Marian, glad you liked my Sylvia Plath factoid. It seemed that Mother Aurelia just HAD to believe her daughter was a certain way : loving, kind, a devoted mother … a Cooper Union humanities prof of mine, Anne Griffin, a one-time classmate of Ali McGraw’s, (there’s another factoid !) thought Sylvia Plath was very grasping, manipulative … “By 1957, I MUST HAVE a cottage in Devon !” …. who knows, may she rest in peace …
Still haven’t seen Gwyneth Paltrow film, “Sylvia”, though I have seen “Mona Lisa Smile” ….
Typical wild Catholic school girl ? Yes, I suppose I’m still a rebellious 17-year-old Catholic schoolBOY in my going on 52-year-old head … Mick Jagger circa summer 1972 USA, in the skin-tight silver jumpsuit, the frontal zipper open down to the top of the pubis … went to an amateur talent show at NYU Newman center right before Christmas, 1976 … the friend whom I went with said, you’ll love it, it’s Catholic students, so it’ll be pretty dirty …. I loved the way they did “Tits And Ass” from “Chorus Line” … the way the girls on stage pinched their nipples and wowed their mouths at the audience …
Double standard … when the Stones do “Little T and A” they’re a menace to society, but “Chorus Line” is that heartwarming Bway musical …. bring the family !
I love, I love, I love, your NBC Living Color Christmas 1960 photo !!!!! You could have been me in 1961 with …..
MOON BASE … BY MARX ! COMES COMPLETE EXCEPT FOR THE GROUND YOU PUT IT ON !!!! Or was that G I Joe ?
Got me ready to appreciate Kubrick’s “2001” in fall 1970, if nothing else. I wonder if later editions of Moon Base By Marx included a black monolith …. (cue Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Requiem” on the soundtrack):
phillysantella, you’re welcome to the TZ update. There’s a lot of garbage on the IMDb, but mixed in with it is lots of good, intelligent writing. Patience is required to scan and sift, to find the good stuff, but it’s usually worthwhile.
Thanks for your answers on F K Lane and ENY Voc High. My dad’s sister attended the same F K Lane you did (albeit in 1943-47). My dad attended the ENY Voc High near Bway Junction, Atlantic and ENY and Van Sinderen Aves, ENY LIRR station, Atlantic Avenue Canarsie Line and Fulton St. el station, a decade earlier, 1933-1937.
I’m very familiar with where Conduit Blvd takes off from Atlantic Avenue. My Brooklyn USGS quad sheet shows “Vocational High School” just south of there, a few blocks east of St. Rita’s.
I am even more familiar with the 3-way intersection of Conduit Blvd and Liberty and Euclid Avenues, the old fire house on Liberty just west of there. That’s where the old Fulton Street El turned onto Liberty Avenue, but that was before my time. It had been gone for 11 years by the time I began to become familiar with that intersection in 1967.
Marian, thanks for posting the links to your weblogs. You’re quite the groovy chick, if I may say so. Also quite the wit … “Cyberia”, indeed ! I just read some of your 101 factoids, and came away feeling tired. I won’t try and compete with you, but I have a few of my own ….
“Spoke to Sylvia Plath’s mother about Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) in late May, 1977”
You seem like a goer, a doer, a mover and a shaker …. the very opposite of a cruddy old geezer who needs to get a life, live in the present, and do more than try and relive or recapture the past.
I most associate “oil = Earl” with Archie Bunker, but an older man who interviewed me for a NYC job in May 1979 first said “cunsoined”, then corrected himself, saying “concerned”.
I recall John Laroquette as Dan Fielding on “Night Court” in mid-April 1988, joking about The Duke Of Oil, The Wizard Of Ooze …
The kids who played ball on my old Ridgewood block seemed to spend more time arguing about the balls they’d just hit (was it a triple or a foul ?) than they did playing. Good practice for later life as white collar professionals in our over-litigous bureaucracy.
Never played hit the penny.
Was more obsessed with outer space sci fi than with Westerns as a kid on my block. The Space Angel, Prof. Mace. Wonderful how a bike with training wheels could be a starship, and a sidewalk encrusted with endless globs of dirt-blackened, discarded chewing gum could be a densely-crowded star field in optical reverse ….
That especially big glob on the crack is Delta Geminorum ….
Ed, that’s great news ! Your teacher avoided the cliche of being a bitter, middle-aged homosexual, mourning his loss of youth and good looks, preying on innocent and unsuspecting teenage boys ….
