Separated at Birth?

[Sal Randazzo]

Forgetaboutboating, Carter really started a nostalgia movement. I grew up on New York's lower east side, where I was surrounded by a variety of ethnic food from Chinatown, Little Italy, and Jewish deli like Katz's. It was really wonderful. There was this lilttle known, (no tourists,) local hole in the wall place on the bowery (The Bridge) that had fried Calmari and scungelli with hot sauce to die for. And does anyone remember the Garden Cafeteria - a Jewish stronghold that served hot tea in a glass - old world style?

[Rollergirl]

same thing


Came from a different culture, and took my girlfriend there to show my simpatico. Waiters annoyed me; I already had my own opinion.
I just did not get .

Now, 37 years later, I think I miss it. Almost. Want to hear about my cholesterol?
And just for your information, I don't care what my servers' name is.

What Ho, Ratners, wherever you are. Keep at it.

Bill

[Oswego John]

Greenwich Village isn't the same anymore. The Fulton Fish Market, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, is gone. It moved up to Hunt's Point after 170 years Supposed to be more conducive to business in the new spot.

Even the Bowery, the mecca for bums went upscale a notch or two. No more Sammy Fuchs and his Bowery Follies with the flora dora girls.

Chelsea is barely hanging in there. Now it's Soho and Tribeca.

I haven't seen a pushcart vendor in ages. Same for the sidewalk electronic sales on Canal Street. When I was in school, I bought most of my project components on the cheap from them. You had to develope the fine art of haggling over the price.

The old reporters and writers are but a memory. Who can forget Walter Winchell, Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner and Ed Sullivan, who later became emcee of the Sunday night variety show, "The Show Of Shows"

Somehow, we'll survive, but the memories linger on.

Watch out for the blizzard coming up the east coast Saturday

Stay warm,
O J

[Neil Gordon]

Even the Bowery, ...

The same thing is happening there that is happening in Florida with marinas. Everything goes upscale and the land becomes worth more. The neighborhood regulars have to move on.

[Carter Brey]

You never know about these threads. What a beautiful collection of memories and associations.

I remember McSorley's back when it didn't yet have a ladies' room. It's still there, and the sawdust is still on the floor.

Katz' is still thriving. I took my 10-year-old son there a few months ago. Send a salami to your boy in the Awmy. You have to speak the local dialect to get it to rhyme. It took me a while to figure that out with my white-shoe Westchester WASP accent.

I remember when Yorkville, on the Upper East Side, was all German. It was a hotbed of spies during the war. WW II, that is. In a poignant juxtaposition, until a couple of decades ago, on the Upper West Side, directly west about a mile away, you had places like Eclair, the pastry shop where Jewish intellectuals and musicians, arrived from Europe in the 1930's and 1940's, would gather and read the newspapers from their home towns, tacked to the wall, a babel of German, Hungarian, Polish. Some of them didn't roll up the sleeves of their shirts even in hot weather. We knew they had strings of blue numbers tatooed on their arms, spidery European numerals with broken 4's and crossbar 7's. Most of them are gone, now, as is Eclair. It's a nail salon or a sushi bar, now.

My neighborhood is constantly evolving, a reminder that New York is unconcerned with its own coin of nostalgia; it's great precisely because of its unsentimental and brutal need to grow and absorb. The new waves of the unwashed are the Koreans who took over the fruit and vegetable stores and dry cleaning establishments; the Pakistanis who man the news kiosks; the Indians who drive the cabs; the post-Glasnost Russians who serve you pizza and ask it you want "selet" with that. The man who knew all about Trollope at Endicott Books now works at the information desk at Barnes & Noble. We adjust and go on.

Barney Greengrass? His store still serves matzoh ball soup and lox up on 87th street to its clientele of elderly ladies in furs and fixed incomes, a lovingly maintained anachronism, just like the Volvo.

Carter

[/i]

[Warren Kaplan]

Warren,
Is Isaac Gellis still on Delancy Street (or was it Essex St.)? My father was their Maryland/DC/Virginia distributor for 45 years. I used to visit their plant every few years, with my dad & his partner.

Every best wish,
Mitchell Bober
Sunny Annapolis (where you can't get decent heartburn from lunch),MD

Mitch.

Essex Street! Definitely Essex Street!

I bet your dad brought home plenty of samples!!! Lucky you!!

