VOODOO IN THE PARK

One Sunday evening in spring, my landlord knocked on my door and said, “Come with me, I have something to show you in the park.” Although I had made it a point to not enter the park after dark, I was intrigued. I grabbed a jacket and followed him down the stairs and out the front door. We crossed Ocean Avenue and entered the park at Lincoln Avenue. From there we walked onto the grass and into a lightly wooded area.

From a distance I could hear a crowd of people, and as we got closer, I saw a long table laden with flowers, candles, and food. The people milling around it were dressed all in white. The ladies wore long white skirts with long blouses over them and white scarf turbans. The men were in white pants and shirts.

My landlord whispered, “It's a Voodoo meeting.” Voodoo is a Haitian religion, and I was thinking this group could be practicing Candomblé, a South American religion begun in Bahai, or Santaría a creole Caribbean religion. All three of these religions are based African religions – Fon, Yoruba, Bantu – brought to the Western Hemisphere by slaves.

As we got closer to the group, a very friendly woman approached us and said in a Caribbean accent, “Would you like something to eat? Please help yourself?”

I thanked her and declined, feeling nosy and out of place. The landlord had some food.  

“We are having a healing ceremony for a friend who is very sick,” this woman explained. “We just finished.”

I had only seen these kinds of ceremonies in the media – television and movies – and I was sorry I missed it here in the park, mainly because I know that the media exploits African religions, making them scary and silly – a holdover from slavery days. And I would like to have seen this healing ceremony. I never heard about or saw another one.

We only stayed that few minutes and then returned to the house. I doubted I would ever recognize these women if I saw them in the neighborhood. But certainly these people in the park were friendlier and more welcoming than the Christian church members near the house who glared at me, if they looked at me at all, if I happened to pass through the crowd while church was letting out. I never considered attending a service there.

Members of this church near the house were legally permitted to double-park on Sundays, blocking the neighborhood cars until noon. I don't know if this happened with other churches in Brooklyn, but it seemed to me that since public transportation ran on Sundays, they might have been “legally permitted” to ride the subway or busses. Not my call.

I only ever entered the park after dark once after that night. A tall, husky male friend and I walked from Park Slope to Lefferts Gardens at 10 o'clock one evening. We were on a narrow, hilly, dirt trail between a dense wall of bushes and trees on either side. It was really dark and I was really glad when we reached the flat area near Ocean Avenue. I'm pretty brave, but I would never take that walk alone.

Post by Alana Cash

S-P-R-I-N-G

Spring has sprung in New York, when the weather is above 50 degrees and the little portable vestibules outside the doors of restaurants, come down and get stored away for next year.  Until then, there are still bitter cold nights and lots griping about how long winter has lasted.  And then, expected, yet always surprising, the long, beautiful spring starts in March and travels thru July – week-by-week different flowers appearing in gardens and bursting out on the trees before the leaves unfold.  The little portable vestibules are replaced by outdoor tables and chairs on the sidewalks.  

During the winter, the front and back garden of the house where I lived were flat and brown with naked bushes and trees, but in March the shoots began rising green from the earth and there were buds on the trees.  And then for months the flowers came in waves – tulips, daffodils, irises, daisies, zinnias, gladiolas, daylilies, sweet potato flowers – the clematis vines and the passion flower vines flowered – the huge peony and hydrangea bushes flowered like fireworks and the Datona Trumpet tree grew drooping orange flowers.  A grape vine came back to live as well as a wisteria with that intoxicating scent.  The blank dirt back yard became overgrown with just a little winding path to the back where the mulch container was kept.  Every warm day, I set a chair in the middle of the path and worked there, invisible surrounded by nature.  Who would think that living in New York could be like that.

It’s grand weather until August, when there are two or three weeks of high temperatures – meaning somewhere about 95 degrees and heavy humidity that Texans live with eight months out of the year.  And then comes fall, another beautiful, shorter season.  This time, the colors of the leaves replace the beauty of the flowers in the spring.

THE QUAKER CONNECTION

The other day I started reading a biography about Walt Whitman, a Brooklynite of sorts (he was actually born on Long Island and died in New Jersey). I learned that Whitman was a Quaker, and on top of that he met Elias Hicks, the very man whose beliefs split the Quaker Church into Hicksite and Orthodox.  That got my attention because I happen to own the original two pamphlets published in 1824 that concern that split.

