coney island

August 2, 1926 – Brooklyn

by

[Note: To see large scans of Papa’s letter, click the thumbnail images on the right of this page.]

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New York Aug 1. 1926

August 2, 1926

9 P.M.

My dear Jeanie: –

I am glad at this time to inform you
that Honey is O.K. I called up Rose
just before, Sally answered the phone
she said that he isn’t home any more
he is all well and at this time playing
outside with the kids.1

I tried to call up your father but there
was no answer, I suppose that he must
be in the restaurant now.2

I was in C.I. last night, I took the
Iron Steamboat to the Battery, oh how
it was lonesome, my other friends do
not seem to interest me much now. — 3

Oh Jeanie, you ought to be glad to
be away from the City, this is another
hot day like those of 2 weeks ago
a little shower would be a great relief,4

I do not write much now as I am a little
fatigued from business, but one of this weeks
letters will surely be a bigger one.

Regards to dear mother.

With love,

Harry

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1 – Honey, as we’ve mentioned before, was the nickname for Harold, the son of my grandmother’s sister Rose. My grandmother and great-grandmother, who were both vacationing at the Lakeside Inn in Ferndale, NY when Papa wrote this letter, would have been anxious to hear about Harold’s health if he had been ill. My mother tells me that no one in my grandmother’s family liked to use telephones, so this may have been the first news they had of Harold’s recovery.

2 – My great-grandfather was, according to family lore, a rather imperious, traditional sort of man. As such, he certainly wouldn’t have been able to cook for himself, so he must gone out to eat a lot when his wife and daughters weren’t around. I imagine he ate at the same restaurant all the time since Papa refers to it only as “the restaurant” and not by name.

3 – The Iron Steamboat Company started running a ferry from Manhattan to Coney Island in the late 1800’s, and at the time Papa wrote this letter would drop its passengers exclusively at Steeplechase Pier. (Steeplechase Pier was was an entrance to Steeplechase Park, one of Coney’s most famous amusement parks. The Iron Steamboat Company started bringing passengers there in 1911.) The undated postcards below (from a site hosted at USGenNet.org) show a couple of Iron Steamboats in action:

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Papa seems to attribute his loneliness and lack of interest in his friends to my grandmother’s absence, but, interestingly, this isn’t the first time he’s been hit with a blue mood on a Coney Island ferry. His June 22, 1924 diary entry describes a similar experience:

The heat chased me out
to Coney Island, where I
took the first dive in the
cool ocean. Lonely I spent
there several hours and
in the evening I certainly
was refreshed by the cool
ocean breezes on the boat
ride back to town.

I could have stayed on the
island later, but I escaped
the gay throngs on the boardwalk
there was no place for a lone
sad man, to get that boat, but
on the boat again were gay couples
which in my loneliness tended to
make me sadder.

Papa wrote this diary entry a few weeks after his father’s death, a time when he was subject to long bouts of melancholy. In subsequent weeks he would visit Coney Island frequently, but he often felt low and would occasionally take leave of his friends to say kaddish in a nearby synagogue. I wonder, then, if he continued to associate Coney Island with those difficult times and if, when he wrote the above letter to my grandmother two years later, his mournful memories triggered his “lonesome” feelings and his seemingly inexplicable desire to separate from his friends.

I’ve also speculated that crowded boats full of people like himself recalled even more distant memories of his passage to America and, by extension, the family he left behind and missed so terribly. Did all this make his longing for my grandmother even more keen, his loneliness more pronounced?

4 – Temperatures were at 88 and rising on the day Papa wrote this letter, though the late July heat wave he refers to was even worse, with temperatures topping off at 97. The New York Times headlines of the day told tales of massive Coney Island crowds and heat-related deaths and prostrations (see references below). It was certainly a few degrees cooler and less dangerous in “The Mountains”, as my grandmother called the Catskills, where the Lakeside Inn was located.

