I’d follow the beam of light across smoke-filled time and space to the screen, where, like magic, the Technicolor face of Danny Kaye appeared, 100 feet wide, in Knock on Wood. Uncle Gus would greet me with an array from the candy counter-Raisinets, Goobers, potato sticks-and then, if I was good, guide my hands to strike the carbon-arc lamp of the huge picture machine. I’d stroll through the theater’s soaring Moorish lobby like a 7-year-old sultan, never pay a nickel, and make my way to the upper balcony, where I’d climb a steep metal staircase to the projection booth.
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In 1955, this was a wondrous treat, especially when I was dropped off at the Loew’s Kameo, the massive movie palace where my uncle Gus worked as the projectionist, projecting movies being something of a family business in those days. It was from 320 Eastern Parkway that I used to walk Grandma Sugar (as we called her) to Nostrand Avenue, where she worked retail, selling children’s clothes. So many hours I spent watching the street below, the morning rush, the evening calm, Barricini Candy on one corner, Barton’s on the other, one box of assorted, tinfoil-wrapped chocolates for the goys, another for the Jews. After my mother and father bailed on the borough for the green fields of Flushing, Queens, the six-story building at the corner of Franklin Avenue became my Brooklyn home, site of uncounted sleepovers, the blue spark of “electric bus” poles along the power lines suspended outside my window.
Three-twenty Eastern Parkway, apartment 4D, is where my grandparents lived for four decades. That’s when it began to seep up, that Brooklyn that lies beneath, inching through the asphalt like long-buried trolley tracks. “You’re not talking about 320 Eastern Parkway, are you?” I asked. Yet somewhere along the line, the tales of the Franklin Avenue Posse, or at least the physical setting of their hardscrabble world, struck a familiar chord.
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The work was compelling, full of boastful, yearning romance tempered with a deep awareness of the stacked deck they were up against. Photo-illustration by Jesse Lenz.Īt the outset of the current millennium, long before national magazines declared Brooklyn to be “the coolest city on the planet,” I found myself in a bar, listening to members of the Franklin Avenue Posse rap about their lives in the crack-ravaged Crown Heights of the nineties.
Photo: AP (pedestrians on Brooklyn Bridge in 1891) Karsten Bidstrup/Getty Images (contemporary photo of Brooklyn Bridge with pedestrians) Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images (female pedestrian on right).
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