The Quaker split was on account of Hicks drift from the official Quaker dogma, and it interested me that religious questing was as discouraged in the early 19^th Century Brooklyn.  This is surprising because I was taught and I believed that our country was founded on religious freedom, and I would expect that less than 50 years after the Revolution, there would be a bit more tolerance of differing religious views.  To me that would mean allowing for personally seeking a greater understanding of the mysteries of existence.  But, no, I found out that when Elias Hicks views caused an uproar.

I did some research on the issue of colonial religion and found out that the Puritans – who brought us the Salem witch trials – were British Anglicans who wanted to reform that State church and were considered cranks because of it.  They left England for the purpose of expressing their religious beliefs more freely and made it against the law to skip Sunday services.  You would think they’d have developed a tolerance because of the way they were treated, but no.  In keeping with religious narrow-mindedness and bigotry, when the Puritans settled in colonial US, they made their religion the State religion and anyone veering from it was considered a heretic which included the Quakers.  One colonial governor went so far as to ask for help in sinking a ship in which Quakers were traveling. 

Having grown up in a home where I was taught that anyone not a Baptist was going to hell, I had a terrible aversion to other religions until I was out on my own and what I knew about Quakerism was limited to oats.  I was curious but afraid of exploring what was taught in those houses of worship that was so bad as to damn their members forever.  One of my great-grandfathers was a minister and he killed someone.  My grandfather was a minister and an adulterer.  I was hard pressed to understand what went on in a Lutheran church or a Quaker meeting that would lead me astray.

I’ve attended many different religious services as an adult, even venturing into a catholic mass or two, and on at least three occasions I attend a Quaker meeting.  All three of the Meetings I attended were Hicksite meetings where the people sat quietly together until someone felt compelled to speak, supposedly no preaching, and I don’t remember any singing either.

The first was in Austin where everyone sat quietly until someone spoke of the government’s policies in the Middle East.  When the meditation ended, I learned that the Meeting was sending a delegation to the Middle East to end or prevent (not sure) the violence there.  I said I thought that might be fruitless and someone explained to me that a delegation of Quakers went to Germany before WWII to speak to Hitler.  Thus making my point. 

The second Meeting I attended was in Santa Monica, California and a third at the Quaker Meeting House (circa 1857) at 110 Schemerhorn in Brooklyn.  During both meeting someone interrupting the meditative silence to speak passionately about politics and errors in political decision-making.  

All in all, the Meetings had a lot of what seemed like preaching to me, but nothing heretical. 

At any rate, I set forth here a quote from one of the pamphlets – this one published by Elias Hicks – The Misrepresentation of Anna Braithwait in Relation to the Doctrines Preached by Elias Hicks Together with the Refutation of the Same in a Letter from Elias Hicks.

Braithwait stated:

            “[Hicks] conceived the writings of Confucius and of many of the philosophers were equally of Divine Revelation with the scriptures; that the heathen nations of the Mahometans, Chinese, and Indian bore greater evidence of the influence of Divine Light than professing Christians.” (pg. 9 of above document)

It sounds so modern (except for the spelling).  And not a word about the government.  

At any rate, I’m glad to own the pamphlets which I found not in Brooklyn, but in Los Angeles.

WHICH CHEZ YOU AT? - FORT GREEN

Fort Greene is one of the tres cool gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn. As trendy as the other neighborhoods around Brooklyn Heights, it’s gotten really expensive to live there.  But Fort Greene has something extra to offer for the money.  Pratt Institute, one of the best art schools in the country, is in Fort Greene and the students leave their mark.  If you want to see art in a park, on the walls of buildings, on the sidewalk, sticking out of trash cans, visit Fort Greene. 

Pratt Institute Sculpture Garden

The first time I was in Fort Greene it was on a walk from Prospect Park to Chinatown in Manhattan and I didn’t spend any time looking around because I was already feeling the cement against my feet.  I was in Fort Green the second time was because I was hired as an extra in a Spike Lee film.  I sat reading in an attic-like room in a row house all afternoon and never got called to the set.  The last time I was in Fort Greene I had a fabulous walk around, visiting a fabulous organic grocery on Myrtle Avenue, exploring the sculpture gardens of Pratt Institute, looking at the refurbished brownstones, the graffiti, the Christmas decorations.

Fort Greene's version of the guard dog

Of course there is history.  Pratt Institute was originally a vocational school that offered classes in sewing and stenography (https://www.pratt.edu/the-institute/history/) (the school website doesn’t make clear that it was originally intended as a technical institute for training industrial workers).  It’s now a major art and architectural college.

