Crazy Stable

Update: Yes, it's official, it was a tornado--like we hadn't figured that out.

We're not in Flatbush anymore, Toto. At least that's what it looks like this morning. The news claims that a tornado "may have" hit Bay Ridge , but so far no one is reporting on the devastation a block south of us in the Prospect Park South historic district, what we call "the magic land" for its magnificent Victorian homes and trees. Most of the homes were spared anything but minor damage, from the look of it on a steamy walk this morning, but the trees are a fallen forest in what was one of the city's leafiest enclaves. Here's a tour.

Just south of Church Avenue on Marlborough Road, this mid-sized maple outside Temple Beth Emeth peeled off the underground cement pad where it must've grown as a weed tree. It's amazing it lasted this long on such a shallow pad of superficial roots. The victim car seems strangely cozy in its cage of branches.

Going south, the corner of Albemarle and Marlborough Roads--a four-way-mansion intersection--is a scene of ruination. Lots of neighbors on cell phones gazing at lots of felled maples, pines, lindens. (Nobody going anywhere on the train--there's also a tree across the subway tracks in a nearby open culvert.) Everyone describes a house-shaking "freight train" wind before dawn, and the swath of destruction is totally unlike the "twigs down" scale we were blessed with just a block away. If this ain't a tornado, it's close enough for me.

The snapped-off trunks stand in a row like palings on Marlborugh just south of Albemarle.

Over on Buckingham Road, neighbors reported hearing lightning strike this lovely old hemlock, splitting it in half. It would've been quite a show if anyone had been foolhardy enough to be sitting in the balcony of that gorgeous turret.

Every intersection was barricaded by fallen trunks, and police, fire, and MTA vehicles prowled around them. Here is Rugby Road looking north from Beverly Road--a strangely bucolic pedestrian mall.

I stepped over countless twisted roadblocks; for some, it was not an option.

On Argyle Road, our neighbor with the famous double-depth garden showed me her backyard--what had been a spacious lawn was a shoulder-deep tangle of fallen woods. In front of the house, a twisted metal sign had been deposited from blocks-distant Coney Island Avenue.

As I headed back to Church Avenue, a crew of strapping young men from the FDNY strolled down the middle of the street with a chain saw, a welcome sight (and not just because of their firefightery gorgeousness). 

Finally, back in my own little sliver of "Caton Park" north of Church Avenue, my neighbors on Rugby Road awoke to their own roadblock. Blessedly, no one was in the car.

It seems a miracle now that the Crazy Stable and our looming Mighty Ent were spared. And even in the ravaged Magic Land, I saw no missing roofs or other major house damage, thank God.

It's not every day that Kevin Walsh, friend and intrepid author/webmaster of Forgotten New York, takes his band of urban-ephemera obsessives on a tour of one's own childhood stomping ground. So it was that, on a summer Sunday at sunset (sufferin' succotash!), we were traipsing along leafy streets on a Forgotten Tour of Little Neck.

Astute followers of the CrazyStable may recall that I have forgotten very little about my semi-idyllic upbringing in this most suburban corner of Queens. Awhile back, I recounted my Proustian home-renovation memories of life in this comfortable hilly enclave (along with my horrified discovery of mass McMansionizing) in "Return to the Ur-Stable" and "Ur-Stable II: There Goes the Neighborhood."    Last night, I had the uncanny experience of seeing my familiar-yet-utterly-changed byways through fresh eyes, and looking several centuries further back than the Kennedy Administration during which we moved there. Under Kevin's guidance, we visited the tomb of the Last Matinecock at Zion Episcopal Church, a solemn split rock upon which my Brownie troop and I disported ourselves most disrespectfully. In the same graveyard, as the setting sun gilded the 1830 white church, we visited the leaf-twined monument of the appallingly prolific Bloodgood Cutter, an indefatigable local poet who managed to incur the personal scorn of Mark Twain. (Good to know I am not the only obscure yet undeterred literary light to flicker from the swamps of Little Neck.) We found several tiny alleyways off Northern Boulevard, where ancient cottages are being turned into--yes--McMansions, bloated piles of brick glowering down lanes too narrow for sidewalks.

As we passed countless new businesses--Korean restaurants, meat markets, nail parlors, and other hallmarks of the area's whiplash-fast demographic change--I conducted my own internal "unforgotten" tour. Here, before the garish McDonald's on Marathon Parkway, stood the Revolutionary-War era steepled church that was razed without a peep of protest. (Not from me, certainly--I relished the novelty of these strange new fries and burgers.) There once stood Virginia Variety, a tiny store with scuffed old wooden bins full of plastic toys for a nickel, dime or quarter. Now a car dealership, there, opposite my old school, stood a Howard Johnson's, where my grade-schooler's notion of gourmet cuisine was the All-You-Can-Eat clam strips night. (Tuesdays, if memory served, and a rare treat in our cash-strapped household.) Gone, too, was the Carvel where the fast teenagers hung out in the parking lot, and the Irish gift store with its Connemara marble and lace, and the Bohack's where I pined for the canned snails in the "gourmet" section. (My wise mother said yes to clam strips but no to snails.)

