We didn’t have air conditioning in our apartment growing up. Then again, heat and humidity spells didn’t last quite as long in my youth as they do now. That’s likely why we got along fine during hot spells and persevered during the warm weeks. In weather like we’re having now, my grandmother would pack a couple of baloney sandwiches and a couple apples or peaches and we’d head across the triangle park at 6th Avenue and 83rd Street (it didn’t have a name then) to the B16 Fort Hamilton Parkway bus stop, and we would go down to Shore Road and take a seat in one of the benches facing the Narrows and enjoy the breezes. When I was very small, from 1960-1963, we would watch workmen spinning cables for the new Verrazzano Bridge. It was the same bench that Tony Manero spun a yarn about a worker falling into wet concrete at the suspension cable housing on the Brooklyn side in “Saturday Night Fever.” That never happened, but a worker did fall off the bridge to his death, as related in Gay Talese’s “The Bridge.”
I recently found myself staggering up 5th Avenue in ungodly blast-furnace pizza oven humidity ( I have to get my exercise, humidity or no) and I spotted a painted ad for the now-defunct Austin’s Steakhouse near 89th Street. The latest Yelp review was in 2010, so it’s over a decade since it’s gone, but the vertical ad “Austin’s” is still there in black and white. You have to go to the other end of the alphabet for its replacement, Zamaan, a restaurant and hookah bar. You can still get a look at what Austin’s looked like at that Yelp review linked above.
A more thorough look at Bay Ridge’s 3rd and 5th Avenue will appear anon.
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7/15/24
4 comments
Those encased-in-concrete rumors have been swirling around the Hoover Dam for decades. Needless to say, they aren’t true.
More recently something of the sort has come up in the case of the Springfield Three, who were three women who vanished from the Missouri version of Springfield in 1992, under exceedingly bizarre circumstances. Rumor has it that they were buried by perpetrator(s) unknown in the concrete foundation of a hospital parking garage.
Speaking of concrete “resting places,” Jimmy Hoffa wasn’t under the old Giants Stadium, and Judge Joseph Crater is not under the Empire State Building nor the NY Aquarium. In the case of the latter, you’d think they’d have dug him up in the late Fifties when the Aquarium site was being built on.
I drove through Cobble Hill one summer about 30 years ago and the streets were deserted,a ghost
town.Not back in my day.The streets just teemed with people,everyone was out in the street.Someone
told me that this was because air condtioning wasnt that affordable back then so everyone was outside
and opening up the hydrants,etc.I heard people are afraid to let their kids go outside by themselves these
days in big bad New York.
Was there a very nice place called Howe’s Steak House there in Bay Ridge, decades ago? Jacketed-&-tied waitstaff IIRC. When I was but a lad we would make a rare (get it?) pilgrimage down there, all the way from Jackson Hts., I guess when the old man didn’t feel like going into Yorkville for Dresdner’s (where the $ came from for all this is to this day unclear).