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