Some nights  I can’t fall asleep – I toss about in the sea of covers and dogs, twist legs and toes, hands overhead or under, but can never seem to relax. When that happens, I just lay back and tell myself stories . They can be simple – like fixing myself a cup of tea, detailing the sounds of the cabinet door opening and closing, the tearing of the tea pocket, the hiss and splash of the water in the cup. But the other night I found myself telling a story about the neighborhood where I grew up, my first seven years, in the apartment buildings that lined a street in Brooklyn just a half block away from the elevated lines of the subway.

It was a four story building – at least we lived on the fourth floor and I always went down the stairs, never up. Each floor had a small, gritty tile landing, yellowing brown walls, with an exposed flourescent lamp on the ceiling. I remembered bouncing a ball too hard and it rebounded up into the glass, shattering it with a pop. My mother came out, dragged me back into the apartment, and called my father who came home to put in a new bulb before the landlord found out.

Our apartment may have been small but so was I – my world appeared larger to me than it really was. The front door opened into the kitchen, with a table on one wall, the gas oven in the corner across the room, a deep cast iron sink next to the window that opened out onto the courtyard and the clotheslines that tethered to each of the surrounding buildings. My mother would sometimes do her wash in that sink, then lean out the window, clothespin shirts and underwear one by one to the gray line, while I listened to the squeak of the pulley wheel as she fed the line out to dry them all in the sun.

The kitchen opened into the living room with one small bedroom for my sister on one wall, my parents’ bedroom on the other. I slept in the living room on a fold out couch with my older brother – at least until I turned four when he left after he married. At night I would stare out from the edge of that foldout bed into the lit  kitchen where I would see my father reading the late edition of the news, leaning forward with his dark arms folded across each other on the table, a Pall Mall burning down in the ashtray.

The summers were hot and air conditioning was something other people had. All the heavy windows in the stairway landings were opened to let a breeze into the building, doors on apartments were left open, and wooden double-hung windows slid up so that the air could move thru the apartment  floor. If the heat was keeping me awake, my parents would put some bedding out onto the fire escape and I would lay there until I finally fell asleep. Staring up into the sky between the buildings, thru the iron railings, I could see every star while I listened to the sounds of the street echo their way up thru the alleyways of the surrounding apartments, and the ticking of the subway line passing on the tracks…

[The above photo was in a reminiscence posted by Steven Lasky, founder of The Museum of Family History. The address of the building above is 520 Williams Avenue - the building I was born in was just across Livonia Avenue at 444 Williams Avenue. On the buildings in the photo, the fire escapes were mounted to the front street side. On my block, they were mounted to the backs of the buildings. And in the lower left hand of the photo, you can see a seltzer delivery truck - this may very well have been my grandfather's...except family legend has it there were no doors on the driver's or passenger's side...]

Advertisement