Although, in the case of me and my classmates, beginning sixth grade in the fall of 1966, with hormones beginning to rage then, a great deal was both suspected and imagined.
I was going to complain about you not commending me on MY creative writing. Then I took another look at what I had written, and saw I was merely echoing Clive Barker, and trying to apply my favorite horror stories of his to your high school situation.
Ah yes : Single Room Occupancy. A problem on the Upper West Side of Manhattan : mental patients turned out of hospitals for lack of room, “living” (really merely existing) in SRO’s, or, worse yet, on the street ….
OK, downtown Jamaica wasn’t really your neighborhood, yet you wrote about its decline so eloquently.
Merrick Avenue or Boulevard ?
Warren, I’m glad to read that the chicken chow mein sandwich is alive and well at the original Nathan’s at Coney Island.
Thank YOU, Jack Tomai (poetic !) and saps (suspenseful).
saps, your story almost reads like an old EC horror comics tale, and has some of the tinge of those deliberately, exaggeratedly melodramatic lobby cards !
It also reminds me a bit of “Human Remains”, a Clive Barker “books of blood” story, one of several of them in which the sleazy sex-crime-drugs underbelly of a big city (in this case, a young male prostitute named Gavin, and his client, a middle-aged fancier of Roman Britain) is a front for a supernatural, or super-normal, horror that is infinitely worse.
Two other stories of his, even more apropos to this theater site, would be “Son Of Celluloid”, and “Sex, Death and Starshine”, the ultimate haunted theater story.
So, Ed, perhaps your former English teacher was not only a junkie and a sexual pervert, but perhaps had also managed to open a door into hell, or the nether-world of the dead, into which yet another unsuspecting young innocent ….
Thanks, Ed Solero, for posting these detailed Jamaica memories of your youth. You’ve mentioned many interesting details of some rapidly changing conditions of your old home neighborhood.
Re : your former English teacher : I’m amazed that he also held on to his life, let alone his job as a teacher of impressionable youth ! May I ask what his personal problems were, and how did they, and the sleaze that he lived in, spill over to you and your classmates ?
SRO = Servicemen’s Relief Organization ? Was the hotel pre-WW I or II ?
You’re about a decade to a decade and a half before me timewise in terms of hanging out in Williamsburg and Greenpoint as a teen and young adult. Sorry, I didn’t know any of the people you’ve mentioned. Breakfast and lunch were probably served at Joe’s Busy Corner, along with lots of great coffee. It was on Driggs and North 7th, not Bedford.
Jack Tomai, good to read you back on this site again !
I remember those Woolworth’s chicken chow mein sandwiches well, but in Ridgewood, Queens, not Jamaica. My family and I liked them so much that we made our own at home, from take-out chicken chow mein, and buns from the grocery store.
I also remember eating at A & S on Fulton St. in downtown Brooklyn, 1962-66, both the cafeteria in the basement, and the fancier restaurant on the 4th floor. When I had the shrimp creole at the restaurant, I thought I was in heaven !
Interesting that the Astoria, slightly larger than the RKO Madison, was multiplexed, but, even so, could not survive as such, and ended up being a store, anyway. Perhaps that also would have happened to the Madison had it been multiplexed. As it was, the Madison avoided the “intermediate” state of being multiplexed, and, for better or worse (I would think most of us would say the latter)went “directly” to becoming a store.
It did, Ed. I read about it earlier today on that very same IMDb page. I was also reminded of the camp cult classic, “Queen Of Outer Space”, which takes place on Venus.
Anniegirl, I remember the Meserole quite fondly but not Van Dolan’s. What years did you hang out there ? My only high school “hangout” was a few afternoons over burgers and cokes at Joe’s Busy Corner at Driggs and North 7th, near the Canarsie Line subway station and my high school. St. Francis Prep (186 North 6th Street), late 1972, early 1973.
Thanks, I never knew that. It makes sense, more so than Western Easter, the date of which is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. Next Easter falling on MArch 23 is as about as early as Western Easter can get.
Would you be so kind as to give me your private e-mail address so we can continue our most interesting correspondence privately ? Thanks.
Perfect predecessor to “Three Stooges In Orbit”. I think my favorite bit was when they return to Earth and their rocket accidentally goes through the Holland Tunnel !
No, anniegirl, I don’t remember the Republic. I’ve been in movie theaters in Greenpoint but not Williamsburg. Is there a page for it on this site ? If not, perhaps you’d like to start one.