Charles Pratt, one of Rockerfeller's partners, funded the school.  Pratt was owner of Astral Oil Works, a refinery in Brooklyn mainly producing kerosene for lamps.  One of their ads claimed: “burns in any lamp without danger of exploding.”  That is certainly a plus, BUT in 1880 the whole plant exploded.  Astral Oil changed their ads to read: “The holy lamps of Tibet are primed with Astral oil.” Tibet being so far away and all, no one would hear about explosions over there.

Pratt was one of the oil men who opposed John D. Rockefeller’s Southern Improvement Company scheme when Rockefeller colluded with railroads to get a 33% rebate on ALL shipments of oil.  That allowed Rockefeller to cut his oil prices and put the competition out of business.  What a guy!  Eventually, Rockefeller convinced Pratt to partner with him.  No comment.

Pratt built a home on Clinton Avenue in Fort Greene which is just a few blocks from Pratt Institute.  His son built a house next door.  Both are still standing and are used by institutions.  The Pratts also built homes in Glen Cove on Long Island and so many of them lived out there that they have their own private Pratt cemetery behind gates.  Had I only known.

BAD NANNIES

Every day in Brooklyn, the nannies are out pushing strollers that hold the children in their care.  They are ubiquitous in the parks – even in winter – and on the subways.  Hiring a nanny is a way of keeping a child at home and away from the head lice and diseases that are found in day-cares and preschools.  But, while day-cares are licensed and generally have security cameras, the nanny is a free agent.

I read the bestseller The Nanny Diaries, and while I’m sure there are indifferent narcissistic mothers like the one in that story, I wonder how most of the mothers would feel if they knew what their nannies were up to.  For example, one spring afternoon I saw two nannies with strollers parked in front of the garage door of an expensive house.  The nannies were sharing a blunt that I could smell as I rode by on my bike.  I wouldn’t want the nanny of my child to smoke cigarettes on the job, let alone marijuana.

Once, a long time ago, I saw a very famous middle-aged actor walking in a park, holding a book near his face and reading.  A toddler about two years old was trailing behind trying to keep up with the actor that I could only assume was the little boy’s father.  I thought that was sad that the little boy was getting no attention.  But now the nannies can’t put their cell phones down for a minute, unless of course, they are in the company of other nannies.  Then they talk to each other.

I was once in a store in Atlantic Mall and a nanny was shopping for clothes and talking on the telephone while the little boy in the stroller just cried and cried.  Was he hungry?  Thirsty?  Wet diaper?  He needed something, something his parents were paying that nanny to provide and she was just ignoring him.  Finally, after 30 minutes (possibly longer) I approached her and said I’d call security if she didn’t take care of that little boy.  She got all humble and sheepish and spoke in a Spanish accent, “Yes, I take care right away” and then got in line to pay for her stuff. 

The worst nanny situation I witnessed was on a train headed for Coney Island.  Two boys about 4 and 6 years old were sitting across the aisle from me.  Their nanny – blond, Slavic accent – was laying on the seat in front of them.  Cursing at them softly.  Using the F-word at these kids.  She wore a baseball cap and had it pulled down low and evidently she had serious problems.  The smallest of the boys stood in his seat and she ignored that until he fell.  She helped him up, cursing softly all the while.  I determined to find a cop as soon as we got off the train.  The parents should know and the cop would get information to let them know.  But when the train stopped she got off quickly with the kids.  I tried to follow, but when I saw a cop and when I veered off to speak to him, I lost her. 

All I can say is – check your nanny.

VANDERBILT MAUSOLEUM, STATEN ISLAND

While I was in Newport, Rhode Island, I visited a bookstore and bought a book about the history of the Vanderbilt family.  I had heard of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt who had amassed the wealth, and the Vanderbilt name was linked with rich elite, but the name was not as commonly referred to as Rockerfeller or Roosevelt so I didn’t know much of anything about them.  Perhaps if Grand Central Station had been named Vanderbilt Center, they’d still be more in the forefront.

What I learned was that Cornelius Vanderbilt was born and raised on a farm on Staten Island.  When he was a teenager, he worked a ferry service shuttling people and produce from the farms on Staten Island to various docks in Manhattan.  While continuing his ferry service, he went to work managing the steamboat service of Thomas Gibbons who wanted to drive his competition to either sell out to him or go out of business.   

