Learning to Drive in Inwood

By Raanan Geberer

I never lived in Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan. But we lived in Marble Hill, just over the bridge on the Bronx mainland, and most of my learning-to-drive experiences took place in Inwood. And what experiences they were – painful at the time, but sometimes humorous in retrospect.

During senior year at Bronx Science, everyone was learning to drive. Because Science didn’t have its own driver’s ed program, you could take driver’s ed at any nearby high school and Science would give you credit. The closest school to me that offered driver’s ed was the Academy of the Sacred Heart of Mary, a Catholic girls’ school in Inwood. I was a little nervous about going there, thinking I would be out of place, but I needn’t have been. The class was co-ed, and there were several other non-Catholics. I was one of three Jewish kids in the group – the other two were Jewish greasers from George Washington High School who wore black leather jackets and looked like something out of “Da Fonz.”

We first went out in the car in the “industrial area of Inwood” east of Broadway, north of 207^th Street. The neighborhood was dominated by the subway yards, warehouses, garages and a pet cemetery. There were few people on the streets and there was plenty of room to practice. As we became more comfortable behind the wheel, the teacher, whose name I don’t remember, took us into the nearby Bronx. We went to Jerome Avenue, as far as Bronx Science itself. He also took us up and down the steep Kingsbridge Road hill, which in retrospect was a foolish choice when dealing with inexperienced drivers. 

It soon became apparent that I was as klutzy as a driver as I had been in sports. Making fun of the way I frequently took my foot off the gas pedal, braked and then put it on the pedal again, the teacher invented a name for me: “Herky-Jerky.”  Once, when he criticized me and I began a sentence with “I have,” he yelled, “Here’s what you don’t have! You don’t have control of the car, you don’t have awareness of the other cars, you don’t know how to turn…” When it finally came time to take the road test, I went up onto the curb and failed.

“Okay,” my father said, “from now on, I’d better start giving you some lessons myself.” Once again, I found myself in the industrial area of Inwood, but this time with my father as the teacher. My father had just bought a used ’64 Lincoln Continental. When this model car first came out, it had been my favorite, but now it was 1971, seven years later. Dad had bought the car for a ridiculously low price, but with gas prices going sky-high, it still cost him more than it was worth. To top it off, the car was so big, it was difficult to park.

When I was younger, Dad, who had once been sergeant in the Military Police, had taught me how to play the piano. Now, behind the wheel, I found that his teaching methods hadn’t changed: “You idiot! You’re going to back right up into the curb! What? Don’t you signal before you turn? You drive like a lunatic! There’s a car right in front of you—you want to get yourself killed? What’s the hell’s the matter with you!....”  In August, I took the test a second time, and just like the time before, I failed.

My father apparently realized that a kinder, gentler approach was called for.  The next year, I was up at the State University at Binghamton as a freshman, but in June he took me over to a driving school, again in Inwood, owned by an acquaintance of his, Jerry Kristol. I’m not sure how he knew Jerry – it may have been through his job or at the synagogue – but Jerry was a good teacher. The fact that the driving school was on 207^th Street, next to Francesca’s Ice Cream Parlor, didn’t hurt. After each lesson, I had a cherry lime rickey at Francesca’s. The next time I took the test, I failed again, but only by a few points. 

My father, undaunted, sent me for more lessons with Jerry Kristol during the winter and spring breaks. To augment these lessons, he gave me a few lessons of his own, and actually let me drive part of the way to and from Binghamton on Route 17 a few times. By the summer, our family had moved to Co-op City, but I still took the long ride on the 12 bus to the driving school on 207^th Street. In July, I was ready. I took the test again in the all-too-familiar industrial area of Inwood, and this time I passed. Within a few months, I was the owner of a 10-year-old clunker, a Pontiac Tempest. And that was how I learned to drive in Inwood.