The Forgotteners' mission, however, was to find the remnants of the past that have survived. One was the shingled corner real-estate office of our family's Daddy Warbucks-like landlord, Bryce Rea; but what I never knew is that Rea co-founded Little Neck's first bank, along with the descendants of some of the area's original white settlers! It so figures. "His" bank, now a Chase Manhattan, still stands at the corner of Northern Blvd. and Little Neck Parkway, adorned with a suitably oppressive and wealthy-looking eagle.

We parted from the tour before they penetrated deeper into the past in Douglaston Manor, the adjacent neighborhood on the bay where the rich kids lived.  The tour briefly skirted Browvale Lane, but not my block at the crest of the hill. Good thing, too--if I'd had to pass my old house, I would've been reduced to sputtering fits.

We checked up on the Ur-Stable before the tour. The house itself is in gorgeous condition, brought back to one-family gracious perfection from the shambles it was when we moved there as tenants in an illegal 5-family conversion.  But all around it...my God! What a heartbreaking catalog of the worst transformations that can be wrought by affluence. Every single house across the street, a row of at least four, has been torn down and replaced by vulgar, gaudy bloaters. Below are two.

This was a fine old white colonial corner home that once belonged to the kiddie-TV host Sandy Becker.

And this was my friend Elizabeth's Tudor house, a tear-down site on my last visit and now an ill-proportioned brick fortress.

Saddest of all, on my last visit, was the utter absence of kids (or indeed, anyone except landscaping crews) from the tree-lined streets. But it was winter then, and I'd hoped that a summer twilight might coax out some of these poor hidden children of affluence from their air-conditioned, wide-screen-equipped cocoons (presuming such children even exist within the bloaters' vast walls and Palladian windows). My hopes were dashed; Browvale Lane stood empty in the shifting, tender emerald light of an August evening. No sound of bat meeting ball, of bike bell ringing, of ice cream truck jingling, pool splashing, Dad listening to a game, Mom calling in to a deliciously late vacation bedtime.  Just...silence, except for the wistful songs of a robin and a dove...because on Sundays, presumably, the day laborers who trim these tortured hedges get their day off.  Here is the empty street that, 40 years ago, was the playground to the blessed children of the Baby Boom.

If only there were a Forgotteners Tour that could find traces of our very lives and souls, little shreds of holographic memory in the bend of a lane or the branch of a tree! A tour that would touch the way it felt to stay out with the fireflies until dark, or slam a screen door, or smell the grass your father just mowed or the grill he was lighting up. What will these new residents of Little Neck remember fondly from their time there, I wonder? Ah well...thanks be to Kevin for a wonderful evening back in time.

We are back from a magnificent week in a picture-perfect cottage on the coast of Maine, and I am in a torpid muddle of conflicting emotions: relief at being reunited with the cats, despair at a fresh perspective on the house's vast undone-ness (it was shedding big plaster flakes in the Brooklyn humidity upon our return, and the Squirrel Barricade in the roof/ceiling hole had fallen away...), and a raw hunger for the natural beauty we left behind. Add in the dull, creeping dread that returns as I grapple with a return to fiscal reality; this vacation represented the last blessed cupful of a life-giving draught that issued from my late uncle's estate, and now that the final drops have been drained (having also rescued us from the Dead Appliance Trifecta and the New Car Cash-Suck), and you have a major case of Back Home Broke Blues...which can be no laughing matter if you have a history of depressive episodes in the dog days of August.

Which is why I was happily unnerved when I pried myself away from a game of Freecell to Sacred Space, a prayer site run by the Irish Jesuits. Lest that sound too...Jesuitical, here is their opening "something to think and pray about this week" for today, August 1:

"We all know about families. There is a variety of kinds of family and each of us has had a mix of good and bad experiences. The clearest family portrait in the Gospel is of a father (and Jesus is talking about God) who was made a fool of, a young son who went prodigal and squandered the family fortune and reputation, and an older son who was so jealous of his kid brother that he would not attend the homecoming party. God knows about troubled families. They are nothing out of the ordinary. We may have a dream of an ideal family with lively, intelligent, obedient children who line up with their parents for church on Sunday, pass their exams, compete in community sports, and visit their granny. Perhaps we need to move away from such rosy pictures. There is no such thing as perfect parents, or perfect children. God is not the presenter of prizes at a high-powered graduation, but the one who helps us to recognise our need of help and to accept our blessings."

Just wanted to share that with you. Their Scripture reading for today is about the man who found a treasure hidden in a field and "sold all he had" to buy the field.  Our week together at Acadia National Park was such a treasure, even if we'll never be a perfect family, fiscally or any other way, and it was worth it in the deepest sense of "worth," even if the roof is still unpatched and the shingles unpainted. I'm mixing my gospel metaphors here--the Prodigal Son merely squandered his fortune--but then, I said I was muddled. But I am home, and trying to figure it out. More soon--including a spectacular archiblogging tour of Cambridge, Massachusetts and other distractions from our flaky domicile. Meanwhile, many thanks to the noble piper of The Inn at the End of the World for having tagged me with the "Thinking Blogger Award"...I will attempt to rise to the bait with a thought-provoking quintet of my own if the heat doesn't fry my brain past all thought in the meantime!

Image: Rembrandt, The Prodigal Son