Cornelius to New Jersey with his wife Sophia, also his first cousin, and she opened a profitable inn there.  For the California Gold Rush, Vanderbilt turned to ocean shipping.   Then he bought the stock of the Harlem Railroad, made it profitable, and the rest is history..

The competitiveness was passed through the generations – his grandson Cornelius II bought the block on Fifth Avenue between 57^th and 58^th Streets to build the biggest house ever constructed in the US.  And why?  Because he wanted to outdo his friends and neighbors.  By contrast, the amasser of the

Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt House
10 Washington Place, NY

wealth, the Commodore moved from New Jersey to a relatively moderate home at 10 Washington Place (torn down to build a 6-story commercial building in 1900) which is now owned by NYU.  I was there while it was being renovated and took a walk inside. 

After his first wife (Sophia) died in 1868, Commodore Vanderbilt eloped in 1869 with another cousin, 43 years his junior.  Her name was Frank Armstrong.  A year later he financially sponsored Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tinny in become members of the New York Stock Exchange.  There were rumors that Vanderbilt had an affair with Tinny, also much younger than he.  The Woodhulls made a fortune on Wall Street and started their newspaper Woodull & Clafflin’s Weekly which published the first English version of Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx.  Did the Commodore read it, I wonder.

Commodore Vanderbilt donated land to the Moravian Church in Staten Island and that is where he and some other members of his family are buried.  I wanted to see it, so I took a trip over to Staten Island.  

I only visited Staten Island twice while I lived in Brooklyn.  I drove across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge (this is the bridge in Saturday Night Fever) just for fun and was surprised when I was charged a hefty toll to get back to Brooklyn.  The second visit, I took the ferry from Manhattan.  Staten Island doesn’t have a subway (underground), but it does have a train which I took to the New Dorp stop and walked up to the cemetery.  The feeling being there was like a fishing village.  The area isn't as densely populated or over-constructed as the other boroughs, and the feeling is lighter, newer.

I knew from the book that the Vanderbilt Mausoleum was at the rear of the cemetery and so that’s where I headed.  At the back, I passed a vaulted exit with locked iron gates and couldn’t find the Vanderbilts.  I asked some people in the cemetery and they directed me back to that vaulted exit.  That was the entrance to the Vanderbilt portion of the cemetery.  I found my way passed the gate and into a weird, silent, dead feeling.  I walked about a quarter of a mile up a narrow road, passing lots of fallen dead trees and not seeing or hearing a living creature – not a bird or squirrel – the whole way.

Vanderbilt Tomb Interior

At the top, the feeling was creepy.  The Vanderbilt Mausoleum resembles a small church with three sets of doors at the front and small vaulted windows above them.  At one time the doors were iron gates, but in the 1960s a woman pulled on the gates trying to get inside the tomb and the gates fell on her and killed her.  So, the gates have been replaced with gray steel industrial doors with padlocks.  The windows above the doors have been stopped up with concrete blocks. 

It is difficult to describe the feeling – sadness, loneliness, desolation.  But certainly the place felt empty.   I didn’t linger.  I would never want to go back there.

It was only when I was walking back down through the cemetery that I realized I was walking on the farmland where Cornelius Vanderbilt grew up.

NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND ROAD TRIP

One Christmas while I was living in Brooklyn, I rented a car and drove with my son to Newport, Rhode Island.  I’d wanted to see the summer “cottages” of the one-percenters of the Gilded Age that line Bellevue Avenue.  My interest had been captured years before when I watch a documentary produced by the Preservation Society of Newport County.

Newport is not a busy place in the winter – no regattas, no tourists to speak of – just a quiet island town with little pubs and restaurants.  It’s as quaint as an old-fashioned Christmas card, especially with snow on the ground.  We stayed on an island just off Newport and faced the town. 

Because it was Christmas, only a few of the “cottage” homes were open for tours and we chose The ^th Street.  Still standing at the southeast corner of 64^th Street and Fifth Avenue, it’s now a 9-unit coop.  The coops currently sell in the neighborhood of $25 million and rent in the neighborhood of $150,000.  Even though the front door is still on East 64^th Street, the building uses the address 828 Fifth Avenue as it is more posh.

