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Old Brooklyn Dope Game

Aug 21st, 2010 by Caz Dolowicz

MANY STORIES TOLD
OF GIRLS DRUGGED,
AS WAS MRS. GRAFF

Anti-Vice Societies, However,
Have Been Unable to Sub-
stantiate the Tales

APPARENTLY WELL FOUNDED

“Dope” Put In Soda Water at Fount-
ains and Girls Stabbed With
Needles at Movies

Point was given today, to the remarkable story of the arrest of Armand Megaro, charged by Mrs. Marjorie Graff, a Brooklyn girl, and a bride of less than a week, with drugging her hypodermically in a Newark theater. It became known that anti-vice societies, social workers and others have been fairly inundated with complaints of similar attacks which have come from every section of the city.

Many of the stories have to do with alleged outrages in Brooklyn.

Within the last two weeks the Committee of Fourteen, which  has headquaters in Manhattan and also covers the Brooklyn field, has had a dozen such stories called to its attention. In each instance the informant was a reputable man or woman. The committee has never been able to learn the identity of the victims or discover that the reporter assailants were able to take the young women away after the drugging was accomplished.

Is Hysteria or Truth Behind the Stories?

Still, the stories have persisted with a frequency and persistency which suggests that there must be some fire where there so much smoke or else that an amazing wave of hysteria, perhaps superinduced by the publicity given white slave cases, is sweeping over the entire city— even the country in fact, for many of the stories relate to attacks in other states.

In Brooklyn these stories have come to the care of social workers, officers of the Young Women’s Christian Association, teachers in the schools and the police. They have been cropping out ever since early in the summer and have spread like wild fire until there is scarcely a quarter of the borough into which they haven’t been carried.

… TO BE CONTINUED

— from Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 6, 1913

Caz Dolowicz, was born on Sands Street in 1923; once he grazed Cara Williams hip in a Nedick’s. Who the fuck eats at Nedick’s?

Posted in All-City, Coffee, Crime, Downtown, Fort Greene, Literature, Manhattan, Music, Navy Yard, Religion, Sex | No Comments »

A Brief History Of Brooklyn Cycling

Aug 10th, 2010 by Kenny Wisdom

Believe it or not, it was my bike. This one I had bought at Madison Square Garden, at the end of a six-day race. It had been made in Chemnitz, Bohemia and the six-day rider who owned it was a German, I believe. What distinguished it from other racing bikes was that the upper bar slanted down towards the handle bars.

I had two other bikes of American manufacture. These I would lend my friends when in need. But the one from the Garden no one but myself rode. It was like a pet. And why not? Did it not see me through all my times of trouble and despair?

Yes, I was in the throes of love, a first love, than which nothing is more disastrous, as a rule. My friends had become disgusted with me; they were deserting me, or  vice versa, one by one. I was desolate and alone. Whether my parents knew of my said plight I don’t recall, but I am sure they knew that something was bothering me. That “something” was a beautiful young woman named Una Gifford, whom I had met during my high school days.

As I have told elsewhere we were such naive creatures perhaps we kissed two or three times– at a party, for example, never elsewhere. Though we both had telephones we never telephoned one another. Why? I ask myself. (Because it would have been too bold, perhaps.) We did write each other, but out letters were far apart. I remember how each day when I came home I turned first to the mantel piece, where letters were kept, and it was almost always a blank absence that greeted me.

It was a period when I spent most of days job-huting (presumably). Actually, I went to a movie or the burlesk (if I could afford it). Suddenly, I stopped doing this and did nothing. Nothing but ride the bike. Often I was in the saddle, so to speak, from morning til evening. I rode everywhere and usually at a good clip. Some days, I encountered some of the six-day riders at the fountain at Prospect Park. They would permit to set the pace for them that led from the Park to Coney Island.

