Colonial Theatre
1746 Broadway,
Brooklyn,
NY
11233
1746 Broadway,
Brooklyn,
NY
11233
6 people
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Showing 126 - 150 of 198 comments
Schmearmans was on Broadway between Rockaway-Cooper and Chauncey streets
Welcome Peter L. My dad (born 1919) remembers Schmeaman’s, and its cream crumb cake. What cross street was Schmeaman’s closest to ?
Hey Bill,
I want to guess that the stickball player with the low IQ on Chauncey Street was none other that Artie Kopp. He was also a hustler that would bet on the games.Sometimes as much as fifty cents a man. Also, does anyone remember the two great bakeries on Broadway, Gills and Schmearman’s (forgive the spelling). Schmearmans was noted for their fabulous cream crumb cake. I also worked for Frank Cannino (The Veteran Italian Grocery Store) located on Chauncey and Rockaway aves. He too was a wizard at adding up tabs on the grocery bag without any errors.
Hello everyone.
Anyone for a game of hot peas and butter?
I found this site a couple of years ago but never posted.
Every once in a while I check it and I was surprised that the posts from 2007
hit so close to home. I think I must have known some of the people who posted here, so I had to put my two cents in.
The reason I checked the site today was I was trimming my mustache today and noticed an old, fading, barely visible scar on my lower lip. Something deep in the past gnawed at me for a few minutes. Then suddenly I remembered. “Labesky’s” I said out loud. I looked around and was happy no one was around least I be accused of talking to myself.
I may not have the spelling right but Labesky’s was the candy store on the north side of Broadway right at the entrance to the Manhattan bound L train
in Bushwick at Chauncy street. I received the cut on my lip from one of the penny candies I bought there. Does anyone remember the little pie plate filled with some kind of flavored sugar that came with a little metal spoon. It was that spoon that delivered the cut. Well the spoon had an edge on it like a Gillette blade.
It would never passed the consumer protection agency today.
He had a cigar box on the news stand. People would put the money in it and grab a paper.It was an honor system and nobody cheated.
The money wouldn’t last two seconds today.
My name is Bill Rohan. I lived at 39 Granite street from 1956 thru 1964.
I went to school at Our Lady of Lourdes from first thru seventh grade until we moved to Queens when we kept getting beaten up on the way to school by those
“public school kids”. I remember so clearly many of the places mentioned here.
No one mentioned Labesky’s. It was our favorite place. It had about ten million kinds of penny candy and an endless supply of pennsy pinkys, waxed teeth and the large sticks of chalk we used to crush up in a sock to hit others with on Halloween. I was an altar boy and a member of the granite street gang. But
worse thing I remember doing as a gang member is losing a stick ball game to the Chauncey street kids. We had an agreement that no one past the sixth grade
could play. The only reason the Chauncey st kids won was they had a kid who was about 19 but had a room temperature IQ and was in the sixth grade. He hit the L train tracks five times for automatic home runs. We called “ Hindu” but it was disallowed. We finished the game under protest. The commissioner hasn’t ruled to this day.
I bought so many stickball bats at the broom factory they offered me a job.
I still get heartburn from those pickles. You would give the guy a nickel and you would submerge your arm up to the arm pit into the great big wooden barrel
and try to fish out the biggest pickle you could wrap your hand around. We would lick the juice off our arms before biting into that juicy treat. Not very sanitary. Another practice the health dept would never permit nowadays.Evey time I buy a pickle at the supermarket out of the sterile plastic bin with the tongs and put it in the clean neat plastic bag I think about those pickles.
Nothing tasted as good, and probably never will.
I remember:
the test of manhood that climbing up the fence at the end of Granite St.to Beanbelly hill was.
In the summer a horse drawn wagon selling watermelon. The black man driving the wagon singing out in a rich, deep, baritone voice “WAR-TEE- MELL-OOOOO”.It said “Sweet as Honey, Red as Fire” on the side of the wagon.
The Good Humor man and the Bungalow Bar man almost coming to blows over who’s time it was to be on the block.
Kicking on the street lights
Weinsteins grocery and Portelli’s deli on B'way between Granite and Furman. Henery Portelli was in my class.
Old man Weinstein would take out a note book to keep track of your family’s tab. He would add up the order on the paper bag and was more accurate than a Texas Instrument calculator. Every payday it was my fathers first stop to pay off the weekly food bill. Everyone in the neighborhood owed Weinstein.
