Wednesday Evening in Brooklyn Heights: Scott Wiener lectures on "Pizza: The Brooklyn Story" at the Brooklyn Historical Society"

(Video courtesy Scott's Pizza Tours)

Saturday Afternoon in Fort Greene Park: Urban Park Rangers present "Walt Whitman's Fort Greene"

At 1 p.m. on this beautiful, breezy Saturday, we were one of a half-dozen people who showed up at the Fort Greene Park Visitor Center to go on a fascinating tour of the park with the theme "Walt Whitman's Fort Greene" with one of the Urban Park Rangers, the very knowledgeable and personable Vinny Piccolo, a Brooklyn native who's been at Fort Greene Park for half a dozen years and knows it inside and out.

Walt Whitman, of course, was not only one of the greatest poets of all time but served as the editor of The Brooklyn Eagle, at the time the largest circulation afternoon newspaper in the country.

As the editor and a resident of the area, he was a moving force behind both Fort Greene Park and the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument. Vinny Piccolo took us around the park, pointing out many things we'd never noticed or known before, like this tree that was hit by lightning, as he spoke about Whitman's legacy here.

As Vinny mentioned, Whitman was progressive in many ways -- from abolitionism to deism to celebrating gayness -- and he was also an environmentalist who, as any reader of Leaves of Grass can see, found sustenance in nature. (This poor pine tree, like most of the old pines in the park, is afflicted with pine borers and dying from the top down. But new ones, like the one to its left, have been recently planted.)

Anyway, Vinny served as a terrific guide to Fort Greene Park and the monument, as well as Whitman's role in it. We're kind of pressed for time, so we'll lift some of this from the Parks Department website for the park:

In 1776 American Major General Nathanael Greene supervised the construction of Fort Putnam on high ground that is now part of the park. During the Battle of Long Island, the Continental Army surrendered the fort and retreated to Manhattan. The British held thousands of captives on prison ships anchored in the East River. Over 11,500 men and women died of overcrowding, contaminated water, starvation, and disease aboard the ships, and their bodies were hastily buried along the shore. These brave patriots represented all thirteen colonies and at least thirteen different nationalities. In 1808 the remains of the prison ship martyrs were buried in a tomb on Jackson Street (now Hudson Avenue), near the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The Brooklyn fort was renamed for General Greene and rebuilt for the War of 1812. When the threat of war passed, locals enjoyed visiting the grounds of the old fort for recreation and relaxation. The City of Brooklyn designated the site for use as a public park in 1845, and newspaper editor Walt Whitman rallied popular support for the project. From the pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he appealed for a pleasant retreat for city dwellers, "a place of recreation. . .where, on hot summer evenings, and Sundays, they can spend a few grateful hours in the enjoyment of wholesome rest and fresh air."

In 1847 the legislature approved an act to secure land for Washington Park on the site of the old fort. The improvements were complete by 1850. . . In 1867 landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, designers of Central and Prospect Parks, were engaged to prepare a new design for Washington Park and a crypt for the remains of the prison ship martyrs. At the top of the hill was a trellised walk approaching two flights of steps that led down to a circular parade ground in the northwest corner of the park. Olmsted and Vaux proposed that the rest of the hilly site would be "somewhat closely planted, and . . .so laid out that it will offer a series of shady walks that will have an outlook over open grassy spaces." Washington Park was renamed for Fort Greene in 1897, less than a year before Brooklyn was consolidated into greater New York City.

With funds available for a permanent monument to the prison ship martyrs, the renowned architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White was hired in 1905. They designed a new entrance to the crypt and a wide granite stairway leading to a plaza on top of the hill. From its center rose a freestanding Doric column crowned by a bronze lantern; President-elect William Howard Taft attended the monument’s dedication in 1908.

Although we'd spent a good deal of time in Fort Greene Park -- we went to several of the wonderful recent annual Summer Literary Festivals and last summer saw a terrific Midsummer Night's Dream here -- until this afternoon we had no idea what kinds of trees were here and Vinny pointed out the sometimes-smelly gingkos, the massive London planes, the sugar maples, etc. -- 39 species in all.

