Brooklyn Noir 3 Read online

  Hunterfly Road, which looks like a wide dirt path, runs diagonal to one of the modern streets. I entered the gate and found four perfectly restored pre–Civil War wood frames that look as if they were out of Colonial Williamsburg. The Hunterfly Road Houses, as they are now called, are surrounded by the Kingsborough projects, condos, and single-family homes built later in the twentieth century. They tower over the Weeksville Heritage Center like invading alien ships.

  Like most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century homes, these houses have small rooms, box-shaped, with low ceilings and narrow staircases that can only accommodate one person going up or down at a time. Architects working for the Center have discovered that two of the homes were built in the same style as Southern slave quarters. Inside, the rooms are sparsely furnished; the Heritage Center needs more funds.

  I came armed with a list of questions, the answers to most of which could only be speculated upon. The town of Weeksville is where victims of the Draft Riots escaped to in 1863. Hundreds of blacks from Manhattan and other parts of Brooklyn took refuge here from white mobs who lynched, burned, and beat them because they were angry about being drafted into the Civil War.

  “We don’t know if anyone came to these particular homes,” Lauren Rhodes, the educational coordinator and guide, told me, “but there’s a good chance that they did.” The local celebrities back then, Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, Moses P. Cobb, and Junius C. Morel, a journalist and principal of Colored School No. 2, lived in Weeksville, but their homes as well as the school are now gone. The African Civilization Society met somewhere in Weeksville, and the Garnet Field Club practiced baseball in a field, somewhere. The Brooklyn Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, which took in homeless children and those fresh from slavery, now belongs to a repair shop for the New York City Transit Authority.

  Thanks to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s online archives, I know that Harriet Tubman spoke in Weeksville, as did Fredrick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. Elizabeth Keckly had a correspondence with Fredrick Douglass, and when she retired she taught at Wilberforce University in Ohio, the same place that Susan Smith McKinney-Steward worked after her retirement. At some time during her stay in New York, Keckly probably visited Weeksville, but I can only guess, since all that remains of the place is four little houses and a few churches scattered inside of what used to be its boundaries.

  I was ready to work on the play, and though I didn’t find a lot of what I was looking for, I had a sense of what a woman like Keckly experienced in 1860 New York. Hope and fear is what African Americans were living with back then. Hope for a better life, and fear that the outcome of the Civil War would throw them back into slavery. On that the evidence is pretty clear. How wonderful it would be to see more of the places in which their dreams and struggles took place. Back at Plymouth Church, I had asked Lois Rosebrooks why white people tend not to think of black history as their own history. The minute the question came out of my mouth, I wanted to take it back. It seemed a rude thing to ask of a woman who has devoted much of her life to preserving African American history. I could tell she was taken aback by my question but thankfully not offended. “People are bored by history,” she said. “They don’t want to know it, black or white. I don’t know,” she continued, “I’d have to think more on that.”

  Clearly, I had to as well.

  I can’t stop thinking about what that librarian said to me: “You can’t change history because you don’t like what you find.” So much of American history lifts up our triumphs, while ignoring our infamy. And though black history is white history, much of it is a painful place to revisit, and so preserving it is not a priority. Changing it—or worse, destroying it— is like saying it never happened. The crimes are perpetrated once again.

  In her retirement, Keckly taught at Wilberforce College before returning to Washington, D.C., where she died. The Harmony Cemetery, where she was buried, was paved over in the 1960s and her remains, unclaimed, were placed in an unmarked grave. Unfortunately, I won’t be going to Washington, D.C.

  PART IV

  SKELSIES

  In which two to six players assemble around a crooked course of obstacle lines and periodic stopping points chalked on the street or sidewalk pavement. Each player uses fingers to shoot a bottlecap (the “skelly”) step by step through the obstacle course, halting just before the stopping points. Succeeding players may elect to “kill” opponents by knocking into their skelsies en route to the finish.