Flipping base ball cards in the school yard. Who knew baseball card collecting was to become so big. I know for sure if I had all my cards from back then I would be a millionaire.
I could write a book on the forth of July in Bushwick.
We would get chances to sell for the school. I would sell them in Grimm’s bar.
I was fortunate enough to raise my kids in a nice semi rural area in upstate NY. Like most parents I sometimes catch myself telling my kids how lucky they are to be brought up in a nice safe place. But then I think maybe I was the lucky one. I’d love to hear from anyone with the same sweet memories.
Bill Rohan
posted by pennsy pinky on Aug 7, 2007 at 10:10pm
Here’s the link to the aforementioned article :
View link
Excuse me, 1905, not 1904.
Thanks, Joe G and Bway. Bway, the movement along the Canarsie line you’ve described as going on now, reads like history of a century ago repeating itself. You may want to look at the latest “Our Neighborhood” article in the Times Newsweekly. In it, a Mrs. Bollmann Ognibene reminisces about how her parents came from “kleine Deutschland” (little Germany) on the Lower East Side to Ridgewood in 1904.
Personally, I wonder where in Ridgewood, in 1904, as it was mostly undeveloped then. She reminisces further about attending PS 88 at Catalpa and Fresh Pond.
Unfortunately, the prices in Bushwick are “cheap” compared to many other parts of the city, so that’s why it’s becoming a hot market. That and it’s proximity to transportation, with both the L and J/M lines running right through Bushwick. It’s basically been a movement along the Canarsie line. It began in the East Village in Manhattan, crossed over the East River into Williamsburg and Greenpoint, and now is progressing into Bushwick, and probably Ridgewood.
Key Food was on Broadway, right under the Jamaica line train at Cooper Street. T'giving eve 1970. A sad anniversary, 10 years. Tomorrow, July 17, is the 100th anniversary of my father’s birth (he died in ‘81). I don’t know who can afford the prices in Bushwick, but as I said, there are a lot of artists and hipsters who buy and rent and basically put everything they can afford into it. Also a lot of immigrants, who scrape together all their money and relatives, work 7 days a week and can afford the American dream.
Thanks, Joe G. Where was the Key Food that your mom was mugged when she went to it ? Thanksgiving Eve, what year ? Thanks in advance for your answer. My parents and I had similar fears living in Ridgewood, but our home there was only sold after my father had entered a nursing home, and my mother had died : ten years ago today, in fact.
I, too, cannot belive the rents and prices that are now being asked for apts. and homes in Bushwick. I wonder who is buying and renting at such prices ?
Fantastic memories
Peter, Roy and all,
Again, great stuff, quite a trip in the wayback machine. Linoleum guns â€" haha, made plenty of those. Called them carpet guns. Those suckers hurt when you got hit with them, too, THWACK! off your head. And soapbox racers, made with wooden crates, a 2x4 and roller skate wheels. Evergreen Cemetery â€" it’s actually one of 14 that are adjoined and stretch as far away as Forest Park. Some famous people are buried in them, including Harry Houdini. My house overlooked Evergreen and people always said they’d be too afraid, it’s too morbid, but I said why? It’s quiet and peaceful and nobody dead is going to hurt you, only the living. Evangelical Deaconess hospital was a few blocks down the street from where I lived. The NY Times had a 30th anniversary story about the blackout and looting in Bushwick on the night of July 13, 1977, and another recent story about homes and rentals and artists there. (Apparently, “East Williamsburg†is now the preferred term to lure hipsters who might be scared off by the real name’s negative connotations.) It said a three-bedroom apartment at Bushwick Avenue and Pilling Street, which was just two blocks from my house, now goes for $1,600. I also spoke to a guy from that neighborhood not long ago and he said a three-family house house like the one I grew up in now goes for about $800,000. I can’t possibly imagine these prices for this area, as my parents sold ours in 1971 for $50,000 and we were lucky to get that, and get out alive. We moved when my mother got mugged on Thanksgiving eve when she went to buy groceries at Key Food, which was the former Einhorn’s you spoke of. She still lives now in Canarsie. A couple of years ago I was out there on the pier and a guy fishing reeled in a small shark, probably a sand shark, thrashing and snarling and pissed off as hell. He had to wait for it to wear itself out before he could even pick it up.
On a whim, I just Googled my old address and actually saw a street level photo of the house I grew up in, like I was standing right in front of it. Try it, you may find your house too!