We even got a view of one raptor trying to attack another raptor as it attempted to swoop down on a pigeon. It seemed to be a peregrine falcon going after one of Fort Greene Park's red-tailed hawks.

This view, once unobstructed by any buildings so that it gave a clear view of the waterfront and Manhattan, inspired this from Whitman (read aloud by Vinny as we stood there):

By day the distant, shadowy
sails, the steamers' pennant
trails of smoke
Some vast soul, like a planet's,
bound, arrested, tied,
Watching the distant, shadowy sails,
My sight and senses given to
to thee—the saline smell—
Thy distant shadowy sails—the
steamers' pennant-trails of
smoke,
The flying soaring gull hawks and flocks

Vinny pointed out that the park inspired writers like Marianne Moore, who lived nearby, and Richard Wright, who wrote Native Son on a legal pad while sitting at a bench near the monument. Whitman would have appreciated this urban garden, tended by volunteers, on the west side of the park.

At the end of the tour, we recited "O Captain! My Captain!" -- a poem Mrs. Sanjour made us memorize at Meyer Levin Junior High back in 1965.

It was an informative and fascinating tour around Brooklyn's oldest park on a nice, breezy afternoon, and we're grateful to Vinny Piccolo, the Urban Park Rangers, the Parks Department. . . and of course we're always grateful to Walt Whitman.

Forty Years Ago Today in Brooklyn: May 6, 1970: Brooklyn College reacts to Kent State

From our diary:

Wednesday, May 6, 1970

A cold, hairy day. I relaxed for a change this morning. I did pass by Midwood [High School, our alma mater], which was on strike. When I did get on campus after 2 p.m., I went to the office and did some work. We'll have to postpone, or as things turned out, cancel the elections.

Paul and I went to a crammed meeting of concerned faculty who voted to strike indefinitely. The black and Puerto Rican students want the school kept open, however.

I was in the liberated President's office when a bomb threat call was received, and Boylan Hall was evacuated. Meeting were held everywhere: Student Government in SUBO, strike steering committee at Whitman, blacks at Roosevelt.

Kneller called the Concerned teachers "unrepresentative" but called off classes for the rest of the week. We had to lock our office so that it won't be taken over.

Things are pretty confused. Strikes are going on all over the country and there's a Washington demonstration scheduled for this weekend. Various people around the campus that I've been speaking to - Richard Pontone, Esther, Mitch and others - are not sure of what's happening, and neither am I.

Dad's Bronx store [on Fordham Road] was closed due to the Fordham demonstrations.

The New York Times the next day featured a story by McCandlish Phillips, "City High Schools Join in Protests," which began

Demonstrations, protests and boycotts hit at least 20 of the city's 90 public high schools yesterday.

Thousands of students reacted with anguish or anger to the military sweep into Cambodia and to the deaths of four Kent State University students, shot by National Guardsmen at the school on Monday. . .

High schools situated near college campuses were the most heavily affected. . . Lines of pickets from Brooklyn College formed outside Midwood High School in Brooklyn, affecting attendance there. About 1,500 students from Brooklyn Technical High School went to the Long Island University auditorium on the downtown Brooklyn campus, at the invitation of L.I.U. students.

Wednesday Night at Grand Army Plaza: Cezar Del Valle on "The Movie Houses of Brooklyn" at the Central Library

This evening we had the joy of attending an entertaining and highly informative talk by theater historian Cezar Del Valle on the history of movie theaters in Brooklyn. By the time we got to the Brooklyn Collection room on the second floor of the Central Library at Grand Army Plaza, we were able to find a seat, but not without difficulty, because this was a pretty hot ticket.

No, there wasn't a riot like the one at the 1927 opening of the Universal Theatre on New Utrecht Avenue when 20,000 people stormed the place trying to get in, but we learned an awful lot and had a great time with a charming, knowledgeable and funny man who seems to know more Brooklyn theater history than anyone in captivity.