Elms and The Breakers.  The Elms was the summer home of coal magnate Edward Julius Berwind, at one time the largest owner of coal properties in the world.  He built a 6-story house in Manhattan at 2 East 64

The Elms was built in 1899-1901 at 60,000 square feet and four stories – including the basement.  If you look at the photograph, two floors show, but there is a deceptive wall above the second story.  That wall is 8 feet high and it surrounds the servants’ quarters.  Berwind felt that servants should serve without ever being seen – except in the dining room or if specifically called into a room.  The servants could sit outside on the walkway surrounding their quarters, but should they ever be seen trying to look over that wall, they would be dismissed immediately.

The Elms had a servants’ staircase, and the chamber maids used it to get to work in the bedrooms on the second floor AFTER the rooms were vacated.  Guests might leave shoes in the hallway for buffing or clothing to be cleaned, but the servants were only allowed to pick them up at night after the guests had gone to bed. 

Deliveries to the house were made underground as well.  Coal was delivered at a door at the curb that lead to an underground tunnel from the street to the coal bins.  Food and other supplies were delivered to a covered lower driveway on the other side of the house.

Berwind’s psychology is a bit mystifying.  Perhaps seeing his servants’ lives contrasted with the splendor of the house and his life made him feel guilty.  At any rate, the tour made him very unlikable.

The Breakers, just down the street, is the same size at Highclere Castle (Downton Abbey) and was built by Alice and Cornelius Vanderbilt II, grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt.  Alice and Cornelius II had a large townhouse at 1 West 57^th Street, but feeling that their friends and neighbors might outdo them, they bought the entire block on Fifth Avenue from 57^th to 58^th and built the largest house EVER in the United States.  The house in Manhattan has been torn down and Bergdorf Goodman department store now stands on that property.  I do not know if Bergdorf’s is as large as the destroyed Vanderbilt house.

Alice and Cornelius II outdid their neighbors in Newport by building a house just over 120,000 square feet on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.  Only half of the square footage is actually usable because there is a large atrium in the center of the house with balconies on four sideson each floor.  The bathrooms are the size of a large bedroom and the kitchen is massive, and kindly, the servants were allowed to be seen.

Next door to The Breakers is Marble House, which we toured only externally.  It was built by Cornelius’s brother, William Kissam Vanderbilt who built the current Grand Central Station and his wife (at the time), Alva who was very independent and a suffragette.  She built a little tea house on the edge of the cliff and had a temporary railroad for the staff to bring all the tea and food.  The tracks were put away after tea time was over.  Well, if your husband works for the railroad…

She still owned the house when she divorced William and married Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont (Belmont Stakes is named for his father August Belmont).  Belmont was a playboy addicted to gambling and absinthe.  However, along with Marble House at Newport, Alva shared a home that Belmont built there when he received his inheritance – Belcourt.  It only merited a drive-by.  

Alva continued to host afternoon teas at her little tea house on the cliff and designed a tea service with “Votes for Women” inscribed on it.  Replicas are available for sale at the gift shops in the different houses.

Post by Alana Cash

INNOCENTS ABROAD – GUILTY AT HOME

Plymouth Church was founded by 21 people in 1827 and its first minister was the fiery aboliltionist, Henry Ward Beecher.  The church is still open and operating at 124 Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights.

Plymouth Church was part of the Underground Railroad and the Beecher regularly gave sermons in which he appealed for financial donations to purchase the freedom of slaves.  He held mock slave auctions and women took the jewelry off their fingers, wrists, and necks and placed it in the offering basket. 

In the 19^th century, the church was so well known throughout the country that Abraham Lincoln attended services at Plymouth Church in 1860.  His pew is marked with a plaque.  Charles Dickens gave a talk at Plymouth Church.  Mark Twain travelled to Europe for several months with a group of church members and chronicled their journey in his book The Innocents Abroad, which by the way, I highly recommend. 

Beecher’s salary was $100,000 a year – over $2,000,000 in today’s currency.  Considering that a Union solider earned $15 a month, this made Beecher quite a big cheese. Beecher’s powerful charisma especially appealed to women and he was prone to affairs with congregation members.  One affair, the one with Elizabeth Tilton, would become a public scandal and that wasn’t just because her husband Theodore Tilton was Beecher’s best friend.  How and why that scandal erupted has to do with the interwoven lives of the movers and shakers of Old New York. 

Henry Ward Beecher presided at the marriage of Elizabeth Richards and Theodore Tilton.  Beecher and Tilton together edited The Independent newspaper.  They were both ardent abolitionist speakers and sought-after on the lecture circuit – the 19^th Century equivalent of TV.  They were both out of town often, but not at the same time. 