Thanks for the details of Baerenklau Oil Co. There was a homeownser’s insurance bill I paid for my parents in person near Ridgewood Savings Bank, to save a stamp, before I sold our Ridgewood house at the end of May 1999.
Thank you also for the details of your Holy Trinity Orthodox Church. I have known its green copper onion domes and distinctive crosses as an ENY landmark all my life ! I feel privileged to have finally met someone who has been inside and was a member of its congregation. Was it a Russian Orthodox church ?
Thanks, Ed Solero, for all this information on the Three Stooges. I’m glad you remember Officer Joe Bolton on WPIX. I vaguely remember Eugene McCarthy as either the Grand Marshal or WPIX host of the NYC St. Patrick’s Day parade. Not to be confused with the US senator and 1968 Democratic presidential candidate aspirant of the same name.
Ed, I remember the 8th Street Playhouse. Andy Warhol’s “Flesh For Frankenstein” in the early 1980’s ? I remember Andy Warhol’s “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” from fall 1974, their forte being gross-out sound effects of loose internal organs squishing around inside abdominal cavities.
My sharpest memory of the early 1980’s 3-d craze was a lobby display in a Times Square movie house for “Friday The 13th Part III in 3-D” to debut on Friday August 13th 1982. That was on Sunday July 4 1982, when three friends of mine and I had gone to see “Star Trek II : The Wrath Of Khan”.
I suppose the thrill of that was supposed to be the skewers coming out the other side and the flying severed heads appeared to be coming right at you.
The first “Friday The 13th” film debuted on Friday June 13 1980.
Marian, glad you liked my Sylvia Plath factoid. It seemed that Mother Aurelia just HAD to believe her daughter was a certain way : loving, kind, a devoted mother … a Cooper Union humanities prof of mine, Anne Griffin, a one-time classmate of Ali McGraw’s, (there’s another factoid !) thought Sylvia Plath was very grasping, manipulative … “By 1957, I MUST HAVE a cottage in Devon !” …. who knows, may she rest in peace …
Still haven’t seen Gwyneth Paltrow film, “Sylvia”, though I have seen “Mona Lisa Smile” ….
Typical wild Catholic school girl ? Yes, I suppose I’m still a rebellious 17-year-old Catholic schoolBOY in my going on 52-year-old head … Mick Jagger circa summer 1972 USA, in the skin-tight silver jumpsuit, the frontal zipper open down to the top of the pubis … went to an amateur talent show at NYU Newman center right before Christmas, 1976 … the friend whom I went with said, you’ll love it, it’s Catholic students, so it’ll be pretty dirty …. I loved the way they did “Tits And Ass” from “Chorus Line” … the way the girls on stage pinched their nipples and wowed their mouths at the audience …
Double standard … when the Stones do “Little T and A” they’re a menace to society, but “Chorus Line” is that heartwarming Bway musical …. bring the family !
I love, I love, I love, your NBC Living Color Christmas 1960 photo !!!!! You could have been me in 1961 with …..
MOON BASE … BY MARX ! COMES COMPLETE EXCEPT FOR THE GROUND YOU PUT IT ON !!!! Or was that G I Joe ?
Got me ready to appreciate Kubrick’s “2001” in fall 1970, if nothing else. I wonder if later editions of Moon Base By Marx included a black monolith …. (cue Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Requiem” on the soundtrack):
“EEEEEeeeeee EEEEE eeee EE eeeee ….”
phillysantella, you’re welcome to the TZ update. There’s a lot of garbage on the IMDb, but mixed in with it is lots of good, intelligent writing. Patience is required to scan and sift, to find the good stuff, but it’s usually worthwhile.
Thanks for your answers on F K Lane and ENY Voc High. My dad’s sister attended the same F K Lane you did (albeit in 1943-47). My dad attended the ENY Voc High near Bway Junction, Atlantic and ENY and Van Sinderen Aves, ENY LIRR station, Atlantic Avenue Canarsie Line and Fulton St. el station, a decade earlier, 1933-1937.
I’m very familiar with where Conduit Blvd takes off from Atlantic Avenue. My Brooklyn USGS quad sheet shows “Vocational High School” just south of there, a few blocks east of St. Rita’s.