Cezar began by showing an old photo and gauging the crowd's age by asking if everyone knew what a johnny pump was. The vast majority of the older audience did, though the term had to be explained for the younger people, most of whom were probably foreigners from places like Ohio anyway. Anyway, Cezar pointed out some clues in the background of the kids playing: an ad for a 1928 Ramon Navarro film playing at the Loews Premier on Sutter Avenue.

Ken Gordon, the silent-film expert who curates a long-running silent film series at the library, added his valuable two cents, as he did at several points during the talk, with friendly joshing between him and Cezar.

Cezar's slide show was amazing; our own pics here are mostly not the ones he showed, but stuff we swiped from the Brooklyn Public Library's amazing Photography Collection and from the website Brooklynpix.com. He did show photos of the Loew's Coney Island

and the nearby RKO Tilyou,

as well as the old Meserole in Greenpoint,

which we wrote about last week.

At one time, Cezar said, there were 506 theaters in Brooklyn with a total seating capacity of over 300,000. This was at the height of "the nabes," the neighborhood movie houses which usually did not advertise outside their own area because, well, they didn't need to.

Cezar took us back to May 1893, when the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences sponsored a talk by Thomas Edison, who conducted the world's first public demonstration of films shot using his Kinetograph. Weirdly, the exhibited film showed three people pretending to be blacksmiths. Here's Edison's Kinetoscope for showing films to individuals, like at a peepshow; Cezar said Edison preferred that idea to showing films to big audiences because he thought it would be more profitable.

So Brooklyn played a big role in the early history of motion pictures. One of the earliest films was this one by Edison taken in May 1897 at the Sheepshead Bay horse racing track.

And the year before, 1896, there's "Shooting the Chutes" at "Bergen Beach, Coney Island":

There were several competing processes of both creating and presenting motion pictures at that time, and the city of Brooklyn was home to all of them. Most of the early venues for showing films back then were not so much theaters (below is the interior of the Metropolitan in downtown Brooklyn; we saw The Graduate there) but stores.

These rented "store theaters," Cezar noted became larger, but the big change came in 1913 with a new law that allowed common-show licenses to have audiences of more than 300. The Regent, below, in Harlem, was one of the first "movie houses."

Another was the TNF Theater, in "aristocratic Flatbush," actually Midwood at 597 East 16th Street, which offered claim-check parking, "retiring rooms" for the ladies, and ushers who would bring cake and ice cream to your seat. It closed before World War II. Sorry, we don't have any pics of it, but Cezar also talked about Feltman's aerodrome (outdoor theater) attached to his restaurant and hotel in Coney Island.

Another place where people at the turn of the 20th century could watch outdoor movies was at the Venetian Gardens of Park Slope's Prospect Hall, where admission was free - "with food and drink." Prospect Hall was home to The Crescent Motion Picture Company in 1908 (Cezar said they had their laboratory underneath the stage) until legal pressure from competitor Thomas Edison forced its closing.

But perhaps the largest airdrome ever, the biggest outdoor theater for the showing of films was - and this was one of Cezar's most amazing facts in a presentation full of them - Ebbets Field. Marcus Loew rented the stadium out as a theater, charged ten cents and included a vaudeville show, adding a second screen for the crowds in 1914.

Cezar also talked aboutr Brooklyn as a home to early movie studios like the Midwood-based Vitagraph, which got its land only with an easement for the old property owner to move her cows through it.

There was more information than we can possibly post about here, which is why you should get to one of Cezar Del Valle's next lectures. He told the audience about the entire twentieth century history of movie theaters in Brooklyn, and he touched on all the well-known Brooklyn theaters like the Kings

and the across-Flatbush-Avenue legendary rival palaces the Brooklyn Paramount and the Fox. He showed the bill for one of the Murray the K shows at the Paramount (it featured "Little Stevie Wonder" billed about seventh) and explained how Ginger Rogers got from one show at the Manhattan Paramount to another at the Brooklyn Paramount by traveling in an ambulance.

He had a treasure trove of anecdotes, from Bill "Bojangles" Robinson's historic opening night at the Albee in 1925 (we went to this theater as late as 1969 or 1970) to material about little nabes that are probably remembered only by the very old and theater historians.



