into Manhattan Beach but ran only to the end of Ocean Avenue, and we had to walk over the wooden Ocean Avenue bridge over the bay and then through the streets of Manhattan Beach (the neighborhood) to get to the beach.

It's a lot smaller than Coney and Brighton to the east, a little curved cove of sand. To us, it's the nicest stretch of beach in Brooklyn except for the little private beach slightly to the east on the campus of Kingsborough Community College, where we taught between 1978 and 1980. In those days our step-great-grandmother Bessie Shapiro lived a few blocks away along with her sister Etta.

Ordinarily the buses are jammed with KCC students on weekdays, but this is spring break at CUNY and that's basically why we came today. The beach actually didn't look so good, with something we'd never seen before:

trenches of water due to the deluge downpour a few days ago, and there was sand on the concrete walkway. The sand also seemed darker and coarser than we'd remembered.

Mostly older people were about, jogging and speedwalking and chatting in Russian (or a few in Chinese), along with a couple of bicyclists.

It was nice to hang out and look at the water. The beautiful Marine Parkway Bridge is faintly off in the foggy distance here.

Sunday Morning in Coney Island: Breakfast on the Boardwalk

We never liked Coney Island in the summer and never went to the beach there. It was too crowded and seemed tacky in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Our family, and when we were older, our friends went to the much-nicer Rockaway beaches or if we stayed in Brooklyn, to Manhattan Beach. Both seemed like real beaches outside of a city.

But Coney Island was really nice early this morning. We got the G train in Williamsburg at 7:45 a.m. and changed for the F at Church Avenue. At the West 8th Street/Aquarium stop we changed for the Q to Brighton Beach, where we got iced tea and oatmeal at Starbucks and brought it back to Coney Island, at the boardwalk near Stillwell Avenue.

It was a gorgeous morning and very few people were up and about. The boardwalk food stands and restaurants were all closed. This was really the first time we went to Coney Island in the morning. If we're staying in Brooklyn, we usually go to Brighton Beach, which seems more homey and friendly. And Russian.

We always knew about the Parachute Jump, the Cyclone, the Wonder Wheel, etc., but even as a kid, we hated rides. Although we never got carsick, the thought of going on rides and getting dizzy and nauseated didn't appeal to us, especially when we saw other kids getting sick.

Coney Island always seemed scuzzy to us as a kid. We lived not that far away, just a couple of exits on the Belt Parkway - yeah, our Brooklyn was car-oriented since there were no subways in our neighborhood - but we didn't come here often.

Rockaway was closer, and since we grew up in the Arverne bungalow colonies and then later both sets of grandparents lived in beachfront apartments, we always gravitated to Rockaway, which was where we got our first apartment. That's where we went on good beach days this summer. One Saturday our friend and former Nova Southeastern University Law colleague Mark, now director of academic support at Pace Law School, came down from Westchester with his 5yo son Josh, and we went to Beach 116th Street in Rockaway Park. Mark, who grew up in the Bronx, was there for the first time and also thought Rockaway was a much nicer beach than Coney Island.

When we did go to Coney Island with our family, usually on fall or winter Sundays, we went to Faber's - not the Faber's Fascination but next door. We think it was called Faber's Playland (Faber's Sportland was at Rockaways Playland, which seemed to us a nicer amusement park although we really didn't like any amusement parks. We actually preferred the little Faber's on the Rockaway boardwalk in Edgemere, which we used to walk to with our friends from our bungalow on Beach 56th Street in Arverne.)

Faber's had skee-ball, which we loved to play, and some pinball machines and other games we liked.

Our memories of Stillwell Avenue are mostly of being there on dark, cold winter Sunday afternoons when there were only a handful of cars parked in the middle of the street. It seemed kind of depressing.

Around the time of our Memorial Day 1964 bar mitzvah in nearby Sheepshead Bay, the Loews Coney Island Theatre became the Brandt's Shore. Before we turned 20, the Shore played only X-rated porn films.

We liked Nathan's well enough. As a kid, we liked the french fries, and it was the only place where we would put mustard, not ketchup, on our french fries. But by the time we got to high school, the Nathan's on Long Beach Road in Oceanside was a cooler place to go: it felt (and was) suburban, our uncle lived nearby, and kids from Midwood High School would go out to the Oceanside Nathan's rather than the Coney Island one.

We do like Keyspan Park, of course. Today was the second day of the Great Irish Fair and we would have liked to check it out, but the $12 admission fee didn't fit our potato-famine budget. We went once or twice to Ebbets Field but barely remember it. Jackie Robinson was our god and Pee Wee Reese a saint. The statue of the famous gesture is really great, especially the way the base explains it so effectively. Our favorite Brooklyn Dodger was Duke Snider; at age 6, we knew he wasn't really royalty but did believe that Snyder Avenue was named for him.

Sometimes on off-season weekends, we'd just take a Sunday ride and go down Surf Avenue from one end to the other, by Sea Gate. It always seemed desolate in cold weather. Later we associated with friends and family members who lived in the big apartment houses. So Coney Island never seemed like a fun destination to us, and we suspect that's true for a lot of kids who grew up in southeastern Brooklyn in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

The beach was almost deserted early this morning. One of those vehicles that make the sand smooth and even was going up and down the beach. Of course the lifeguards disappear after Labor Day.

This is looking east from part of the boardwalk that goes in a little, by the foul-urine-smelling public bathrooms at Stillwell Avenue. You can make out the Marine Parkway Bridge faintly at right.

Same location, only facing west. We still have weird problems with "east" and "west" on the Belt Parkway, which was the first highway we drove on by ourselves. When we got home from school on the day when our driver's license came in the mail (we'd failed the road test, then given around Rockaway Avenue and Avenue B, near Brookdale Hospital), we decided to take our first ride on the Belt. We got on at Flatbush Avenue and took it one exit west to Knapp Street, probably less than a mile. It gave us a panic attack.

According to Wikipedia, the Coney Island/Stillwell Avenue subway station is "the world's largest above-ground terminal facility, and notable as the most energy-efficient mass transit facility in the United States." Because we were car people, we never entered it until a few years ago, after its reconstruction and reopening in 2004.

It's the only train station in New York City with that European train station "look and feel."

We like that the station exterior still says BMT. We are so old that we automatically say we are going on the IRT or BMT someplace and nobody younger than 45 seems to know what we're talking about.

We spent a couple of hours reading the Sunday Times after eating our oatmeal and as we drank our iced tea. It was really lovely to sit on a bench by the beach and watch the ocean.