The Observer Tackles Brooklyn

From Brooklyn daily eagle
 
The New York Observer has focused its latest issue on Brooklyn. Its front page carries the New York Observer logo, but the words “New York” are crossed out and “Brooklyn” is written above it. The bottom of the page reads, “Heading for Brooklyn: 128 important, influential and interesting people to know now.”
In the spirit of the late Eagle columnist Dennis Holt, who critiqued every Manhattan-based publication when it focused on Brooklyn, I will do the same for this issue of the Observer.
“In many parts of the world,” the main article reads, “Brooklyn is shorthand for ‘cool,’ but shaggy beards aren’t the borough’s only exports. Its talent is all over TV, its tastemakers are dressing Hollywood, and its tech visionaries are redefining social media.”
The Observer is accurate in that its list of 128 influential Brooklynites represent the Brooklyn of today. You won’t find Barbra Streisand or even Jay-Z on that list. No mention of egg creams will be found.
Many of those on the list are people whom I heartily agree should be there. Among these are Steve Hindy and Garrett Oliver of the Brooklyn Brewery; Karen Brooks Hopkins of the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Andrew Kimball, former president of the Brooklyn Navy Yard; Dr. K.R. Sreenivasan of NYU Polytechnic; director Spike Lee; Brooklyn Bridge Park planner Regina Myer; and former Prospect Park Administrator Tupper Thomas.
These are all people who have solid accomplishments. The paper also has a section on politicians, headed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, although that doesn’t stop the Observer from bashing him in several editorials for being too pro-tenant.
The article begins to lose me when it starts talking about restaurants, culture and real estate. Two restaurateurs, Frank Castronovo and Frank Falcinelli, are praised for updating the old “retro red-sauce joints.” Traditional Italian restaurants of the type the Observer means are hardly dead—they’re alive and well in places like Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge. However, the Observer barely acknowledges that such neighborhoods exist.
Garth Risk Hallberg, a writer who sold a book to Knopf for $2 million last year, is profiled, but what about other authors, such as Paul Auster, who have been writing books for years? Jake Dobkin, the founder of the news blog Gothamist (of which I am a fan) is profiled, but why not local bloggers? There are any number of blogs, such as Pardon Me for Asking, Brokelyn and Sheepshead Bites, that have been doing consistently good work. 
The writers also seem to have little appreciation of the type of quirky charm that marks the borough’s traditional neighborhoods. At one point, the Observer writes of a zoning change that helped transform Greenpoint from a neighborhood dominated by “the Polish National Home and 99-cent stores.” I’ve been to Greenpoint, and to me, thrift stores and Polish bakeries are what make the neighborhood interesting.
Try as it might, the Observer, in its Brooklyn edition, can’t shake its bias favoring wealth, glitz, glamour and big-time success. A friend of mine says there are actually four Brooklyns: Trendy Brooklyn (stretching roughly from Williamsburg to Prospect Park), Immigrant Brooklyn (Sunset Park, much of Bensonhurst, Brighton Beach, etc.), African-American Brooklyn (Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, most of Flatbush, etc.) and Traditional Brooklyn (Midwood, Bay Ridge, Marine Park, etc.). To the Observer, only the first Brooklyn seems to be real.

