In 1964, there were two main ways to travel from New York to Florida; by airplane or train. Airplane was of course the preferred mode. But if one traveled by train – there were two options: Seaboard and Atlantic Coast Lines (these were the days before Amtrak and the last gasp of private train companies). Seaboard was the preferred train company. And if one did travel on the train one booked a compartment in a Pullman car as opposed to coach – which was basically a seat that reclined (if you were fortunate to get one that wasn’t broken). In 1964 my family departed Penn Station on an Atlantic Coast Line train – in coach. It was basically steerage on wheels.

A visit with the grandparents

Herman and Katie spent December through March in Miami Beach.  They were an immigrant success story and at the age of 60 in 1961 my grandfather sold his business and he and my grandmother wintered in the Saxony Hotel on Collins Avenue and then an apartment on Biscayne Bay.  Both were classic mid-century modern with lobbies decorated in Marie Antoinette luxe – lots of crystal chandeliers, furniture with gilt trim and of course the de rigueur grand staircase to nowhere (in fact not unlike the lobby of our circa 1967 apartment house on 57^th Street!). Designed by Morris Lapidus, whose design ethos was “more is never enough,” it appealed to the nouveau riche clientele who scoffed at the Bauhausian “less is more” aesthetic (“Vhat is that? Plain white walls, some glass and cold steel, Vus?  It needs some brocade, a Grecian column or two and maybe something French provincial?).  It was a palace, and I loved visiting my grandparents, even if we didn’t fly to get there.

I’m not sure why we didn’t fly.  Perhaps it was the memory of a distant cousin  who died in a plane crash so the idea of the entire family stuffed into a sardine can that would cascade into flames over the Chesapeake Bay was not going to happen.   I’m not sure if they were too late or too cheap to book a Pullman – probably too late because my parents were extraordinarily bad planners who lived above their means – so we ended up with four seats in coach in 1964.

It had birds!

And that was my first experience at Penn Station.  I was eight and my sister Edria was five.  Penn Station – so I learned much later – was scheduled for demolition.  For all I knew it may have already started.  But I have vivid memories of waiting…and waiting…and waiting in the old Penn Station prior to boarding the train.  The place was vast. I had never been in a building so big with such huge windows with rays of sunlight pouring in.  And birds!  Pigeons I guess, flying above towards the soaring ceiling. I suspect our wait wasn’t that long – but to an eight year old it was forever until we boarded the train and found our seats.

I am sure the “Are we there yet?” questions started before we even got out of the tunnel into New Jersey. My sister and I amused ourselves by singing.  One of our songs was the newly popular Downtown, by Petula Clark. It must have been very amusing the first five or six times we sang it – loudly – to the other passengers.  A real brother sister act.  I am sure it was much less amusing the next 300 times as the train slowly meandered down the east coast.

I recall putting up a fuss when my mother tried to make me wear pajamas.  On a train? In front of strangers?  NO WAY!  It was my first time seeing the country and I remember looking at farmland and junk yards and many small towns through the undoubtedly dirty windows.  My mom may have brought some food for us – but as the not every good planners they were, we spent a lot of time going to the dining car where I ate ‘flapjacks’ – not pancakes – at every meal.

The train made many stops – both in the major cities and little villages.  If there was time my parents would let us get off with them for a “breather.”  I would say for a smoke – my Mom for a cigarette and my dad for a cigar but it was 1964 – and everyone smoked on the train.   The stops were to let us walk a bit.  As we got further south the temperatures got warmer and we were met with sultry southern breezes wafting amidst the diesel smells.  More than a few times I am sure I wandered a little too far and made my parents frantic as the train was about to leave. When the train pulled into Miami I am sure the station there wasn’t an iota as grand as Penn.  Anyway, we ran to my grandfather’s big blue Caddy for a week of fun in the sun.

Swimming – but not for all

As the genesis of this blog is about swimming I need to note the following memory.  Every mid century hotel in Miami Beach had a pool – usually kidney shaped.  Surrounding the pool where chaise lounges where all the old ladies tanned themselves so their skin was similar to the stuffed miniature crocodiles sold in the souvenir shops on Lincoln Road.  Their husbands, clad in their “cabana sets” – baggy trunks with coordinated terry cloth jackets – played high stakes poker at nearby tables.

