It’s been fifty years since the Dodgers left Brooklyn for the sunny skies of Los Angeles. What they left in their wake were several twenty story apartment buildings filled with people who migrated to Brooklyn because it was a shipping and manufacturing centre. As soon as Ebbets Field Houses were completed all the manufacturing jobs that had made Brooklyn a promised land were gone just like the beloved baseball team. The jobs had left with the ballclub but the people remained.
Two score and four years after JACKIE ROBINSON first graced Crown Heights with his lionheart there was still an electricity on Franklin Avenue. The excitement wasn’t for hardball though, but for hard white cocaine. In the early 1990’s Brooklyn was just like any former manufacturing metropolis that had been forsaken by their corporate stewards. Crack was so pervasive in this neighborhood that it completely eroded what had been a progressively middle-class aspiring community.
Everything was for cheap back then. Drugs and lives. KENNY and I used to link with his homey GARY from Ebbets Houses. G knew all the gates that were in the walk-up tenements that lined Union Street off of Franklin Avenue. We would all go in for several dubsacks and spend the night walking through the streets or riding the Franklin Avenue shuttle blazing el after el back to back. Even on cold winter nights you could find us trooping from St. John’s and F.A. to Ebbets and then into Manhattan.
Since the shuttering of nightclubs like The Fever, Union Square, and then the Latin Quarter there wasn’t anywhere to go and party with your ‘hood crew. There was a downtown scene that hosted Hip-Hop loft parties but you had to have an industry connect to find those popoffs. For a regular weekend we would all just go to the ‘Deuce’. This was the urban experience’s excuse for being a mall rat. New York City hadn’t been totally Disney-fied yet and 42nd Street had become a virtual wasteland. There weren’t enough active theaters to house all the aimless teenagers that congregated in and around Times Square.
Back then you had to have your ski jacket game on some super official rugged armageddon ish. KENNY and I had these ridiculous Gore-Tex jackets by Wilderness Experience. Top that off with a Wigwam knit cap or some Rossignol earwarmers. Guess? was still the jeans wear and Timberland was the mandatory minimum for the concrete canyons. This was our uniform that signified not just our style, but our tribe. Add a backpack to that set if you were still in a boosting New York state of mind.
My mind just flashed back as I took the subway home tonight. I transferred to the downtown #2 train at Times Square and I saw the crush of kids making their way up to 42nd Street. The energy of the city remains vibrant while the desperation of hardcore drug addiction has ebbed to only the poorest sections of the city like Hunts Point and East New York. As I exited the subway at Franklin Avenue I looked down the hill towards Ebbets Field. Not too much has changed when you look at the building facades but this is the NEW post-crack, post-riots, post-GIULIANI Crown Heights.
You just have to peel away the shiny new veneer. The old dread isn’t on St. John’s and F.A. any longer. There’s a new building going up on Eastern Parkway. G still rests in Ebbets Houses though. I will give him a ring tonight to see if he wants to take a walk around. Maybe put something in the atmosphere in remembrance of KENNY. In remembrance of yesterday.