A Healthy City Must Provide for All Its Citizens

From Brooklyn Daily Eagle
 
The fact that many Brooklyn neighborhoods have received such an influx of wealthy people that they rival such well-heeled Manhattan neighborhoods as Chelsea, Midtown and Greenwich Village is perhaps inevitable, and isn’t really news to people who have been following Brooklyn real estate.
In a recent Brooklyn Daily Eagle article, reporter Mary Frost summarized a report by New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer that revealed that the median apartment rent has risen by 75 percent since 2000, while real incomes have declined by 4.8 percent. By contrast, the report says, rents in other parts of the country only rose 44 percent during the same time period.
Frost’s article also mentioned that while real incomes are dropping, a number of Brooklyn neighborhoods are getting richer. She names Brooklyn Heights, Fort Greene, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Park Slope and Carroll Gardens as being “increasingly posh” neighborhoods. (I thought that Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope had been growing progressively more upscale since brownstone enthusiasts discovered them in the ‘60s and ‘70s.)
What’s behind this? Simply speaking, it’s the fact that New York is becoming more and more of a magnet for people from all over the world. It is perceived as a glamorous, exciting, dynamic city, with its financial district, film and television industries, high-tech companies, trendy restaurants and so on. When New York was down and out, in the 1970s and ‘80s, you didn’t see many ambitious young people from prestigious colleges coming to the city – indeed, they were leaving the city. Now, the game has changed.
Supply follows demand, and the expensive condos that are being constructed in some parts of Brooklyn wouldn’t be there if there weren’t a large number of successful professionals, businesspeople and artists who could afford to live there. The very successful have always had their own neighborhoods, and that doesn’t bother me any more than the fact that, say, Satmar Hasidim or Pakistani immigrants have theirs.
What does bother me is that the robust growth in upper-income housing isn’t being matched by middle-income and working-class housing. Neighborhoods like the one where I grew up in the Bronx, and where many readers doubtlessly grew up in Brooklyn, are increasingly a thing of the past.  
Yes, the city has made efforts to increase the amount of affordable housing.  But why should such an effort even be necessary? Back when the city had a healthier economy, builders put up middle-income apartment houses in Canarsie and Midwood as well as high-rises on Park Avenue – and made a profit from both.
Comptroller Stringer’s report, officially titled “The Growing Gap: New York City’s Housing Affordability Challenge,” contains more grim statistics, which were quoted by Frost in the Eagle. While the median home value has doubled, nearly 360,000 apartments renting for $400 to $1,000 per month disappeared from 2000 to 2012. Also, the number of New Yorkers living in shelters has risen from around 31,000 in 2002 to more than 52,000 today.
A city, to be viable, must contain a healthy mix of occupations and income groups. There’s nothing wrong with the Lincoln automobile, but do you think that Ford Motor Company would be viable if it only made Lincolns? I think not. The same is true for New York City.

Asthma Is a Serious Problem, But What Are the Causes?

From Brooklyn Daily eagle

Asthma is costing New York's Medicaid system more than half a billion dollars a year, according to a report by the state Comptroller’s Office quoted in an Associated Press article that has been posted on the Brooklyn Daily Eagle website.

The cost to the state is estimated to be $1.3 billion a year, the article continues. A large percentage of this cost is due to Medicaid expenditures. The only good news seems to be that asthma deaths have dropped by nearly 23 percent in the past decade.

There are several causes for asthma. One is hereditary. I have asthma, so did my mother and so did half the people in my mother’s family, to varying degrees.

Another is environmental. Asthma has been blamed on air quality, mold in old apartment buildings, roaches in the same buildings, lack of exercise and many other factors. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, New York County (Manhattan), Brooklyn and the Bronx all are in the Top 10 for cancer risks caused by airborne chemicals. The city is also one of the 25 in the country in ozone pollution.

On the other hand, a survey by then-Mayor Bloomberg’s administration last year found that air pollution in New York City has reached its lowest levels in 50 years, For example, the level of sulfur dioxide in the air dropped 69 percent since 2008, possibly lowered by new emissions regulations that phased out obsolete “heavy” fuels like Number 6 oil. The city’s air quality may still be higher than most of the country’s, but these figures show a step in the right direction.

As we’ve mentioned, roaches have also been mentioned as a cause of asthma. According to the American Lung Association, “Roaches produce substances, or allergens, that aggravate asthma and cause allergic reactions in people who are sensitive to those substances ...  These tiny particles can become airborne and contaminate the air in your home.”

Molds, also common in older buildings, are another asthma trigger. Molds send out tiny spores that float through the air. And of course, there’s also the danger of smoking and second-hand smoke.

While I don’t pretend to be a scientist, the problem with many of these explanations is that these conditions were often worse in the past. I know that air pollution is often horrific, but I find it difficult to believe than it’s any worse than it was during most of the 20^th century, when factories and incinerators within most apartment buildings released smoke into the atmosphere day and night.

 And smoking? The percentage of Americans who smoke has gone down from 45 percent in 1953 to a mere 22 percent in 2010. You can’t tell me that there’s more second-hand smoke today than there was in the days when people smoked in buses, at the office, in restaurants and even in doctors’ offices.

Perhaps the answer lies elsewhere. Several scientists have remarked on the links between obesity, which has been rising steadily since the mass introduction of high-fructose corn syrup, and asthma. Food additives are another possible cause. The Allergy and Asthma Foundation of America has identified several common additives that may cause reactions, including sulfites, aspartame, MSG, tartrazine (a common food dye used in desserts and beverages) and others.

