Midwood: A Middle-Class Neighborhood
Midwood was one of the Brooklyn neighborhoods developed in the 1920s with the arrival of the subway. It was mostly middle-class and had a large Jewish population. The second-generation of the Eastern European Jewish diaspora, despite its secularization and assimilation, was even more likely than its parents to settle into neighborhoods where Jews were the dominant ethnic group unlike their parents who lived in the multi-ethnic neighborhoods of the Lower East Side and Williamsburg. Some people who grew up in Midwood in mid-century later remembered their surprise when they first realized that some people were not Jewish. As with many Jewish neighborhoods, Midwood had Italians residents as well as some Irish and Protestants families who had been there before the boom of the 1920s, but the ethnic groups did not mix and many of the Catholic kids attended parochial schools at least until high school.
"This was not the older Flatbush with its neoclassic mansions and lavish Victorian-inspired houses,” Mimi Sheraton writes of her childhood neighborhood in her memoir Eating My Words. “Streets were lined with builder's houses, usually duplicated three or four in a row. None were noteworthy architecturally.” For the most part they were “simple, two-story brick and stucco affairs” with “small neat patches of front lawns rimmed by clipped hedges" and “window boxes overflowing with ivy, gray-green ice plants, geraniums, and petunias.” They had small, landscaped backyards. Midwood was 45 minutes away from midtown Manhattan by subway, close enough to commute to work yet far enough away to feel like a suburb. When residents went “downtown” to shop or see a movie, they usually were going to Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn where there were many big department stores and movie theaters. Dad might work in "the city" but for the rest of the family a trip to Manhattan was a special excursion, maybe for a special shopping day at the midtown department stores, or to Radio City Music Hall or the Roxy to see a movie with a stage show, or to Broadway to see a play or to eat out at a favorite restaurant .
Avenue K, Avenue M. Ocean Avenue and Coney Island Avenue were the major thoroughfares in Midwood. Kings Highway was on the southern boundary, Nostrand Avenue was on the eastern edge and Ocean Parkway was to the west. Flatbush Avenue, was to the northeast., Brooklyn College, part of the City University system, was on the northern boundary off Bedford Avenue on a former golf course.. The Public Works Administration built the Georgian-style campus in the 1930s. FDR had attended the laying of the cornerstone in 1936 and it was formally opened in 1937 replacing the earlier downtown Brooklyn facilities, which before 1930 had been a school of continuing education. It was the third campus of the City University system to open and the first to be co-educational. In the 1940s and 50s students had to take a mandatory speech course to shed their Brooklyn accents and inflections; the number of semesters required depended on how they did on a test they took upon entrance. There was an abandoned movie studio in Midwood which had been used by Vitagraph in the silent movie days before the industry moved to Hollywood and stars of the day like Fatty Arbuckle could be seen working on the streets back then. A few silent screen actors even lived in the neighborhood back in the day. Warner Bros. later used part of the studio to make shorts until 1939. In 1946 it stood empty waiting for NBC to turn it into a broadcast studio in the 1950s where many of its variety shows and specials in "living color" were taped
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On the week of April 14 Midwood's forsythia bushes, which had recently been named Brooklyn's official flower, were filled with yellow blossoms. Later that spring, the lilacs, roses, azaleas, rhododendrons and bridal wreaths would flower in Midwood backyards. Central Brooklyn was noted for its tree-lined streets. On Sheraton's block they were mostly maple. In late spring kids would make "polly noses," splitting open the winged seed pods that whirled down from the trees and affixing them to their own noses with the sticky fluid inside, like kids did throughout the New York area wherever there were maple trees. In the summer the Bungalow Bar and Good Humor men drove their white ice cream trucks slowly down the street, tinkling their bells. Little kids put on bathing suits and jumped through sprinklers and squirted each other with hoses. Their parents sat on lawn chairs and gliders in the backyard in hot weather, not on the stoop or front lawns as in working class neighborhoods. The milkman delivered milk. Dugans and Krugs delivery men brought bread, coffee cakes and donuts to the doors.
Midwood was one of several variations in Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn and somewhat atypical. In 1946 most of the city's Jews lived in apartments. There were still lower- income Jews living in tenements in Williamsburg and Brownsville and higher- income Jews in luxury apartments on Ocean Avenue. There were Jewish working and middle class neighborhoods in Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Borough Park, Flatbush, Brighton Beach and elsewhere. Williamsburg was already becoming known for its concentration of the ultra-Orthodox who would soon be joined by Hasidim who had survived the Holocaust. Working class Brownsville and Coney Island were thought to be inhabited by fast-talking, make-a-quick-buck hustlers and political radicals. Brighton Beach and East Flatbush was lower middle class. Midwood, like Eastern Parkway and parts of Borough Park, was where the doctors, lawyers, furriers and garment district manufacturers lived, not quite on par with the Upper West Side Jews of Manhattan but still a place for people who were successful, who made a good living. Midwood also had blocks of two-family houses and apartment buildings with residents who were less affluent than the stereotype. The Depression had an effect on at least some of the entrepreneurs in the neighborhood, as another Midwood native, Woody Allen, depicted in his semi-autobiographical movie “Radio Days,” with its family who took in relatives and a father who drove a taxi to make ends meet.
Most of the first-generation Jewish immigrants had come from an Orthodox Jewish background. Many of the Polish and Galician Jews had been Hassids. Mimi Sheraton's grandparents were among the ultra-orthodox. Her father's father was a rabbi and a mohel at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. While her father contributed money for the building of a synagogue, like many of their neighbors, Sheraton's family, the Solomons, attended only on the High Holy Days. The High Holy Day crowds could be so large that rabbis rented out movie theaters to accomodate them. The Solomons kept up many of the traditions, like Friday night chicken dinner with candles, but stripped them of their specifically religious content. They mixed dairy with meat and ate lobster, bacon and shellfish but never served pork at home.
Conservative Judaism was often the compromise religious choice of the second-generation middle class. It was less restrictive and Old World than their Yiddish-speaking parent's Orthodox synagogues but seemed more Jewish than the German Jewish Reformed Judaism. Conservative Jewish establishments like the East Midwood Jewish Center were imposing edifices that were as much as community centers as places of worship. Zionism had come to be more the center of Jewish identity than the Talmud.
Mimi Sheraton's Family: The Solomons of Midwood