After the abolition of slavery, they needed other causes for their zeal.  Tilton became an intense advocate for divorce reform (making it easier to obtain) and women’s emancipation.  There’s some irony here.  Beecher was also supportive of the women’s suffrage movement, but not so much in favor of divorce reform.  He also spoke out against the concept of “free love” (he was against the idea that women should be allowed to choose their sex partners) which was promoted by some women in the feminist movement of that era.  The staunchest advocate for free love, Victoria Woodhull, made note of Beecher’s feelings.

Woodhull was a barely educated entrepreneurial type who worked as a medium and magnetic healer until she and her sister met the recently widowed Cornelius Vanderbilt who set them up at 44 Broad Street as the first female stock brokers – Woodhull & Claflins Co.  Soon after, the sisters created the first newspaper run by women Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.  And, for the hat trick, in 1872, Woodhull was the first woman to run for president.

But I digress.

Beecher was used to visiting the Tilton home and it didn’t appear out of line for him to visit Elizabeth when Theodore was away.  One thing led to another as it often can, and Elizabeth eventually confessed to her husband that she’d been unfaithful to him with Beecher.   Naturally upset, Theodore mentioned this affair to his friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who relayed the news to Victoria Woodhull who took it upon herself to publish an article about it in her newspaper and label Beecher a hypocrite.  Imagine that. 

Beecher was wise enough not to sue for libel.  However, Woodhull was arrested for mailing salacious material.  In other words, because she mailed out her newspaper to subscribers, and because the article was sexual in nature, she was jailed.  When Elizabeth Tilton was questioned and confessed her affair to the police Woodhull was released after a month.  [Adding more irony to the story, Theodore Tilton is rumored to have been a lover of Victoria Woodhull during his marriage.]

It took until 1875 – somewhere in the neighborhood of seven years – for Theodore Tilton to finally sue Beecher for “criminal conversation” adultery (basically meaning debauchery of Elizabeth) and “alienation of affection.”  At the trial, Elizabeth made a short statement of confession.  Beecher, however, declared in inimitable political sidestepping, that perhaps Mrs. Tilton had sexual relations with him but he had not had sex with her.  This sounds awfully familiar.  His lawyers argued for his reputation being ruined and that should Beecher be convicted, middle class values would be thrown into chaos.  More double speak. The lawsuit ended in a hung jury and Theodore dropped his suit.

Theodore Tilton moved to Paris leaving Elizabeth to live in poverty, scorned by the Plymouth Church congregation, and buried in an unmarked grave at Green-Wood Cemetery.  Beecher lived on in the same status as before, actually got a raise in salary, and there’s a big statue of him not far from Plymouth Church on Cadman Square in downtown Brooklyn (see above).

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THE HOUSE ON CLINTON STREET

In the early 1930s, Bill Wilson was living with his wife Lois in her parents’ house at 182 Clinton Street,  Wilson had college education and served in the Army during WWI.  He had already built a successful career on Wall Street when he came up with the idea of physically visiting and researching companies to make informed stock recommendations about them.  He'd made a fortune and lost it.

During the Roaring Twenties, Wilson made his employers, their clients, and himself quite a pile of money.  The 1920s was also the time of Prohibition, yet liquor, especially bad liquor, was as profuse as ever and more enticing because one had to visit a speakeasy.  Knowing the secret code elevated one’s status – perhaps only internally.  And Bill Wilson was a terrific drunk.  When he was drunk, he wasn’t always nice.  In fact, he insulted his bosses and their clients.  He was an embarrassment to himself, the company he worked for and his wife.  But as long as he predicted stocks that soared, he was a rock star, and therefore his behavior and his obvious psychological problems were ignored.

It was a high time - figuratively and literally - and everyone, including the local paper boy, was buying stock on margin.  Having a compulsive personality, Wilson invested heavily on borrowed funds and when the crash came, his lifestyle crashed with it.  And, worse for him, he was no longer a rock star to be lauded and tolerated.  He was fired.

On account of the stock market crash, Wilson and Lois lost their upscale apartment in Brooklyn Heights and moved in with her parents on Clinton Street.  When Lois’s mother died, her father remarried quickly and moved to another house in Brooklyn Heights, leaving his daughter and her dissipating husband to live in the 4-story brick row house he’d bought as a young doctor.

