CHANGE HERE FOR MY CHILDHOOD

Saturday along with our forage into the heart of Brooklyn Heights, we also visited the NYC Transit Museum, that personally speaking as I always do, slammed me back into my childhood, growing up in the Bushwick and Bed-Sty sections of Brooklyn.

It seems the transit system trains and buses were so much a part of my childhood. More massive, lumbering and swaying back and forth, lights flickering or electrical sparks exploding in silence with generators pounding out a steady beat and a hiss that seemed to stop the noise, while they idled in the station, are all things I grew up with.

My Dad would take the subway to Canal Street every morning to go to work, with his fedora and winged tip brown shoes, returning at night with the NY Journal American folded under his arm as he climbed the steps after a long ride on the IND from Canal, filled with stories about Harry and Joe The Fin as we sat down to dinner.

The Elevated BMT would slide by my neighborhood at the end of Hull Street, and every once in a while I would look at the green and black industrial looking passenger freight cars, since that is what they were, and think about my Dad if he was working. I often went down to Fulton Street and waited for him to come home from the “City” as Manhattan was called (even though I lived in the “city” in Brooklyn.)

My Mom would take my on the trolley than ran along Stone Avenue until service was discontinued in the early 1950’s, and I remember how it resembled a subway car.

But the funniest recollection I had last Saturday was of my Mom’s old Olympia Typewriter, it was a portable non-electric, and when she typed it, I would watch it come down the track and imagine it was the “A Train” pulling into the station platform from the front. I must admit it is strange imagery, but I was just a kid of maybe 4 or 5 years old.

Then there was the smells of the old subway stations, with their tiled walls and dark grey floors, dark track beds and green or red lights that waited for the next incoming train to arrive. It seemed everyone dressed up in those days when they went somewhere, even to the doctor’s office, ladies in their dresses and hose, hats with flowers and laced covers and men in their fedoras and wingtip shoes, all milling about the station platform, doing a crossword puzzle, reading the newspaper or passing through the green painted turnstiles with thick wooden sections that held one person after another who deposited his nickel, or people exiting the station through the prison like bars of the revolving gates.