I would visit old haunts, such as Bensonhurst, Ulmer Park, Sheepshead Bay and Coney Island. And always, no matter how diverse the scenery, I was thinking of her.
—from Henry Miller My Bike and Other Friends (Capra Press, 1978)


Photograph, “Fort Greene Gloryhole: Grand Opening!” by Amber Tides, courtesy the LTV Press

Posted in Bay Ridge, Bushwick, Clinton Hill, Coney Island, Fort Greene, Greenpoint, Park Slope, Sex, Sheepshead Bay, Sports, Sunset Park, Transportation | No Comments »

Strange Fate of 1930s Brooklyn Literature

Jul 31st, 2010 by Kenny Wisdom

I don’t think Faulkner is worth the antebellum South, and I would rather not have had Kafka at the proce of twentieth-century European carnage. But in trying to locate contemporary American writing I look at the thirties, that supposedly meager decade if misfired artistic energy and of duped intellectuals and bad proletarian novels, and I see not just novels, and I see not just Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe but James T. Farrell, Anne Porter, Richard Wright*, Nelson Algren, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Nathanael West, Dorothy Parker, Edward Dahlberg, Dalton Trumbo, Zora Neale Hurston, Horace McCoy, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Hellman, James Agee, Edmund Wilson, Daniel Fuchs, Henry Roth, Henry Miller. For Starters. A literature of immense variety and contention, an argument from every side, full of passion, excessive, self-consuming.
— E.L. Doctorow, from Jack London, Hemingway and the Constiution: Selected Essyays 1977-1992

boccaccio-wwib

Kenny Wisdom’s forthcoming novel, Strange Fate of Proud Beauty, rumbles through a case involving two blondes, blackmail and a double dose of MURDER! He grew up on Dean Street.

* In Richard Wright’s papers there is an unpublished essay… “Alas, My Old Favorite Brooklyn Barbershop”? Praise be Hazel Rowley!

Posted in Bay Ridge, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn Heights, Brownsville, Canarsie, Coffee, Crime, Downtown, Drugs, East New York, Flatbush, Fort Greene, Fort Hamilton, Greenpoint, Jazz, Literature, Navy Yard, Park Slope, Red Hook, Sex, South Brooklyn, Williamsburg, politics | No Comments »

Engaging the 14th Brooklyn– Again!

Jul 22nd, 2010 by Caz Dolowicz

As a man in the 12th Alabama wrote, “we were into it hot and heavy. I thought I had been in hot places before— I thought I had heard Minnie ball; but that day capped the climax.” Once in position the Alabamians stubbornly kept up a steady fire of their own, but they could not advance any farther.

It was at the lower part of the hill, where the Yankees did not have the advantage of being behind breastworks, that Allegheny Johnson believed he had the best hope of breaking through and turning in behind Culp’s Hill defenders. The Federals here were the balance of Geary’s brigage, the Pennsylvania brigade of Thomas L. Kane, and two regiments of Charles Candy’s brigade. General Geary followed Greene’s example and rotated regiments to keep his battle lines fresh and fast-firing. Over the morning his line would be reinforced by a miscellany— men from Harry Lockwood’s brigade, a brigade from the Sixth Corps, even a pair of regiments from the First Corps. The latter were the 147th New York and 84th New York (or 14th Brooklyn, as its men preferred to be called), and their brief engagement gave them the distinction of being the only Union regiments to fight on all three days at Gettysburg.
—from Stephen W. Sears, Gettysburg (2003)

Caz “Red Legged Devil” Dolowicz, born on Sands Street in 1923, has published three volumes of poetry under the pen name “Gary Owen.” He never met his father but family legend says he was a Zouave and a shanty Irish drunk from Red Hook.

Posted in Bushwick, Civil War, Downtown, Flatbush, Flatlands, Fort Hamilton, Irish, Literature, Music, Navy Yard, New Utrecht, Red Hook, Sex, Williamsburg, politics | No Comments »

In Memory of the 14th Brooklyn

Jul 17th, 2010 by Kenny Wisdom

THE MARTYR

(Indicative of the Passion of the People on the 15th Day of April, 1865)

Good Friday was the day
Of the prodigy and crime,
When they killed him in his pity,
When they killed him in his prime
Of clemency and calm—
When with yearning he was filled
To redeem the evil-willed,
And, though conqueror, be kind;
But they killed him in his kindness,
In their madness and their blindness,
And they killed him from behind.

There is sobbing of the strong,
And a pall upon the land;
But the People in their weeping
Bare the iron hand:
Beware the People weeping
When they bare the iron hand.

He lieth in his blood—
The father in his face;
They have killed him, the Forgiver—
The Avenger takes his place,
The Avenger wisely stern,
Who in righteousness shall do
What the heavens call him to,
And the parricides remand;
For they killed him in his kindness,
In their madness and their blindness,
And his blood is on their hand.