The kids would always play on the steps of the pool.  Except for the holidays, there were never many children. And it seemed like there was never anyone my age.  So I was excited when my grandmother’s cleaning lady brought her son Thomas – who was my age – on the days she cleaned.  We usually played in the apartment under the watchful eye of his mother.  One sunny afternoon I told him we should go to the pool.  I suppose his mother wasn’t aware we had left, my grandmother was out with my mom and sister and my grandfather was playing cards.  So off we went. The memory is hazy but I remember stepping into the pool with Thomas following me.  Then the memory is of many adults and the words, “He’s not supposed to be here,” followed by a trip back upstairs with scary adults and Thomas leaving the apartment with his mother – never to be seen again.  It wasn’t until years later did I realize that Miami Beach in the early nineteen sixties, with its facade of Jewish liberalism, was still the south.   I didn’t use the pool much after that – it certainly curtailed my swimming skills at an early age.

The Gateway to the City!

Back to Penn Station.  It was the iconic gateway to New York City when you lived on Long Island.  We moved from Brooklyn to Wantagh when I was young. When I say “we” I mean most of the neighborhood from East Flatbush.  It was part of an upward trajectory in the immigrant process: our grandparents left their shetls in Eastern Europe and moved to New York’s lower east side.  When they made some money they moved to Brooklyn and got an apartment with cross-ventilation (a very big thing). Their children – our parents – moved to the Promised Land: the suburbs of the south shore of Long Island – the new nirvana. Many of my childhood friends’ parents and grandparents knew each other prior to the resettlement  – or at the very least it was one the degree of separation.  Though each generation had a little more money and was better educated they still settled in little shetls. Ours was the Holiday Park development in Wantagh.  The builder put up about 300 homes – a few different “models” though they were all variations on a theme: three bedrooms, two baths, and a backyard, and of course good cross ventilation. There was the “excellent” school district and a ‘quick” commute to the “city.”  In reality the school system was fair –until the overachieving Brooklynites moved in and took control of the school board. The commute though never changed – it was always 45 minutes on a good day though more often an hour as the Long Island Rail Road crumbled until it was taken over by the MTA – where it still languished.

The LIRR

It was the LIRR that took us back to our roots.  Our Dads worked in the city.  Our Moms shopped there.  They were all city kids and even though they moved to a suburban paradise the “City” was where it was at for most of their commerce and cultural needs – especially in those formative years when Long Island still known for its ducks.

Traveling into the city was always fun and I loved taking the train into “town.” When we moved to Wantagh the LIRR station was a little Victorian building with a wooden platform in the small downtown.  When the MTA took over they raised the train line so there were no more rail crossings and the stations were elevated affording a great view of downtown Wantagh (yes, that is an oxymoron) We usually took the train to see Broadway musicals and concerts.  My mother was a great believer in Culture for Kids and I sat through more than a few children’s concerts at Carnegie Hall and then Lincoln Center – bored out of my gourd and not appreciating the music or Lenny Bernstein at the time.  We saw musicals too – Hello Dolly, Mame, and of course Fiddler on the Roof.  It’s been said that without Jews or gays Broadway musicals would never survive.  My parents made sure the Jews kept their promise.

But more exciting than the shows was the LIRR ride – especially if it was on a “double-decker” car.  These had alternating up and down stairs compartments that were very cool to any nine old.  The journey along the south shore was pretty dismal – passing towns that looked a lot like Wantagh – only each one a little denser as we got closer to the city.  It would get exciting as we made it through Jamaica – the dreaded switching station which if we were lucky we avoided.  Once we hit the Sunnyside Yards and saw the factories on either side we knew we were almost there.  But it wasn’t until we entered the tunnel that we hit the final stretch.  The train would jerk a bit, sometimes accelerating, other times crawling; sometimes the lights would go out – which only gave it a little theatrical flourish.  And then we entered Penn Station and pulled up alongside the platform and I’d rush to the door.  We’d race up the staircases – with their brass railings they were one of the few vestiges left of the original Penn (and they are still there) – and we’d be the Station itself.