  THE CREAMFLAKE KID

  BY JESS KORMAN

  Crown Heights

  It was to have been a productive workday. He would grind out six more pages. In the television industry swamp, in that summer of 1985, “pages” meant scripted scenes that a producer deemed worth a camera’s time and trouble. This was how the Burbank geniuses measured their employee’s worth: How many shootable pages could the hack du jour grind out?

  According to Larry Sloan, né Scharfsky, you could substitute the word pounds for pages. That’s what they wanted. Pounds of shootable crap for a low-budget series set in Brooklyn. They wanted to film “real people” and let them act out the stories, a terrible idea in which a bunch of nobodies carried on like somebodies. It was also wonderfully cheap to produce.

  Manufacturing the six pages of this proposed disaster in his eight-by-ten rental office in the Artists and Writers Building on Little Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills was no easy feat. The director Billy Wilder rented the office across the hall. The aging and iconic Kirk Douglas, carrying a container of English Breakfast tea, sometimes shuffled through one of the smoked-glass doors three down. Larry’s fellow tenants, highly worshiped avatars of the craft, were a stinging reminder of how low he had sunk in the scheme of things.

  Larry Sloan was taking the buck and running. A shameful crime, he felt, but he was getting away with it. After all, nobody got hurt but Larry.

  The walls of his office were painted in a particularly tired-out shade of gray. The cool of the Mexican stone floors seeped through his thin-soled Rockports. A dusty window looked out upon an alley, offering a glimpse of bougainvillea and the back wall of a garage. The stunning California sun, as reliable as it was relentless day after day, redeemed an otherwise grim view. As it is said in L.A., another goddamn beautiful day.

  The pages were not coming today because Larry Sloan was somewhere else in his head, lost in his own Brooklyn, a long time ago, where his crime wave began.

  The Creamflake Bakery, on Utica Avenue between Carroll and President, was a popular establishment in Crown Heights, catering not only to the Jews, but the Irish too, as well as some Italians—and, lately, newly arrived Caribbeans, whatever they were.

  You could get challah at the Creamflake and Irish soda breads. Green cookies were sold on St. Patrick’s Day, of course, and elaborate confections were available for Christmas, Hanukkah, Easter, and other religious events, such as when the Brooklyn Dodgers won the National League pennant the year before, which was 1952.

  They called him Loo-Loo. The nickname had stuck since his baby days. He was ten now, and Al and Dotty still called him that. This was before being sensitive to your kid’s feelings was called “good parenting.” At P.S. 189 on East New York Avenue, the kids ragged on him about the girly-sounding moniker.

  “It’s not Lulu,” he would snarl, spelling it out. “It’s Loo-Loo, you stupid moron.” This was the big put-down of 1953, the gilded age of “moron” jokes on the tube.

  Anyhow, Loo-Loo’s skin was thick. He had tons of friends. He was a first-class punch-ball player. He could fire a pink Spalding—duly pronounced spaldeen—the whole length between a pair of sewer covers in a neat trajectory. Automatic homer. On President Street, this was status.

  The other thing about Loo-Loo’s popularity was that Al Scharfsky owned the Creamflake. When your father sells chocolate cookies, jelly doughnuts, and charlotte russe, there is no shortage of kids who will gladly accompany you to the bakery for the sweet possibility of a handout.

  Jack
Horn was Al’s partner. Jack was in charge of cakes. Al himself took care of the breads and rolls. Everything was baked in old stone ovens with piles of coal that glowed eternally in the corners.

  Loo-Loo hung around sometimes. Jack and his father would let him squeeze jelly into the doughnuts, using a metal contraption with a lever and a long spout. Sometimes, the Russian help baked alligator-shaped bread with raisin eyes, especially for Loo-Loo. Ten o’clock at night or so, the cops drove by to collect bags of “stale,” leftover breads and rolls which they took back to the 71st Precinct station house on Empire Boulevard.