There is sobbing of the strong,
And a pall upon the land;
But the People in their weeping
Bare the iron hand:
Beware the People weeping
When they bare the iron hand.

—Herman Melville, from Battle Pieces & Aspects of the War (1866)

Photo, “Go Left At 69th Street, Bay Ridge” by Amber Tides, courtesy the Xaverian High School, Class of 1966

Posted in Bay Ridge, Civil War, Literature, Manhattan, Sunset Park, Transportation, politics | No Comments »

Dennis Hopper Memorial 4th of July BBQ

Jul 5th, 2010 by Kenny Wisdom

“There is nothing that ever happens to a woman or a man that he or she doesn’t cause to happen, whether it’s on a mystical level or whether it’s on a spiritual level or whether it’s on a human level.”

“What is good, bad, right and wrong? There are only 1 through 9 numbers. There are no fractions. You either like or dislike, which is weak. You either love or you hate. And if you’re healthy, you try to spend time with people you love rather than people you hate.”

“It has taken me so long to ever direct a movie. I want to do my work. And I want to be allowed to be do my work. But I want to do my work, not their work.”

“I was sleeping on a mattress when I edited Easy Rider and I can sleep on a mattress again.”

“Orson Welles, poor bastard, was turned down by the studio that I’m making this movie for on a half million dollar picture. If there isn’t an audience for Orson Welles in the universities and for the people in this country, then why are we making movies?”

“There’s no way to break my heart. They’re not going to break my heart, man, because I’ve been in prison for a long time and they can’t break me. I’d rather die fighting than die getting fat.“

“I’ve got to act in my movies because I love acting, because I’m really good at it and I never really had a chance to show it. I had to take shit and make gold out of it. And now I’ve got gold and they’re trying to make shit out of it.”

“I used to eat peyote with the Indians, years ago when I was a kid. I was 18, 19. And I had a very heavy death trip. I saw charred and dead bodies hanging from trees. I saw human life as the lowest form of life. I saw the earth as being a cancerous growth in a perfect universe. And I saw a Master Surgeon come and just cut us out like you would a piece of cancer out of a healthy body.”

“I can’t hide me from you because I don’t admire that in other people. I like to go right into the eye of the hurricane. I don’t want to be thrown around on the outside.”

“I think that Michelle Phillips is probably the only one that’s really scared me badly… really got to my head. I find that people who play games scare the shit out of me because I’m dealing with a moment-to-moment reality and they’re dealing on a level where they’re planning something to happen.”

“I find that women are much more open with women than men are with men, much more sensual.”

“I do enjoy group sex with women. It’s very seldom a reality but it’s certainly reality occasionally and has always been a fantasy and I assume always will be a fantasy of mine.”

“I watched a fly beat itself to death on a window when, if it settled down on a chair and tried to feel the draft of the wind, it might have had a chance to get outside. I guess really Peter was one who believed in me enough to give me a chance.”

“Lenin believed that the revolution would be fought with the camera and that minds would be won in a theater rather than on a battlefield. When you go to a dark theater, you’re giving yourself to that screen and wanting to believe, and and it’s done well, you do believe.”

“I think that the audience has been terribly underestimated and I think that audiences don’t want to be audiences but to have experiences.”

“People talk about the great individual. Well, there is nothing in this world we do alone.”

“I’m still 34, terribly naive. The whole world of business, the money-mongers, it’s a totally outrageous world to me. I want to make movies and I want to talk about humanity in symbolistic, mystical terms. I have very little to do with business. I’m probably trapped in a world of my own creation.”

“Editing is a very painful experience for me. It’s like having a child and cutting its arms off and putting its eyes out and chopping it up. And the day you’re really happy is also a very sad day, when you sit in a theater and you see it’s finished and you know that it’s no longer yours and that it’s going to go out and do its own thing.”

“I think that, in our lifetime, a man without a gun is a fool.”

“See a movie… be a movie.”

