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Myrtle Avenue, Plus Thirty

I was feeling a bit nostalgic the other day, so I did what I usually do when the pang strikes. I looked up Google Street View’s visuals of the modern versions of my nostalgic targets. Sometimes it really helps when I do this; it helps me remember more detail, especially when (as in this case) there have not been too many changes. But please don’t tell that to the people who live around 21st Century Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, they think everything is different, particularly between Clinton and Classon Avenues, the part of the Avenue that borders Pratt Institute. It seems people who’ve lived adjacent to Myrtle and would know have always tended to move along after a while but the news sites and blogs say there is a new Brooklyn. I looked at Google to see how much I could remember. Read more

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Thank You. For Whatever Comes.

I ran upstairs because I’d heard the fight was already over.  As part of my ongoing effort to get my friend James into sports I had jotted this down on a post-it before I hit the project-concrete stairs of our dorm room at Willoughby:

“Tyson knocked him out in 93 seconds!  93!”

OK it was really 91.  But I’d been listening to WFAN and they were apparently pretty excited about it too.  I made it the 6 floors up (not trusting the “hellavator”) and stuck the note to James’ door, under the 804 number.  None of us had TVs except for Lewis Greene and Myra Rivera, and he only let us watch Redskins games (including the Super Bowl); and unfortunately this didn’t happen often because we all lived in Brooklyn.

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The Sideways Sofa

I worked hard and saved all my money to get into Pratt Institute.  Even so, the vast majority of the tuition I had to funnel into that Brooklyn school of art and engineering was paid for by bank loans.  Delayed a full semester by months of paperwork, I was pretty excited to get there in January of ’88.  One cold weekend I settled into my new dorm.

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