[Len]

i recall western north carolina when barns painted with "Jesus Saves" were more common than strip malls, when you were welcomed to the outer banks with a sign that read "welcome to Klu Klux Klan Country". Some shocker for a boy from the Bronx. I moved to Idaho were the sheep clogging the streets stopped the traffic before they invested in stop lights. A good half sour pickle is still a deligt. Some things don't change.

[Efrost]

Ok, With you all getting my mouth watering for tastes of my youth (you say appetizing around here and people think your talking about canapes), being born in Brooklyn, but raised on the Island, with all my family, Bubbe and Zedde, living on Ave W, I have a question.

My senior in college daughter is heading to the city in two weeks and has asked me for a good deli near Broadway/Times Square?

Reccomendations?

[Sal Randazzo]

She can't go wrong with the Carnegie Deli on 7th ave between 54th and 55th streets. The pastrami is outstanding - But be forewarned, the sandwhiches are huge!

[Oswego John]

Hi Leonard

You are correct, sir. No one area has a lock on nostalgia and fond memories. I thought that you might touch on them, but because you didn't, I'll mention the Burma Shave quatrains. There were hundreds of variations of them along the highways.

Since today, Sunday, is traditionally slow on the board, and since the east coast is getting clobbered with a nor'east blizzard, maybe it would be a good time to spin some yarns about boating related travels to strange places many years ago. So let me set the stage.

In the late 1940s, WW11 was over. Tens of thousands of service people were being mustered out and jobs were a little scarce. Some older members of my family began delivering snowbird's yachts to Florida in the fall, and bringing them up in the spring

My job was to drive my '38 V8 Ford down to Florida and bring them home after a delivery and to do the reverse trip in the spring. One has to rmember that air transportation, as we know it now, was in it's infancy. Forget about rail transportation. If you were lucky enough to get tickets, the pittance of money that we made then would barely pay for the tickets.Gas was about 25 cents a gallon.

Another thing worth mentioning was in that era, there ws no such things as Interstates or super highways. You drove through every town and obeyed every traffic light and sign. When I drove solo, I tried different routes to see what the new (to me) countryside was like. When my brothers were with me, they wanted the shortest, quickest route to the destination.

Sometimes I would take route US 1 There was another route along the seaside called The Ocean Highway. Farther down there were routes 1A and A1A, also The Dixie Highway in Florida. There was no bridge-tunnel across the Chesapeake. You took the Kiptopeke ferry from Cape Charles to Norfolk. A ferry took me across the Delaware River from Lambertville, NJ to New Hope, Pa.

I drove in semi fear every mile of the trip. I had heard of so many horror stories of troopers hiding behind billboards and pulling northerners over with threats of high fines, or worse. Especially if you had New York plates on your vehicle, like I did. Northerners heading to Florida were supposed to have beaucoup bucks with them. (Yeah, right)

I often gave decent looking hitchhikers a ride, just for the company they afforded. One early morning at sunrise, just outside of Rocky Mount, NC, I spotted a dumptruck with men sitting in the rear, which was pulling a trailer, much like a horse trailer. I had never seen anything like that before. When I asked my rider if he knew what it was, he told me to give it plenty of clearance, that it was a chain gang going to work. (Cool Hand Luke)

Another time, when headed south, pulling into Myrtle Beach I noticed something going on up ahead. Traffic was diverted to curbside, a Ku Klux Klan parde was going down Main St. My heart was up in my throat. I had never seen anything like this before. I was certain that every one of the hooded marchers was looking atraight at me.

While growing up as a boy, I had no vague idea what discrimination meant. It was something that I wasn't aware of, plain and simple. That's how it was during depression days. I had read some stories about it but had never had the occasion to witness it first hand.

Till my dying day, I will never forget something that imprinted an indelible scar on my soul. It was a warm day when I pulled up alongside an empty Miami railroad depot, Strange, in my mind I had the mental illusion that Miami was a large metropolis, somthing like New York. I stepped over the single set of tracks and went into the depot to use the restroom. I was shocked to see signs designating "White Men Only." There was a separate facility for negroes. The same applied to the water fountains. It was on that day that I fully realized the full meaning of what discrimination was. It was all new to this kid from the north.

That's some nostalgia that I will take to my grave.

O J
PS: I'll be working at the Syracuse Boat Show this week.