LIKE most Brooklyn parents, mine accompanied me to Coney Island on numerous Sundays when I was a kid; I seem to remember getting a string of tickets that would let us get on any of the rides in the amusement parks. I even remember riding one of the hobbyhorses at Steeplechase Park and since I was 6 or 7 the last year it was open, that’s an old memory indeed. Our visits to Coney were a bit different. Even though the old man was an avid beachgoer and swimmer, and indulged himself when we went to Atlantic City, we really didn’t hang out on the beach and, amazingly enough, we never went to Nathan’s for the dogs and fries. It wasn’t till I began writing Forgotten NY in the late 1990s that I became a once or twice per year Nathan’s patron.
I have to say, though, that my main interest in going to Coney was the bus ride. In the Swinging Sixties, the B64 bus traveled down 86th Street and Bath, Harway, Cropsey and Stillwell Avenues to the corner of Stillwell and Mermaid, where this photo was snapped in 1965. My interest in the bus ride was keen because the B64 was the only route in which boxy Mack buses were employed (though as a kid I didn’t identify them as Macks; I only knew I preferred the look of the buses). I liked the rhythmic noise the coin box made and I wonder if a musician ever composed a piece based on it.
I’d be sure to grab a window seat and look out the window at, what else, the lampposts. I would have a pencil, Carvel ice cream spoon and flashlight bulb to construct the lampposts I saw out the window in my hand. If we went under an elevated train or highway, that same hand would stand in for the trestle. When incandescent lamps went out in favor of mercurys in the mid-1960s, I gradually lost interest and at least quit imitating lampposts with my little toolkit, but I still filled writing tablets with photos of lampposts, as well as signs, trains and buses.
You might think I would have worked for the DOT or MTA, but I had no idea how people got those jobs. I still don’t!
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1/25/23