— Kenny Wisdom (all quotes from American Dreamer (1971))

Photo “Courtland Meat Market, 4th of July” by Amber Tides, courtesy Caz Dolowicz

Posted in Africa Talks, Bronx, Crime, Drugs, Flicks, Latino, Music, Religion, Sex, labor, politics | No Comments »

Brooklyn at Gettysburg, 1863

Jul 3rd, 2010 by Caz Dolowicz

THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG

A detailed account of the battle of Gettysburg has been received. On Wednesday, General Reynolds, commanding the first corps of our army, attacked the rebel Division of Gen. Ewell, west of the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The rebels took up a postion on rising ground west of town. Reynolds, somewhat hastily, and before his line of battle was perfectly formed, crossed the intervening valley and attacked the rebels. Our forces were driven back, closely pursued by the rebels, who expected to convert the retreat into a rout. On gaining ground formerly occupied by our troops, the right of one of our divisins rallied and got in the rear of General Archer’s brigage, which was closely pressing the centre of our retreating forces.

By this movement, Archer, his Staff, and the forces under him were captured, numbering in the aggregate fifteen hundred men. These prisoners have been sent to Baltimore and Washington. The 14th Regiment of Brooklyn, the 6th Wisconsin, and the 95th New York claim credit of the highly creditable act.

Reynolds succeeded in maintaining his old position and again prepared to attack the foe. Our forces again crossed the valley which separated the two armies, and gained a hill on the othe side, losing heavily however. Skirmishers were thrown out; General Reynolds, while reconnoitering in person, was struck with a musket ball in the back of the neck, and, according to some accounts, was killed instantly. Another erport has it that he concealed the character of his wound from his men, made his way to the rear, where he died in a few minutes.

After the fight had continued for an hour and a half, the Eleventh Corps’ opportunity arrived, and its commander, General Howard, took command of our forces. General Hill’s divisions, about the same time, came to Ewell’s assistance. Artillery was opened on both sides and some of the rebel shells fell within the town, doing some damage. Twice they were driven back, but the third time our forces retired before them; the First Corps passed through the town, leaving the Eleventh Corps bear the brunt of the contest.

This is the devision of our Army whose conduct at Chancellorsville was so severely censured. On this occasion they are said to have redeemed their reputation. They lost, it is said, 3,000 men. The rebels occupied the town but did not push their success further. Gen. Reynolds is censured by some of the newspaper correspondents for forcing an enagement which, if postponed until Howard’s Corps had arrived, might have resulted differently.

Our entire loss is estimated at five thousand and includes several officers. Gen. Longstreet’s division shortly after came up. The main portion of the rebel army concentrated five miles from Gettysburg, and our forces were preparing to give them a battle. Gen. Sedgwick, it is said, has taken up a position in the rear, that the full fruition of a victory, if we secure one, may be obtained.

The rebel loss in the battle of Gettysburg does not fall short of ours. The rumor that 6,000 prisoners have been captured is based, we presume, on the fact that we took Archer’s entire brigade, which it appears, was composed of but fifteen hundred men.

The great battle between the two armies is now going on. The safety of Washington, of Baltimore and of Philadelphia hangs on the result. We would be false to our duty if we did not warn our people to prepare for the worst, while hoping for the best.
—Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 3, 1863


The Death of General Reynolds

Posted in Civil War, Irish, Southern Thing, Sunset Park, politics | No Comments »

Pies On The Road To Gettysburg

Jul 1st, 2010 by Kenny Wisdom

Virtually every diarist and letter writer in the army commented on the friendliness of the inhabitants they met north of the Potomac, in contrast to what they had encountered over the past months in Virginia. The First Corps crossed the Pennsylvania line on June 30, and Lyman Holford of the 6th Wisconsin noted in his diary, “The people here turn out in holiday attire, wave flags, give us bread and butter, and water and in every way shpw their good will toward us.” Diarist Charles Wainwright, commanding the First Corps’ artillery, took note of this as well, but he also noticed citizens who did not let their Unionist feelings interfere with the profit motive. “The people along the road sell everything, and at very high prices,” Wainwright grumbled; “fifty cents for a large loaf of bread, worth, say, twenty; fifteen to twenty-five cents for a canteen, three pints, of skimmed milk; how much for pies I do not know but they were in great demand…” But he admitted that this was by no means the universal practice. Many of the people “will not sell, but give all they can; and we are cheered through all the villages by good wishes and pleasant smiles.”
This welcome was particular exhiliarating to the men of the sixty-even Pennsylvania regiments to the Army of the Potomac. When the 12th Pennsylvania Reserves, just now joining the Potomac army as a reinforcement from the Department of Washington, crossed the Mason-Dixon Line into their home state, E.D. Burdick entered in his diary: “The Col. halted us at the time and the boys gave 3 cheers for old Pa. and we vowed never to leave the State until we had driven the rebels out… or perish in the attempt; this is how we feel to-day.”
—Stephen W. Sears, Gettysburg (2003)

Photo “15th and 50th New York Engineers Memorial, Gettysburg PA” by Kenny Wisdom

Posted in All-City, Literature, South Brooklyn, Sunset Park, politics | No Comments »

But Dad, It’s Hilobrow!