As Bette Davis would have said, “What a dump!”

The ‘new’ Penn Station was consecrated I guess in the late 1960’s. I doubt anyone would admit to being at the ribbon cutting. The architecture could only be characterized as ‘mid-century dreck.’  Long, poorly lit arcades and corridors designed with no thought for human beings but easy for rats to maneuver. The LIRR section was especially depressing with one area for ticket sales across from a long row of low end shops and eateries like Nedicks and Chock Full o’Nuts (and they were the good ones).  Penn Station was in some ways a metaphor of what New York City was becoming in the late 1960’s and into the 70’s – dirty, depressing and dangerous.  In high school I started taking the LIRR in with friends – ostensibly to see the Knicks (the saving grace then was the relocation of the Garden to atop of Penn Station) The parents of suburban teenagers from Long Island felt safe that their kids would never have leave the Penn Station vicinity – though of course we did.

By the time I was in 9^th grade I was making trips with my high school buddies: Grossman, Silberberg, Abrams, Segal (as noted earlier I did grow up in the last shetl). We always told our folks we’d just be going to the Knicks, but on occasion we’d venture a little further north to West 42^nd Street.  Pre-Disneyfaction Times Square with its cheap restaurants and peep shows was more than alluring to 14 year old boys.  And a night that consisted of a $1.89 Tad’s Steak dinner (fat and gristle will never be as tasty), a peak into the Metropole Café, and watching Dave DeBusschere score was about as exciting as it got.

My real ‘getting to know’ Penn was in the mid 1970s.  To the horror of my parents I dropped out Syracuse University and opted for art school in Manhattan. This being the era of high crime, Son of Sam, the Bronx was burning and Daily News headlines ‘Ford to New York: Drop Dead’ no sane person thought New York City had a future.

Someone once tried to mug me in the old Gimbel’s passageway (which really was a block long urinal – but when he saw my $6 Timex he left me alone).  Commuting – especially for an 18 year old who wanted so much to be considered a sophisticated urbanite – sucked.  I took the train each morning at 7 AM to get to class and stayed into the evening to hang out –as all art students do – in smoky Village bars (think Fanelli’s Bar on a rainy night on Spring Street with Linda Ronstadt on the juke box singing Heat Wave).  This inevitably meant catching one of the late local trains.  I’d usually got to Penn just in time to hear the roll call: “Lynbrook, Rockville Centre, Baldwin, Freeport, Merrick, Bellmore, Wantagh, Seaford, Massapequa, Massapequa Park, Amityville, Copiague,  Lindenhurst, Babylon – track 17” (this is cemented in my brain).  A few times I’d fall asleep and wake up in Babylon – usually on the rainiest nights. I finally did move into an apartment on Riverside Drive (6 rooms, riv vu $450 – they couldn’t give them away in those days!) and there began my city slicker days and nights.

Once I moved into the city commuting ceased.   I went through Penn once in a while to visit my folks or in the summer go out to the Hamptons.  And as the 70’s rolled into the 80’s and the 90’s the station got sadder and sadder.  Though traveling through it I would always notice little historic details: the brass rails, some old unwashed mosaic, or an intricate molding that somehow escaped the 1964 pogrom.  These tiny pieces always reminded me of what a great edifice this once was.  As a New York City geek I realize now  that my memories are more from the books I have read than those few hours spent waiting for the Atlantic Coast Line to Miami Beach.

The plans for a new Penn Station seemed to be in the cards since it was destroyed in 1965.  No one ever liked that awful pile of shit.  But, like a LIRR train lurching through the East River tunnel, plans for the rebuilding went back and forth. When it was announced that the Post Office was going to be transformed into the third incarnation of Penn Station it gave me cause to rejoice.  The Post Office is an icon – and to re-purpose it as a train station – Penn Station – is brilliant. The soaring ceilings, the light. the windows, probably the birds – but no matter it will make a much better entry to the greatest city in the world than what we have now.  And when it is completed I am sure a little boy will exit a suburban train, rush upstairs and be filled with wonder. And he will make a vow to himself this too is where he wants to live when he grows up….