Had he developed a more resilient personality, he might have found a way to rebuild a stable life, but he turned to liquor during tough times and could spend days inebriated when he suffered an emotional blow. Wilson had a lot of help to recover, and he would do that for a time, but soon he’d relapse.  He was known to pass out on Schermerhorn Street near a speakeasy and not very far from the Quaker Meeting House.  In fact, he was on the street or in alleys in so many places in Brooklyn Heights, that a “Bill Wilson Tour” could be developed.

Finally, when the hospitals couldn’t help him, his wife’s yelling couldn’t help him, his own shame and destitution couldn’t stop him from drinking, it was the talking cure that saved him – talking to another drunk who had found and kept sobriety.   That, and surrendering his arrogance in favor of humility and seeking spiritual help.  Bill Wilson stopped drinking and wanted to help others.  His initial way of doing that was to invite drunks to live at the Clinton Street house, his wife Lois becoming chief cook and bottle washer, while he encouraged and aided men to get and stay sober.  At the house they experienced the gamut from fights to theft.

Wilson had lost his business reputation and could only get temporary mercy jobs from friends.  He decided to write a book and Lois took a job.  He and Lois lived on the edge from the meager contributions of the people they were helping, until finally unable to meet their mortgage obligation, the bank foreclosed on the house. 

Bill and Lois Wilson were homeless for a year – living with friends – until someone who admired their work made it possible for them to afford to buy a house in Westchester County.  The sales from the book eventually took off and the Wilson’s were able to live comfortably without financial worries. 

The house at 182 Clinton Street is still there and has a plaque on it letting the world know that this was where Bill W. started what we now know as Alcoholics Anonymous.

Post by Alana Cash

THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE

Photo by April

Great God, the only bridge of power, life and joy, the bridge that was a span, a cry, an ecstasy - that was America.'  Thomas Wolfe

I was only on the bridge once.  Some friends were visiting from Texas and we decided to walk from my apartment east of Prospect Park down to the bridge and across into Manhattan.  We took a slightly roundabout way, walking down Washington Avenue through Fort Greene, so that I could show them some of the architecture of Brooklyn and one of the oldest schools.  A walk that would have been about five miles became six, and by the time we walked into Chinatown in Manhattan and down to the Wall Street district was quite a bit longer.  But it was worth the walk.  It was always worth it.

There we were on the top level of the bridge – the part totally given over to pedestrian traffic – with the wind coming off the river and the mystic rise of the steel cables like harp strings soaring above us.  The cathedral-like arches standing there more than a century and the wooden sidewalk like a shoreline boardwalk beneath our feet and the whole of New York Harbor in our vision.  Miles and miles of water with tankers anchored in the deepest parts, water taxis scurrying across from Manhattan to Brooklyn, and the Staten Island Ferry in the distance gliding past the Statue of Liberty.  Seagulls soaring and perched and light glinting on the windows of the buildings in all the boroughs – from this place, all five boroughs can be seen.    

Traffic, cars and trucks, cross the bridge on the level below the pedestrian walkway.  No trains cross on the bridge.  All train travel is on the Manhattan Bridge right next to it.  And actually, I preferred looking at the bridge to standing on it because any time of day in any kind of weather the bridge is beautiful to look at.  At night the string lights outline its main cables so that it’s always visible in the darkness.

Photo by Wallyg

Skateboarders, skaters, and cyclists also use the pedestrian bridge and they have the expectation that anyone on foot will get out of their way.  I was almost hit by an aggressive cyclist who screamed at me “MOVE MOVE MOVE,” then gave me the finger because I wasn’t fast enough for him.

By that time, I had lived in New York long enough to know that a Native New York bike rider would not have sounded like that.  The guy could have come from New Jersey, Illinois, or Wisconsin, but he wasn’t raised in New York City.  Not that New Yorkers aren’t rude, they sure can be, but they are so used to tourists and delays and dysfunction that the language might have been the same, but the tone of voice would have been very different, less bitchy and more dramatic, and I would have moved much faster.

But that is part of the rhythm of the City.  The millions of personalities that touch it every day.  And what I learned as I lived there, instead of just visiting, is that I must keep moving along, like the river, like the traffic on the bridge, like the subways and the escalators that descend down to them -- even when they break the feet keep moving down, keep moving.  The City feels indifferent because it keeps moving, but how else would millions of people be fed and sheltered and kept warm if the City stopped.

[Clips from Ken Burns’ documentary about the bridge can be found here:  http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/brooklynbridge/film/ ]

Post by Alana Cash