I am even more familiar with the 3-way intersection of Conduit Blvd and Liberty and Euclid Avenues, the old fire house on Liberty just west of there. That’s where the old Fulton Street El turned onto Liberty Avenue, but that was before my time. It had been gone for 11 years by the time I began to become familiar with that intersection in 1967.
Welcome, Mopella !
Marian, thanks for posting the links to your weblogs. You’re quite the groovy chick, if I may say so. Also quite the wit … “Cyberia”, indeed ! I just read some of your 101 factoids, and came away feeling tired. I won’t try and compete with you, but I have a few of my own ….
“Spoke to Sylvia Plath’s mother about Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) in late May, 1977”
You seem like a goer, a doer, a mover and a shaker …. the very opposite of a cruddy old geezer who needs to get a life, live in the present, and do more than try and relive or recapture the past.
I most associate “oil = Earl” with Archie Bunker, but an older man who interviewed me for a NYC job in May 1979 first said “cunsoined”, then corrected himself, saying “concerned”.
I recall John Laroquette as Dan Fielding on “Night Court” in mid-April 1988, joking about The Duke Of Oil, The Wizard Of Ooze …
The kids who played ball on my old Ridgewood block seemed to spend more time arguing about the balls they’d just hit (was it a triple or a foul ?) than they did playing. Good practice for later life as white collar professionals in our over-litigous bureaucracy.
Never played hit the penny.
Was more obsessed with outer space sci fi than with Westerns as a kid on my block. The Space Angel, Prof. Mace. Wonderful how a bike with training wheels could be a starship, and a sidewalk encrusted with endless globs of dirt-blackened, discarded chewing gum could be a densely-crowded star field in optical reverse ….
That especially big glob on the crack is Delta Geminorum ….
Ed, that’s great news ! Your teacher avoided the cliche of being a bitter, middle-aged homosexual, mourning his loss of youth and good looks, preying on innocent and unsuspecting teenage boys ….
Although, in the case of me and my classmates, beginning sixth grade in the fall of 1966, with hormones beginning to rage then, a great deal was both suspected and imagined.
I was going to complain about you not commending me on MY creative writing. Then I took another look at what I had written, and saw I was merely echoing Clive Barker, and trying to apply my favorite horror stories of his to your high school situation.
Ah yes : Single Room Occupancy. A problem on the Upper West Side of Manhattan : mental patients turned out of hospitals for lack of room, “living” (really merely existing) in SRO’s, or, worse yet, on the street ….
OK, downtown Jamaica wasn’t really your neighborhood, yet you wrote about its decline so eloquently.
Merrick Avenue or Boulevard ?
Warren, I’m glad to read that the chicken chow mein sandwich is alive and well at the original Nathan’s at Coney Island.
Thank YOU, Jack Tomai (poetic !) and saps (suspenseful).
saps, your story almost reads like an old EC horror comics tale, and has some of the tinge of those deliberately, exaggeratedly melodramatic lobby cards !
It also reminds me a bit of “Human Remains”, a Clive Barker “books of blood” story, one of several of them in which the sleazy sex-crime-drugs underbelly of a big city (in this case, a young male prostitute named Gavin, and his client, a middle-aged fancier of Roman Britain) is a front for a supernatural, or super-normal, horror that is infinitely worse.
Two other stories of his, even more apropos to this theater site, would be “Son Of Celluloid”, and “Sex, Death and Starshine”, the ultimate haunted theater story.
So, Ed, perhaps your former English teacher was not only a junkie and a sexual pervert, but perhaps had also managed to open a door into hell, or the nether-world of the dead, into which yet another unsuspecting young innocent ….
Thanks, Ed Solero, for posting these detailed Jamaica memories of your youth. You’ve mentioned many interesting details of some rapidly changing conditions of your old home neighborhood.
Re : your former English teacher : I’m amazed that he also held on to his life, let alone his job as a teacher of impressionable youth ! May I ask what his personal problems were, and how did they, and the sleaze that he lived in, spill over to you and your classmates ?
SRO = Servicemen’s Relief Organization ? Was the hotel pre-WW I or II ?
As well as Anniegirl, of course.
Panzer65, I don’t know. Perhaps Warren and Lost Memory can be of some help.
Thanks, Bway.
Dear Anniegirl :
You’re about a decade to a decade and a half before me timewise in terms of hanging out in Williamsburg and Greenpoint as a teen and young adult. Sorry, I didn’t know any of the people you’ve mentioned. Breakfast and lunch were probably served at Joe’s Busy Corner, along with lots of great coffee. It was on Driggs and North 7th, not Bedford.