  Along Loo-Loo’s stretch of Utica was the usual constellation of neighborhood shops—fruits and vegetables, butcher, freshly slaughtered chickens, fish, dresses, radio repair, barbers, and a candy store with a soda fountain. Two blocks further up, the retail pattern repeated, including a bakery just like the Creamflake, only it was called the Union because it was near Union Street.

  Although people preferred shopping as few steps as possible from where they lived, they would sometimes cross the continent into the next block. Which is why Al Scharfsky considered the Union Bakery his arch competitor, especially in the summer of ’53 with the place under mysterious new management.

  Trolley cars once clanged their way up and down Utica, their motormen wearing neckties. Kids put pennies on the tracks and they got flattened out when the cars rattled past. Now there were buses, though the old tracks remained on the cobblestones as parallel reminders of the past, beyond Eastern Parkway into the unknown and ominous infinity of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

  This was Loo-Loo’s universe. President Street terminated at the enormous Lincoln Terrace Park, which separated the Andy Hardy tranquility of Crown Heights from the mean and dangerous Brownsville, birthplace of Murder Incorporated. While the park had plenty of green spaces for a game, the kids preferred the “gutter,” a.k.a. the street. Two grand maple trees on either side were markers for first and third. The sewer cover in the middle was second.

  Crown Heights was not at all like the fabled and dangerous Brooklyn of Cagney movies. It was more like some small town in middle America, at least the small-town America image perpetrated by Hollywood’s immigrant studio heads.

  Very innocent. Very tranquil. There were rows of one-and two-family houses, some of them in the Renaissance Revival, Georgian, and Romanesque styles, sometimes bookended by five-story apartment houses on each corner. Looming shade trees, elms and sycamores, lined the sidewalks like protective uncles.

  But for some, danger seemed near at all times. Something in the air, obviously lurking yet inexplicable; a conventional notion that someone was coming to get you if you didn’t watch your ass. One minute, everything seemed safe in the neighborhood. Then a cop car would come tearing down Utica on the way to a murder or a holdup someplace, its siren splitting the June air like heat lightning.

  At the supper table, to make matters even more unsettling, Loo-Loo would sit staring into the dry chicken on his plate— chicken cooked to within an inch of its taste—exchanging looks with Rita, his little sister, while Al Scharfsky sang disturbing arias.

  “It’s changing, you know. The whole neighborhood. They’re coming in.”

  “Who’s coming, Pop?” Loo-Loo asked.

  “People. The Immigrants. Coloreds. Spanish. People from Aruba.”

  “Where’s Aruba, Pop?”

  “It’s down there. The rich people go there for gambling and ha-cha-cha and the criminals from there come to Crown Heights.”

  “What’s wrong if they want to come here, Pop? Maybe you’ll sell more rye bread.”

  “They don’t eat rye bread, Loo-Loo. They eat their own food. Things with fish in it.”

  “Maybe they’ll like your rye bread.”

  “Maybe,” Al said, then changed the subject. “No sooner we got rid of Murder Incorporated, we got to deal with this element.”

  “What’s an element?” Rita asked.

  “A criminal element. Criminals are attracted to this neighborhood, honey.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Rita, nodding her head, dimly satisfied.

  Loo-Loo’s mother raised her hand to say, “They’re just poor people, Al. Besides, Murder Inc. around here, that was ten, twenty years ago.”

  “Oh, they’re still around,” said Al. “Believe me, Dotty. And nearby—just over into Brownsville.” He lowered his voice, so as not to scare the kids, which scared the kids. “You saw on the Senator Kefauver hearings a couple years ago—those mobsters. Albert Anastasia. Frank Erickson. Frank Costello. They’re still around assassinating each other left and right. Some of them live right around here, probably.”

  “I never saw Frank Costello on President Street,” said Dotty.

  Al leaned closer to his wife.

  “You know those people who just bought the Union Bakery?” Al paused. “They could be connected to the mob.”

  Dotty snickered, which did nothing to soothe the frightened kids. “You’re crazy, Al. What would the mob want with a bakery? And why are you whispering?”