For example, we'd never before heard of the Jefferson, on Myrtle Avenue, the Jewel on Kings Highway (which we remember only as the Cinema Kings Highway, though Cezar reminded us that when it became a porn theater triplex, they had straight porn in one theater, gay porn in the old balcony, and foreign films in the last theater), the Starr on Knickerbocker Avenue, or the Marcy in Williamsburg, which Cezar said switched to Spanish movies .

Loew's Pitkin was legendary, at least in the memory of our father and his parents, aunts and uncles, who lived in the neighborhood (Brownsville). We certainly remember it being open but can't recall ever being taken there. Cezar noted that Al Jolson gave his final performance here in 1949. By the way, "Loew's" was always pronounced with two syllables by everyone we knew, but Cezar said the owners couldn't stand that and gave space into their handbook for employees about the proper way to say "Loew's" (lows). The Pitkin was one of the Loew's palaces' "atmospheric theaters," with a cloudy, starry sky and romantic lighting effects.

We thought we knew all the theaters around Flatbush and Church Avenues near where we grew up - and we were going to the Kings, Kenmore, Albemarle, Rialto, and Astor till the 1970s - but we didn't know about the Flatbush Theater, which closed about the time we were born.

Anyway, our notes from Cezar's lecture gave us a lot of names of theaters and a lot of information. His talk was filled with anecdotes - we do remember stories of "dish night" and the other rituals of the 1930s and 1940s from our grandparents and parents, and we have first-hand knowledge of the flashlight-wielding matrons who patrolled the children's sections of the Brooklyn nabes in the 1950s and early 1960s.

And we pretty much expected a double feature on Saturday morning when we and our friends would go to the movies. Of course, as Cezar explained to those few in the audience too young to realize it, the advent of TV in the late 1940s led to the decline and closure of most Brooklyn movie houses.

The talk ended well after 8 p.m., and it still seemed too short. If you can ever catch one of Cezar Del Valle's lectures, you'd be smart to go. We had the feeling he was telling us only a small fraction of what he knows about theater history, and not just in Brooklyn or New York City.

We wrote about our own experiences in "The Lost Movie Theaters of Southeastern Brooklyn and Rockaway Beach," a story-memoir that first appeared at the webzine Eyeshot and is in one of our collections.

And we also wrote "Forgotten Movie Screens of Broward County," which appeared in the anthology Life as We Show It: Writing on Film, co-edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn, and also online at The Rumpus.

Monday Night in Marine Park: Brooklyn Historian Ron Schweiger's "Brooklyn: Then & Now" Slide Show at the Salt Marsh Nature Center

This evening we went to the Salt Marsh Nature Center overlooking Gerritsen Creek in Brooklyn's largest park, Marine Park, to a great lecture and slide show by the always-fascinating official Brooklyn borough historian, Ron Schweiger, on "Brooklyn Then and Now."

It's a long way from Dumbo Books HQ in Williamsburg to our old neighborhood but we made pretty good time via our usual route: we start with the fabulous G train to Fulton Street, the walk around the mysterious gated triangle park, down that gorgeous block of St. Felix, with BAM on one corner and the Williamsburg Savings Bank Building, One Hansen Place, on the next, into the Brighton line station below via elevator from the street; then we take the B train to Kings Highway, getting out the East 16th Street/Quentin Road exit, where we catch the B100 Mill Basin bus that we used to take right to our block.

We got off by the junior high on Fillmore Avenue and walked through Marine Park, around the oval path where our parents would run on, starting in the mid-1970s when they decided this would help them give up smoking. (Our dad won several races in New York and Florida and still walks about 5-7 miles a day in his eighties.) Inside the oval - we wouldn't call it a track - are the ballfields where we watched baseball, cricket and soccer games.

Crossing Avenue U, we went inside the Salt Marsh Nature Center, which opened in 2001. One of ten Urban Park Ranger Nature Centers in the city, it serves as an in-park community center for public education, recreational activities and environmental studies, and a starting point for walking tours of the salt marsh by Gerritsen Creek, a bird-watchers paradise with ducks, geese, cormorants, sandpipers, herons, egrets, red-winged blackbirds, and marsh hawks.