Whatever the cause is, the problem of asthma is a serious one that deserves more study.

Give Former Journalists Policy-Making Positions

By Raanan Geberer

An old movie I once saw on TV focused on the relationship between a crusading lawyer and a crusading journalist. Soon, the lawyer is elected to office. But the journalist remains a journalist, seemingly forever consigned to his role on the sidelines.

Traditionally, journalism, unlike law, does not open the door to new careers. But this state of affairs is dramatically out of date. According to a survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the number of newspaper jobs declined from 52,600 in 2007 to 38,000 in 2012. And that doesn’t even take into account magazine jobs.

In addition, an article in the February-March edition of the American Journalism Review reported that of those journalists who left or were laid off from newspapers, only 6 percent found other newspaper jobs. “the rest are doing everything from public relations to teaching to driving a bus and clerking in a liquor store,” the article reads. And we doubt that it’s gotten better since then.

Since so much of what journalists do involves reporting on city, county, state and federal governments, why shouldn’t elected officials or government agencies hire more journalists in managerial or administrative positions? This sometimes happens, but the journalist usually finds himself or herself relegated to the “ghetto” of press secretary.

Why should a journalist or former journalist who has spent 30 years covering education and schools NOT be appointed to a decision-making position with the Department of Education? As it is, these positions are not always filled by education or teaching professionals. A veteran education reporter knows most of the people in important positions, knows the issues, knows the controversies and probably has some opinions on what should be done.  He or probably knows a lot more than some lawyer or MBA with little or no direct experience in the field.

The same thing goes for commissions that are appointed for a specific purpose – for example, to investigate the need to clean up a polluted body of water or to look into building a light rail line or to examine why a particular business district is losing money. If there is a journalist or former journalist who is an expert on the relevant topic, why not appoint him or her to the commission? Unfortunately, in most municipalities, the same people – elected officials, business leaders, attorneys, heads of community organizations – are appointed to these bodies over and over and over again. Why not give someone else a chance?

People go into journalism for a variety of reasons, but most will say that one of the reasons is that want to make a difference in their communities. Often, their decision to go into the field made in their teens or early twenties. For veteran, long-time journalists, there is no way they could have foreseen the decline in journalism jobs. Just because they now find themselves in a landscape where new positions in the field are few and far between, does that mean that the knowledge they have gained over the years should be thrown in the trash can? Definitely not! Many have already begun to reassess their roles during the past few years.

In general, society should invite older journalists and former journalists in from the sidelines to become active participants in the political and governmental processes. It can only benefit.

Inanimate Objects react to the snow

From Brooklyn Daily Eagle

By now, we’re all used to weather reports predicting heavy snowfall. This has happened maybe five or six times this winter, and there’s probably more to come. We know how people feel about the snow. But how do inanimate objects feel about it?

I have several pairs of shoes and several coats. One of the coats, a nice green coat, is perfect for normal winter weather, say, the 40s or 30s. I have a much heavier coat, but normally, I only wear it in extremely cold weather, in the teens or 20s.

This winter, however, is throwing my coat routine way off balance. Instead of wearing my extra-heavy coat two or three times, I’m wearing it more often than the other one. As for my third jacket, the one that’s appropriate for temperatures in the high 40s or 50s, I’m not wearing it at all.

And if this is the case for my coats, then, what of my shoes? I have two “regular” pairs of shoes, one pair of sneakers and one pair of heavy boots. Most of the time, I rotate the two pairs of shoes and wear the sneakers on weekends. During normal winters, I only wear the heavy boots maybe four or five days, when there’s a heavy snowstorm.

But this winter is different. This winter, I’m wearing the boots, which I think of as being for abnormal weather, more often than the shoes.

I haven’t even mentioned my pants. I have two pairs of heavy corduroy pants that I usually wear two or three times for the entire winter. This winter, I find myself wearing them a lot more than that.

