The Streetscapes of My Childhood
Between 1939 and 1941, the Works Progress Administration collaborated with the New York City Tax Department to collect photographs of most buildings in the five boroughs of New York City. In 2018, the NYC Municipal Archives completed the digitization and tagging of these photos. This website places them on a map that is covered with dots. Zoom in, and each dot is a photo! Type in a specific address, and there it is, the way it looked around 1940. These are remarkably clear and revealing little glimpses, a pre-Google version of Street View. Will wonders never cease?
A recent article on how to stay sane while housebound during the pandemic listed suggestions such as doing crosswords and jigsaw puzzles, writing letters (actual letters), and reading fiction. I’m not much of a puzzle person, and I am well acquainted with writing old-fashioned letters and reading novels to escape this time and place, but now I have a new avocation. I’ve become a virtual street archaeologist, exploring with my cursor up and down Coney Island Avenue and along vaguely remembered neighborhood routes to various points in my childhood world.
Above is my earliest address, 624 Coney Island Avenue. By the time I lived there, during the 1950s, these particular shops had changed hands, but the buildings looked the same. In fact, I realize suddenly that the Brooklyn of 1940 is far more familiar to me than the contemporary version I have seen when I visited in recent years. I suppose that’s the thing about a city…and a world…it is organic, always changing…and yet we seek the comfort and stability of the constants that underpin it. As William Stafford put it: “There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn't change…”
And that’s me these days, always trying to find and follow that thread. The world has gone mad, and it’s hard to stay steady, and I realize my childhood street searches are a trivial–even pathetic–distraction, but it’s harmless and soothing. It also validates and clarifies blurred memories, and that’s very reassuring. I see a narrative in these pictures, a constant connecting me to my past and all the way to now, as concrete as those sidewalks.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the landscapes of childhood, how they become the setting for our play and shape our impressions of the world. I read an abstract of a 1991 article The Landscapes of Childhood: The Reflection of Childhood's Environment in Adult Memories and in Children's Attitudes by Rachel Sebba that concludes that most adults identify the most significant place in their childhood with the outdoors, and without adult mediation. “Children experience the natural environment in a deep and direct manner, not as a background for events, but, rather, as a factor and stimulator..." In my current life, I watch the children growing up here on this ranch, their stunning ease in the water, their leather-tough bare feet on rocky dirt paths, their radar for snakes and other dangers, and I can only imagine how these experiences will shape them. But there were plenty of adventures and fascinations to be had on those Brooklyn streets.
Nature for Brooklyn kids like us was a trip to Prospect Park, and in the meantime, there were tree-lined residential streets of what is now called Ditmas Park. There were plenty of good landmarks on Coney Island Avenue…tall street lamps to touch for iron tag, stoops for sitting and jumping, post-rain gutters in which to set popsicle stick boats sailing. Puddles pooled with oily rainbows and the colors of traffic lights and neon signs. There was often a jump rope session in progress, and Carol and I played with our dolls on the roof or fire escape. A procession of strangers walked by daily, and we were in the thick of things.
Which brings me back to the website. I’m sure this isn’t as interesting to you, dear readers, as it is to me, but that’s Harry Nathanson’s grocery store, where we did our food shopping in those pre-supermarket days. I can still remember kindly Mr. Nathanson, who sometimes allowed us to pick up an item in exchange for an IOU written on a little slip of paper and placed in the till. To the left in the photo is a prior incarnation of Joe Gluck’s soda fountain, candy store, and newspaper and comic stand…a very important locale any time we managed to conjure up a few coins.
You may have your mountain ranges, but the picture below shows the stoop, a significant element in the topography of our street. Not visible in this photograph, but a little further down there was a used car lot, and in the other direction would be my best friend’s building, and Mr. Blitstein’s lumber yard, all of which I can view in the website photographs, clear as day, and pretty much as I remember them.
I’ve probably over-indulged here already, but I can’t resist posting one more photo (below), because this one shows Tobin’s Furs, a long-vanished establishment, still there when I was a child, and it figures into an important memory. You see, one rainy day, my sister Marlene and I decided to run away. We visited the refrigerator first, where the remnant of a layer cake awaited (from Ebinger’s Bakery, of course) and sliced ourselves a hefty wedge. Then I wrapped the cake in a bandana attached to a stick to sling over my shoulder, as we imagined hoboes did, and we slipped away into the rain. We walked as far as Tobin’s Fur, which wasn’t very far, found its awnings appealing, and stood in its doorway. There were pale mannequins in the windows, as always, perennially on tiptoes to accommodate high-heeled shoes, but barefoot, yet draped in voluptuous fur coats. It was a bit surreal, though we wouldn’t have thought of it that way. Everything simply was the way it was. Marlene and I stood side by side watching the rain. No one seemed aware that we had run away. We unwrapped the cake and ate it.