We sat in the back of the community room/classroom, near Smokey the rabbit's hutch and cage (the Grayson family for years has had pet bunnies: RIP Gwendolyn, Cecily and Misty, but Max and Harry are still with us) in a human crowd of around 25, mostly past the half-century mark.

Mark Kaplan of the Salt Marsh Alliance, started off the evening by mentioning the many programs at the Center and then introduced Ron Schweiger, whom most of the audience had seen before. (In the past year we heard Ron speak at the Lefferts Homestead on Brooklyn's Dutch farmhouses and on the Children of Abraham Peace Walk, where he spoke at the historic Temple Beth Emeth as both borough historian and president of the synagogue.)

Appointed borough historian by Marty Markowitz in February 2002, Ron has given his time to do hundreds of presentations. Anyone going to one of his talks can tell that Ron is a master teacher (he taught science at P.S. 219 in East Flatbush for 31 years and has been at Yeshiva of Flatbush for eight years now) and someone whose love of Brooklyn goes very deep indeed. He also wears numerous other hats in the community - for example, he's vice president of the Brooklyn College Alumni Association (we served on the BCAA board of directors for eight years back in '70s and early '80s). And he also has more Brooklyn-related sweatshirts than anyone who ever lived; tonight he had on a black one of the "built in 1917" Coney Island roller coaster.

On this evening, he brought perhaps sixty or so of his collection of vintage Brooklyn photos of streets, intersections and homes, along with pics he's taken in the past few years. Ron pretty much gets the sites from the exact same spot and angle, usually going there early on Sunday mornings so he can stand in the middle of a street and not get run over. The contrasts between then and now are amazing, both in the vast changes and the similarities between, say, 1908 and 2008. (Unfortunately, none of the pics used here are from Ron's collection, which probably runs to thousands of photographs.)

The first photo was of a corner that we and almost everyone in the audience recognized: the intersection of Flatlands and Flatbush Avenues, circa 1946. We didn't move into the neighborhood till a dozen years later but we could immediately make out the bank building on the northeast corner with its Dutch set roof - and Max's Men's Shop was there, albeit a storefront or two down from where it is today. The Marine Theater, of course, was still around, and a teenage girl was walking to St. Thomas Aquinas School, which some of our friends attended (we remember a terrific high school production of Anything Goes which we saw in its auditorium around 1969).

Closer to our time, a 1956 photo of the intersection showed a big-finned Cadillac, like the kind our father and grandfather drove, making what in more recent times would be an illegal left turn from Flatbush onto Flatlands.

Kings Highway was in the background of both photos, and Ron explained that what became Kings Highway and Flatbush Avenue were the two main trails of the Canarsee Indians and their intersection became the focal point of the Dutch colony of Nieuw Amersfoort, later the town of Flatlands. (We once learned all that stuff at P.S. 203, the Floyd Bennett School, from Miss Gura and Mrs. Elkin back in the Fabulous Fifties.)

Ron's recent photo of the Flatbush/Flatlands Avenues intersection included a girl carrying schoolbooks in almost the exact same spot as the schoolgirl in 1946, but going the opposite way. In a budget-cutting move, the Brooklyn Diocese closed St. Thomas Aquinas a few years ago but it's doing well now as the private Amity School.

A shot of Kings Highway between East 13th and East 14th Streets (near where Quentin Road intersects) from 1912 [the photo above is near East 16th from the 1920s] showed it unpaved, with horses making their way through the streets. Every building there in his 1912 postcard - Ron had both the original black-and-white version (with the postmark showing) and a color postcard, painstakingly hand-colored by an artist in the days before color film - still was around in 2004, when Ron took his (color, digital) pic of exactly the same scene. Of course in 1912 there was no Burger King and no B/Q train el in the background.

Another vintage photo featured Sheepshead Bay Road in 1903, and it looked pretty bucolic. That was when two railroads ran through the area. The Brooklyn Flatbush Coney Island line - which later became the Brighton Beach Railroad and then part of the BRT (Brooklyn Rapid Transit) and then the BMT (Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit) and finally the subway system's Brighton line) - ran on East 16th Street at grade level. And East 17th Street was the track for the Manhattan Beach line of the Long Island Rail Road. That explained why East 17th Street is so wide compared to other streets in the area.