Yes, if memory serves me – it was Cooper Street. Another trivia fact about Evergreen Cemetery is that Bill – bojangles – Robinson is buried there with a small monument
Peter, where do you come out of Evergreen Cemetery when you walk in at Bushwick Ave? Cooper?
And Wimpy’s specialty was hamburgers, leroyelliston ? In Great Britain, a hamburger stand is known as a “Wimpy Bar”.
Thanks for posting all your memories of growing up on Cooper Street.
I walked on Cooper Street from Bway to Bushwick on Saturday August 6, 2005, (the bells of the Wayside Baptist Church within the former Colonial Theater were just chiming 3 pm as I stepped off the Manhattan bound el train at the Chauncey St station) thence southeast on Bushwick, past St. Thomas Methodist-Episcopal Church, former old age home (1420 Bushwick Avenue, now the Bushwick Health Center, curved staircases still in front) 1454 Bushwick Avenue, my dad’s last address as a single man, before he wed my mom in 1945, thence to the Bushwick Avenue gate of Evergreen Cemetery for a shortcut through the cemetery to Ridgewood and the Cozy Corner.
Didn’t walk down to Bway and Chauncey, to the remaining bldg. of the hospital (Evangelical Deaconess) I was born in. Have seen pictures of it, though.
I just remembered the restaurant near the RKO Bushwick. It was called “Wimpy’s” with a big cartoon of Popeye’s Wimpy.
Joe G.
I grew up on Cooper Street from 1948 to 1956, eight years of an education that you could never learn in school. My children laugh when I tell them some of the stories, good and bad, that my brother and I endured. I remember how long it took to get to Boy’s High School…taking 2 trains, walking 8 blocks and getting there by 7:40 for the first bell. The walk we had to JHS 73 and sometimes coming home for lunch or eating at the sandwich shop adjacent to JHS 73. The Wilson Avenue trolley going to Canarsie which ran every 20 minutes. Some of the guys would jump on the back for a joy ride or detach the circuit pole. Playing stoop ball…Ring-a-leaveio, Johnny on a pony…making linoleum guns out of the corner of fruit crates.
Roller-skating all over the place with our Chicago’s. Bike riding through the whole neighbor hood…going a far a Forest Park. Playing in the used cars that were sold on the corner of Cooper and Bushwick. Having my first job at Einhorn’s on Broadway as a carriage boy then promoted to the Dairy Department. Going crabbing on the Canarsie pier. Taking the Wilson Avenue trolley straight there. Crab cages and all. `Fun times!
Guys,
This is great stuff. Peter. I went to Our Lady of Lourdes, where Jackie Gleason, a public school student, took his religious instruction. I remember the stickball bat (broom) factory very well. I lived a block or so away on MacDougal Street, and got many bats from there. Former Yankee pitcher Bob Grim’s bar was there too; I wrote about that here sometime back.
Roy, I remember some of the stuff you mentioned, like Bohacks, and Terrana Pastry on Broadway and Rockaway, the cannolis, mmm, fuhgeddabout it. The pizzeria on Broadway near the Saratoga Avenue Library, where for 15 cents you got the biggest and best slice you ever ate. Highland Park, of course, the thrill of riding my bike at amazing speed down its long hill, and later, the lovers lane. I took my son over there to see it the other week; he’s the same age now that I was then, some 40 years ago. And “Mrs. Beanbelly.” I don’t remember The Granite Street gang, even though I lived on Bushwick Avenue between Furman Avenue and Granite Street. But I’ll tell you a good story.
At Lourdes, we and the neighborhood lived in fear of two neighborhood gangs, holdovers from the gang heyday of the ‘50s: the F&R and the R&R, the Fulton and Rockaway Gang and the Railroad Boys. They were named, respectively, for the street corner and the local railroad tracks in East New York where they hung out. The mere mention of their names sent shivers of fear through the neighborhood, and a rumor whispered through Lourdes â€" “the F&R is comin’!†â€" sent everyone running home and emptied the streets. (“F&R,†of course, was also a play on “F*ckin’ R.â€) Mind you, I never actually saw either gang, although a tough kid in my eighth-grade class who periodically shook down and beat up anybody in his way was rumored to be an upcoming member. As I said, the mere mention of their name was enough to send everyone scurrying. It sort of got to the status of an urban legend, but one that no one wanted to try to prove or disprove. I never heard anything about them after I moved away. Until a couple of years ago. When John Gotti died, his long obituary in the NY Times, which I don’t have a copy of at hand and which was written by a famous crime reporter, went into a lot of biographical detail. It mentioned how when he was growing up in Brooklyn, he got his start in crime with a local outfit called the Fulton and Rockaway Gang. So the legend proved to be true, and we survived the reign of terror of one of NY’s most notorious criminals. It would be interesting if it turned out that somewhere along the way, Serpico or those other guys busted him for some minor offense on his way to a stellar career in crime.