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References:

August 4, 1928 – New York City

by

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New York Aug. 4. 1928

My dear Jeanie:–

I called up this evening at 7 P.M.
figuring that you’d be at dinner, but again
out of luck, it seems that you over there
are also afflicted with the hot spell, for the
propriator told me that all guests went
down to the lake to escape the heat, but
I was happy indeed to hear that you’re
getting along fine.1

The heat last night was the most severe
of the season, the city streets were deserted
and I went moonlight bathing, the beach
presented a strange spectacle at mid-
night thousands bathing in the tall waves
of the ocean while tens of thousands were
sleeping on the sands.2

./.

2.

But I enjoyed night bathing
immensely refreshing myself without
the fear of getting sunburned.

As I sat later on the beach thinking
of you a longing betook me as I heard
an orchestra at some building on the
boardwalk play the beautiful tender
strains of Lehar’s Merry Widow waltz, I
would have given part of my life to hold
you in my arms just that moment.3

This evening I visited your folks
Everybody is O.K. Rose and the kids were
there, when Shirley saw me coming she
said Maah Shamah go she says to me
gimmie an Jean. Ain’t she smart?
I argued with Sally for not writing
to you oftener.

./.


3.

As soon as I will be through with
this I’ll go for another dip in C.I. but
there will be little moon if any cause
heavy clouds are gathering now.

If these clouds should bring rain
it would be a relief especially to my
suffering East side neighbors.4

I’m sure that you have already received
the candy package that I mailed you
Thursday morning, this morning I mailed
you some magazines.

If I didn’t know you all through
Id get sore but I know that you
at heard didn’t mean what you wrote
me that you [were] in a way happy to hear
from me I know that you were all
happy, and I’m only writing to make
you happy, and nothing would be
too big for me to offer for your happiness.

./.

4.

If you meant to tease me please
don’t repeat that, enough about that.

What other news can I write you?
Ma went tonight to sleep at Roses house
that she may be early on the beach
tomorrow with her, and by the way if
it interest you to know Rose bought a
nice black size 50 bathing suit but
it is a little tight.

As I am not writing this at home
(to your luck) I have no poem to add
I cannot memorize what I had in thought
to write and my books are at home.6

So my dear I am closing with
an earnest plea that you may write
a nice long long letter, and remain

Your Ever faithful

Harry

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Matt’s Notes

1 – When Papa wrote this letter, my grandmother was vacationing at the Viola House in Lake Huntington, New York. As we’ve discussed before, my grandmother, like many other Jewish New Yorkers of the Twentieth Century, would spend a bit of every summer at a Catskill Mountain “Borscht Belt” hotel like the Viola.

2 – According to the New York Times, the heat wave of August 1928 was the most severe in 46 years. It would kill at least fourteen people.

3 –

4 – If Papa wound up going back to Coney Island on the night of August 4th as he intended, he would have been caught in a sudden, severe thunderstorm and a resulting 600,000-person stampede for shelter. Oddly, three people would die that night of electrocution: one was a policeman who touched a fallen power line; the second was a swimmer who was struck by lighting; the third was a 16-year-old named Gertrude Neidenberg who fell from the Ocean Parkway subway platform and landed on the third rail.

Here’s a creepy thing: Ms. Neidenberg lived at 36 Attorney Street in Manhattan, just a few doors down from Papa apartment at number 96. It’s grotesquely ironic, but she was literally one of Papa’s “suffering East side neighbors” for whom he hoped the rain would provide some relief.

5 – Remember that my grandmother had been trying to cool Papa’s ardor for three years at this point, so I’m sure she meant to disorient him when she said she was only “in a way” happy to hear from him. I should point out, though, that qualified compliments and other minor jabs like this were not a stretch for her — they were part of her everyday conversation, and Papa had probably been on the receiving end of them since he first met her.

6 – Papa quoted a love poem by Robert Burns in his August 2, 1928 letter and a one by Robert Browning in his July 31st letter.

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References:

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Audio Source: The Merry Widow Waltz (1907) recorded by the Victor Dance Orchestra. Via Archive.org.

Papa, as we know, was a huge opera fan, so he would have known the “Merry Widow Waltz” quite well.  Here’s a video clip of the scene in “The Merry Widow” in which it appears (via YouTube):