ABSTRACT
Brooklyn was not always this place, and certainly not for people growing up there in the 1940s and 1950s. I was born in February, 1946 in Beth-El Hospital (now Brookdale Hospital), on Linden Boulevard, in an East Flatbush neighborhood located just on the cusp of Brownsville. My parents, Sara and Max(well) Lerner, younger brother (Robert), and I lived in Apartment 3A at 1088 Willmohr Street, on the corner of East 95th Street. We were one block north of Brooklyn’s Church Avenue. In addition to being the (obvious) location of numerous churches, the avenue was famous for being the setting of the 1944 Frank Capra comedy, Arsenic and Old Lace, which starred Cary Grant. It was famous as well for its trolley line, which became the last such route of this vehicle in a borough once defined by these conveyances. The original name of the Brooklyn Dodgers was “The Trolley Dodgers” because the ubiquity of these vehicles constituted obstacles to the pedestrians of Brooklyn.
