As I said in the previous (recycled) post, I’m on the road today, but I’m reposting old pieces with a Veteran’s Day theme.  This was first posted on May 23rd of this year. — RDC

Home Port Staten Island

Originally uploaded by Ron Coleman

I was early for court in Staten Island this morning, a place I don’t get to too often. I didn’t realize the courthouse was practically in the water; indeed, it is on the navy base. It’s Fleet Week, so they let people go a little bit closer than usual. Here’s a shot of the bows of three ships, including the USS Monterey, in front of the city they are protecting.

Whenever I see the arrayed armed might of this country, even a sliver of it, I am awed, and profoundly thankful to God that, in our age at least, it has been given this way.

I felt a little like a spy taking pictures at a military installation, and indeed there was a sign at the security checkpoint that says, among other warnings but in very big, compelling letters, “USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED.” My approach is that where use of deadly force is authorized, asking the people with the guns first is well advised. I did. Twice.

I kind of have to make this point that I have always meant to write up somewhere, but because of a post on LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® where I allude to it, I have to make it now.

The Lords of Flatbush

The Jews stole Flatbush.  Basically almost every orthodox Jew who lives in Brooklyn either lives in Borough Park or thinks he lives in “Flatbush.”  But almost none of Jewish Flatbush is in Flatbush at all, or even really close to it.

Now my bubby — she lived in Flatbush!  The smell of her Warsaw-via-Havana chicken soup emanated throughout the hallway as we walked up the ancient ceramic-tiled stairs on Caton Avenue to her apartment for yomtov dinner.  Flatbush Avenue itself, a mecca of lower-middle-class retail, was a block away.

But there are no bubbies in her old building any more, that’s for sure.  And a large percentage of today’s self-described “Flatbush” Jews have never even set foot on Flatbush Avenue.

Hasidim in Williamsburg: They're staying.

The heart of what the Jews call Flatbush is, in fact, Midwood.  But at least three or four other Brooklyn neighborhoods, and arguably about a third of the entire borough, is called Flatbush by the orthodox Jewish subculture.  It mainly means “an orthodox Jewish neighborhood that is not ‘Boro Park.'”  (Though even then it is a lot yes-Boro-Park than it was 20 years ago…)

Here’s what happened.  Jews abandoned numerous New York neighborhoods throughout the 20th century, as they moved up the economic ladder and headed further and further from the Lower East Side in Manhattan, where so many of us started out.  East New York, Brownsville… more neighborhoods than you want to name were “great Jewish neighborhoods” that no longer have any statistically significant Jewish presence at all.

When it came to time to ditch Flatbush, though, it happened that the greener pasture of Midwood was just across the LIRR tracks on Avenue I.  More single-family houses, elbow room, and less urban… in every sense of the word.  But the move, in that case, was incremental.  So who’s to say, really, that once you traverse Nostrand Avenue you’re not really in Flatbush any more?  This particular move, however, coincided with a renaissance of orthodox Jewish life, prosperity and pride that took place beginning roughly in the late 1960’s.  And this time the neighborhood “took,” and grew, and with it a new provincialism that merely saw the expanding borders of the neighborhood in terms of what fellow members of the subculture called its original core.

So almost all of Brooklyn that isn’t Boro Park or Williamsburg is Flatbush, for the Jews.  Hopefully, no one will sue us over it!