Ron also explained that Jerome Avenue, the cross street, was named after Leonard Jerome, the owner of one of the two local racetracks that, along with the beach resorts, made southern Brooklyn the prime vacation spot in the nation for the very wealthy. (We did know that Leonard Jerome was Winston Churchill's grandpa.)

We greatly enjoyed seeing the Junction when the only house in sight was the Vandeveer Park real estate office and looking at Avenue U and Flatbush pre-Kings Plaza (as our dad had a store there, we were there for the groundbreaking ceremony and there on the first day in September 1970 but recall the old gas station on the corner) and reminiscing about beloved old landmarks like Ben Maksik's Town and Country - though we did have an absolutely horrible 1967 Thanksgiving dinner there with both sides of our family; we remember watching our twin stepcousins' mouths simultaneously open in disbelief when the waiter told us they'd run out of turkey.

Still, the highlights of the evening for us were Ron's many before-and-after photos of Victorian Flatbush: the gorgeous neighborhoods of Prospect Park South, Ditmas Park, Ditmas Park West, Beverley Square West, Fiske Terrace and West Midwood, all kind of suburban subdivisions of a century ago.

Again, the photos here we got from the web; they are only coincidentally photos from Ron's extensive collection. He and his family were renters for years there, and he was actually elected president of the local homeowners' association despite not owning a house.

Ron's been instrumental in making the case for a historic district there, and he played a huge role in saving the wonderful old-time station house at the Avenue H stop of the Brighton line (and, yes, the pot-bellied stove was still there when we began Brooklyn College in 1969).

Houses in Victorian Flatbush that sold around 1901 for $9500 or $10,000 recently have fetched well over a million dollars, Ron said. He discussed the developers who owned the land and created these houses, and Ron showed us photos of the houses under construction, when the just-planted sycamore trees in front of them were thin and reedlike and now are so broad and leafy that they create canopies over some blocks.

Above is a pic of a "Japanese Tudor" house on Marlborough Road that Ron showed. It's 1903 and a sign in the window says the selling price is $9850.

Above is the same house in 1940. Notice the modifications and the larger tree.

And above is 340 Marlborough Road in 2005.

Ron is the go-to maven when it comes to Brooklyn history and he's one of the biggest Brooklyn Dodgers fans in a land where they abound. (Naturally, he's got season tickets to Cyclones games and he showed us an old photo of what existed on the spot where Keyspan Park now stands, contrasting that with the ballpark of today.)

Showing some photos of Ebbets Field and the 1950s teams, Ron could name not only the players - not just the easy ones like Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, and Carl Furillo but less famous faces like that of Billy Cox - but also each one's number! (Having lost most of our marbles, all we could recall was that Pee Wee was number one.)

We could go on and on about Ron's fascinating talk and photos; we couldn't believe that 80 or 90 minutes passed and we'll be sure to catch Ron again. We have to teach that morning, but on Saturday, November 1, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Ron will be giving a walking tour of Sheepshead Bay and Manhattan Beach, sponsored by the Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment, which has this on their website:

Take a walk along the water through these historic and colorful neighborhoods which were part of the largest and most popular resort in the United States a century ago. Visit sites of the old resort hotels and restaurants, where Diamond Jim Brady and Leonard Jerome came to the Sheepshead Bay Racetrack. We'll see the plaque for Vince Lombardi, the great coach of the Green Bay Packers, who grew up in Sheepshead Bay, and the NYC landmark in the Bay, Lundy's.

Walk across the historic 127 year old Ocean Avenue footbridge that has its own special history and then marvel at the mansions as we walk through the streets of Manhattan Beach and learn of its history.

As we waited in the autumn night chill across Avenue U for the B3 bus to take us to the Q train, we were very grateful to Ron Schweiger and the Salt Marsh Alliance for working so hard on tonight's program. Isn't Brooklyn wonderful!