  “I’m just saying, the criminal element’s all around and we have to be careful. Furthermore, look what happened to that shoe salesman last year—what’s-his-name, Arnold Schuster. A Brooklyn guy. One of us. An innocent citizen.”

  Loo-Loo, an inveterate reader of the tabloids his father brought home every day and likewise an ardent viewer of the Kefauver hearings, enlightened his mother: “Anastasia had him bumped off. Schuster snitched to the cops about Willie Sutton the bank robber.”

  “Where’d you get that?” Al asked his boy.

  “From Kefauver. Remember, Pop?”

  Al, grumpily attempting to keep control of the conversation, replied quickly. “Arnold Schuster had nothing to do with Murder Inc., which was before you were born, Loo-Loo. What you say we change the subject?”

  “Murder Incorporated were the ones who threw Abe Reles out the window,” Loo-Loo now informed his goggle-eyed sister.

  “Where’d you hear that?” Al barked.

  “I dunno,” said Loo-Loo. Not wishing to be forbidden access to tabs, he lied, “The schoolyard.”

  “Ah-hah! Schoolyard University,” Al said with disgust.

  “They said this guy Abe Reles gave names of gangsters to the G-men,” continued Loo-Loo in a rush, “and the detectives were supposed to be guarding him, but then he fell out of the window at the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island and it’s a big mystery because they don’t know if he was pushed out of the window of room 623 or if he was trying to escape.”

  Al eyed his son despairingly. “You know the room number, I see?”

  The boy was on a roll. “They called Abe Reles ‘the canary who sang but couldn’t fly.’”

  Al pushed away his plate. “Who’s feeding you this trash?”

  “I’m interested in crime. Just like you, Pop.”

  I’d prefer you to be interested in long division,” Al said, after which he grumped into the living room where he could read the Post and maybe the Brooklyn Eagle—and certainly the Journal-American and the World and the Daily Mirror, these three being the reading mainstays of the bathroom—after which he would probably doze off, having begun his day at the bakery at the usual starting time of 5 o’clock in the a.m.

  Gangsters were just the half of it. Spies also fascinated Loo-Loo, especially the Rosenbergs.

  Convicted of being in league with the Reds a couple of years back, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sent up the river. Loo-Loo hadn’t thought much about it at the time; he was only eight, after all. But he knew Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg were parents, like his own, and that they had two sons about Loo-Loo’s own age. This made the case seem closer to home than the business about the racket guys Senator Kefauver talked about, guys like Joe Adonis and Frank Erickson.

  But the thing that kept the spy case hot for Loo-Loo was Al Scharfsky’s supper-table lament that it was an awful shame that Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg were Jewish.

  Weren’t they guilty?

  Al sum
marized the case. “Guilty? They’re Jewish. We got enough troubles.”

  One warm night in that June of ’53, Loo-Loo went out to Utica Avenue after supper for an ice-cream cone. Then he strolled to Chudow’s radio repair store, across the street from the Creamflake, to watch television. Very few people owned TV sets, and a small crowd had gathered, as usual, to watch a flickering black-and-white DuMont screen in the store window. This was evening recreation in Crown Heights.

  The news was on. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing at sundown.

  Loo-Loo worked his way through the onlookers, his cone dripping. There was no sound from the TV set, just the ghostly screen, with mugshots of the recently departed spies. A man in an Adam Hat and a business suit stood watching.

  “What’s goin’ on?” Loo-Loo asked the man.

  “They stole atomic bomb secrets, Sonny. Gave ’em to the Russians.”

  Loo-Loo was silent. He already knew that.

  “Yep. Espionage. They fried ’em both for espionage.”

  “Jeez,” was all Loo-Loo could say, wondering what espionage was.

  “Yeah, and they said that Julius went just like that after the juice was turned on,” said the man, snapping his fingers. “But they had trouble with the missus. Electrodes weren’t working right. A witness said he saw smoke coming out of her head.”