Jun 29th, 2010 by Caz Dolowicz

Ignorant of the ways of publicity and chance alike, I’m unsure how these things happen but HiLoBrow.com has just been named by Time magazine’s Best Blogs of the Year . I could make up some things but not that! We’ve been meaning to catch up with WWIB’s  recently elusive publisher, Brian Berger, who doesn’t answer the phone, won’t say where he lives and, if he replies at all to e-mail, it’s gibberish like “Dude, I’m a historian— Pickett’s charge had no chance!— Remember Mother Jones in Colorado? At Coney Island?!— Give my love to Stumpy; Sandy sends her best.” Her best what? Among Berger’s fellow HiLo contributors, by the way, are Luc Sante, once a poet, and philosopher Mark Kingwell but what any of ‘em have to do with the price of apple butter in Prospect Heights I just can’t say. Perhaps there are clues among the following:

composer and pianist George Walker

composer Charles Wuorinen

writer Randolph Bourne

musician and writer Tom T. Hall

MC Melle Mel

writer and activist Gary Snyder

musician Charles Mingus

musician and composer Artur Schnabel

musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron

artist and educator Josef Albers

poet, photographer and publisher Jonathan Williams

musician and activist Harry Belafonte

writer Anais Nin

pop singer Gene Pitney

writer James Joyce

writer Richard Brautigan

blues musician Elmore James

country musician and icon Dolly Parton

jazz musician and activist Max Roach

Not a bad list, I’ll admit, but it’d be nice to know how Berger got these assignments, and why, by my reckoning, Max Roach is the only Brooklyn native. — Caz Dolowicz

Caz Dolowicz has been from Maine to Mexico but was born on Sands Street in 1923. No way he could pick just one favorite Harry Belafonte song but Jamacia Farewell might is one of ‘em.

Posted in Bay Ridge, Bed-Stuy, Carroll Gardens, Coney Island, Crime, Downtown, Flicks, Irish, Jazz, Latino, Literature, Manhattan, Midwood, Music, Ocean Hill, Park Slope, Poetry, Queens, Red Hook, Religion, Rockaways, Sex, Transportation, West Indian, Williamsburg, hip-hop, labor, politics | No Comments »

Jim Knipfel’s Sad Day In Queens

Jun 25th, 2010 by Kenny Wisdom

There was once a very sad and impressionable man who lived in a shabby apartment in a desolate section of Queens. Grady was his name, and it had been quite a long time since anything had gone right for him. Eight months earlier, he’d been fired from his job at the pencil factory. It wasn’t a great, but it had paid the bills and kept food on the table. He hadn’t been able to find any work since.

Fed up with his lack of initative, his wife had packed her bags, grabbed the kids, and moved to Jersey, leaving him alone. And now the landlord was threatening to have him evicted for being months behind on his rent.

His clothes grew threadbare and smelly, as he could neither afford new ones nor even spare the quarters necessary to do a few loads of laundry. For food, he’d taken to hanging our near the dumpsters behind area grocery stores, waiting for nightfall so he could rummage through the discarded bruised vegetables and dented cans.

His days grew slower and heavier, and he wandered the streets of the city, stopping at each business he came across to ask for work. He was often sent away before he could finish asking on acount of his foul smell and unkempt appearance. Sometimes he was granted an interview, but usually only as a cruel joke. It was never very long before he found himself back on the sidewalk, his face as long as a rainy week.
—from These Children Who Come At You With Knives (Simon & Schuster, 2010)

rated A- by Entertainment Weekly— really!

Photograph, “Shabby, Desolate & Almost Queens” by Amber Tides, from the collection of the Lindenwood Historical Society.

See also: Jim Knipfel’s Park Slope Liebestod, winner of the 2009 Lee Mortimer Award for Crime Writing.

Posted in Crime, East New York, Literature, Manhattan, Park Slope, Queens, Transportation, labor | No Comments »

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