It’s plain to see that my regular shoes, jackets and pants are jealous of my heavy-duty clothes. They’re accustomed to being worn on a regular basis. Being inside the house most of the time, they don’t know about the constant snowstorms, and they blame me for not wearing them enough. If I’m not careful, they’ll start a revolt, and I’ll come home to find my clothes scattered all over the bedroom floor.

Also in the bedroom, there’s a small toy polar bear that we’ve had for years. Usually we don’t pay much attention to it, except when the cat decides to play with it. But now, the little polar bear is looking forward to the time when real polar bears will come to New York if this weather continues, and it’s getting ready to join them. One day, we’ll come home and the toy bear will be gone.

If you think that’s bad, you should see what’s happening elsewhere! Over in the Museum of Natural History, the mock-ups of the wooly mammoths behind glass have come to life. For maybe 10,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age, they’ve felt out of place. Now’s their chance. The  snowstorms have awakened them, they think there’s a new Ice Age, and they’re beginning to move about in their display cases when no one’s looking. Soon, they believe, they’ll be roaming the Arctic tundra once again.

Clearly, the snowstorms are disrupting people, animals, stuffed animals, coats, shoes and everything else. It’s time to tell the weatherman, “Enough already!” Tell the scientists to bring back global warming. Anything’s better than this!
 

Jean Shepherd and `A Christmas Story'

 From Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec 2013

It’s Christmas time, and once again we’re treated to showings of the holiday favorite “A Christmas Story.” The film has become so much a classic that it’s been turned into a Broadway play, and the house in Cleveland that was used as the Parker family’s house has been turned into a museum. Characters like The Old Man, bully Scott Farkas and the hillbilly Bumpus family, not to mention inanimate objects like the leg lamp, have become part of American folklore.

Lost in the shuffle, however, has been the author and narrator of the story—Jean Shepherd. Many of the millions of people who have seen the film, perhaps most, are only familiar with him through “A Christmas Story.” And that’s sad, because as good as it is, it only represents a small portion of Shepherd’s work.

Jean Shepherd was born in the early 1920s and grew up in Hammond, Indiana (called “Hohman, Indiana” in the film). The late Eagle columnist Dennis Holt, who lived there during part of his youth, knew Shepherd and his friends, although they were older than him. While the film takes place around 1940, the real events upon which it is based took place about seven or eight years earlier.

Like most men of his generation, Shepherd served in the military during World War II (his Signal Corps stories have recently been collected as “Shep’s Army”). Afterward, he drifted into TV and radio, but he didn’t become famous until the mid-1950s, when he began broadcasting one of the first talk shows on WOR-AM. About half of his show was dedicated to tales of his Indiana childhood and his Army days. The rest consisted on his observations of the passing scene. He commented on advertising, popular music (he loved jazz, disliked rock), sexual mores, suburbia, all-night diners, beer and almost everything else. He avoided politics, but at times he “got serious,” as he did after JFK’s assassination and again after Martin Luther King’s assassination. In between it all, he played hokey Dixieland jazz songs, accompanying them on the kazoo and Jew’s harp, and recited old-time folk poetry like “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”

In one of his best-known pranks, he began to talk about a non-existent sexy book, “I, Libertine,” supposedly written in the 18^th century. He told his listeners to ask for it in bookstores. Eventually, the demand was so great that a publisher hired several authors (including Shepherd himself) to ghost-write the book.

Shepherd continued on, broadcasting every weekday at 10:15 p.m. and on Saturday nights from the Limelight in Greenwich Village. Thousands of young New Yorkers listened to Shep on their transistor radios under their pillows when their parents thought they were asleep. In 1977, he quit his radio gig. By this time, he was becoming known nationally. He wrote stories for Playboy and published several short-story collections. He also had a public television show, “Jean Shepherd’s America,” in which he visited different parts of the country. There was even an unsuccessful follow-up to “A Christmas Story,” called “My Summer Story.”

Shep died in 1999. After his death, his dark side was discovered: He had two children from an early marriage, neither of which he had seen for 30 years. In fact, he often denied that he had children at all. Still, I prefer to celebrate his contributions to American culture. Quoting Shep’s most famous catch phrase, I proclaim to everybody concerned, “Excelsior, you fatheads!”