PKoch
Jack Tomai, good to read you back on this site again !
I remember those Woolworth’s chicken chow mein sandwiches well, but in Ridgewood, Queens, not Jamaica. My family and I liked them so much that we made our own at home, from take-out chicken chow mein, and buns from the grocery store.
I also remember eating at A & S on Fulton St. in downtown Brooklyn, 1962-66, both the cafeteria in the basement, and the fancier restaurant on the 4th floor. When I had the shrimp creole at the restaurant, I thought I was in heaven !
Interesting that the Astoria, slightly larger than the RKO Madison, was multiplexed, but, even so, could not survive as such, and ended up being a store, anyway. Perhaps that also would have happened to the Madison had it been multiplexed. As it was, the Madison avoided the “intermediate” state of being multiplexed, and, for better or worse (I would think most of us would say the latter)went “directly” to becoming a store.
Thanks, Bway. Where’s the entrance to the drug store, if not under the marquee ?
Anything left of the theater inside ?
Excuse me, Ed, it MAY have, in the A & C film. I’m not sure !
“CHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICK !!!!!!”
It did, Ed. I read about it earlier today on that very same IMDb page. I was also reminded of the camp cult classic, “Queen Of Outer Space”, which takes place on Venus.
Bochino !
Thanks, Ed Solero. Did you graduated from Jamaica High School in June 1983 ?
Thank you, Muzer.
PKoch
Anniegirl, I remember the Meserole quite fondly but not Van Dolan’s. What years did you hang out there ? My only high school “hangout” was a few afternoons over burgers and cokes at Joe’s Busy Corner at Driggs and North 7th, near the Canarsie Line subway station and my high school. St. Francis Prep (186 North 6th Street), late 1972, early 1973.
Muzer,
Thanks, I never knew that. It makes sense, more so than Western Easter, the date of which is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. Next Easter falling on MArch 23 is as about as early as Western Easter can get.
Would you be so kind as to give me your private e-mail address so we can continue our most interesting correspondence privately ? Thanks.
PKoch
Link to IMDb page for 1959’s “Have Rocket Will Travel” :
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052880/usercomments
Perfect predecessor to “Three Stooges In Orbit”. I think my favorite bit was when they return to Earth and their rocket accidentally goes through the Holland Tunnel !
Muzer,
Thanks. Have you been back to Holy Trinity since you moved to Long Island ?
“Greek Easter”, eleven days later than “Western” Easter, because the Patriarch of Constantinople never accepted the Gregorian Calendar ?
PKoch
No, anniegirl, I don’t remember the Republic. I’ve been in movie theaters in Greenpoint but not Williamsburg. Is there a page for it on this site ? If not, perhaps you’d like to start one.
Muzer :
Thanks for the details of Baerenklau Oil Co. There was a homeownser’s insurance bill I paid for my parents in person near Ridgewood Savings Bank, to save a stamp, before I sold our Ridgewood house at the end of May 1999.
Thank you also for the details of your Holy Trinity Orthodox Church. I have known its green copper onion domes and distinctive crosses as an ENY landmark all my life ! I feel privileged to have finally met someone who has been inside and was a member of its congregation. Was it a Russian Orthodox church ?
PKoch
Thanks, mp775. That salmon-pink GM Fishbowl bus looks like it’s seen better days !
Thanks, Ed Solero, for all this information on the Three Stooges. I’m glad you remember Officer Joe Bolton on WPIX. I vaguely remember Eugene McCarthy as either the Grand Marshal or WPIX host of the NYC St. Patrick’s Day parade. Not to be confused with the US senator and 1968 Democratic presidential candidate aspirant of the same name.
Ed, I remember the 8th Street Playhouse. Andy Warhol’s “Flesh For Frankenstein” in the early 1980’s ? I remember Andy Warhol’s “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” from fall 1974, their forte being gross-out sound effects of loose internal organs squishing around inside abdominal cavities.
My sharpest memory of the early 1980’s 3-d craze was a lobby display in a Times Square movie house for “Friday The 13th Part III in 3-D” to debut on Friday August 13th 1982. That was on Sunday July 4 1982, when three friends of mine and I had gone to see “Star Trek II : The Wrath Of Khan”.
I suppose the thrill of that was supposed to be the skewers coming out the other side and the flying severed heads appeared to be coming right at you.
The first “Friday The 13th” film debuted on Friday June 13 1980.