Hey Roy,
You mentioned Beanbelly and I remember how scared we were to venture anywheres near that area. It prompted me to write a short story about it. While the story is part fictitious and partly true it was a lot of fun doing it. Anyway, here is the link to it:
View link
Jack S. My dad, Irving was the projectionist in the Colonial theater until its closing. He loved his job. He never once said he was going to work. He always said, “I’m going to the movies.” My friends and I got in free every Saturday. My dad would go to the candy stand lady and get us free popcorn. We went up to the balconey and chucked jubies down on the kids below. When the usher told us that the balconey was closed, we politely informed him that we were there with Mr. S. He always left us alone. Boy, did we feel important. I hated climbing up the swirling staircase to the projection booth.
I remember the kids yelling that there was no color when the Wizard of Oz started. I felt bad for my dad with all the yelling, however once Judy Garland opened the door in Oz, everyone quieted down. I visited there in 2004 and the Reverend was quite hospitable. He let me go up those dreaded stairs into the projection booth where I said a few prayers. It brought back tears and thoughts of happier and innocent times.
Please r.s.v.p. if anyone has any photo of the Colonial Theater.
Pete and Joe,
You guys are really brining back the memories. Pickles! We used to buy those sour pickles instead of candy when we went to the Colonial. I’m trying to remember the Cooper Street gang…Charlie Bolton, Frankie Spataro, Bobby “Fatso” Green, the D'Angelo brothers, Dom Andretto. I seem to not remember the other names. We were mostly Irish/Italian in those days. Old Smith’s candy store. The Wilson Avenue trolley! The name Jerry rings a bell, but don’t recall the last name. How about the Chinese restaurant that opened on Broadway. The Chinese laundry on Chauncey Street with the big German Shepard.. The “Jolly Boys!” Peg pants with saddle stitching and pistol pockets (1950-52 period). Bohacks on Broadway. There was a restaurant on Broadway and Halsey. Can’t remember the name. The coffee shop on Broadway and Rockaway. Highland Park. “Mrs. Beanbelly” with her fictitious BB gun lived near the hill where the Carnarsie line would go into the tunnel. Indiam Bridge, The Granite Street gang. Was a victim of their actions about three times. Bruises and all. Good times! Hurray for ther Colonial!
I wonder if anyone remembers the stickball bat place on Stone Avenue just off Broadway. Actually, it was a broom factory. However, they would sell us the stick portion, which came in two tones, for twenty cents. Not too far from that was a pickle factory where I used to pay five cents for a giant sour pickle picked fresh from a barrel, which I’d munch on my way to Our Lady of Lourdes,
Roy,
The only cop I remember from the 81st. Precinct was an older guy, close to retirement, that could hardly walk. I remember the kids would tease him and rile him up. Flat Al – the name we coined for him – would have a lot of trouble trying to chase us as he cursed and wheezed trying to come after us heckling brats. By the way, Roy. Your last name is not LaPerra by chance? I remember someone that had that last name. Also, on Cooper street was a friend of mine named, Jerry Salata. Does that ring any bells?
Roy,
The precinct was the 81st. There were a few cops who worked in it or in neighboring precincts who went on to achieve some small amount of fame: Frank Serpico, Eddie Egan (of “The French Connection”) and Dave Greenberg and Robert Hantz, who were known as Batman and Robin and the Supercops. All had movies made about them. I lived in the neighborhood at the various times all were working there, late 50s to early 70s, when the drugs and crime were astounding.
Peter and Fred:
I just read most of the comments and realized that you were from the same neighborhood. I live on Cooper Street from 1948 to 1956. Went to PS 113, JHS 73 and then to Boy’s High. I forget the Precinct number but remember being a part of the PAL boxing. My second home during the summer were the Cypress swimming pool and all the movies…Colonial, Decatur, Monroe, RKO Bushwick and the Loew’s Gates. Sometimes to the Loew’s Valencia, Merrick, Savoy and the RKO Alden in Jamacia. We sure made the best with very little. Good times! Tough times!
Roy the 3 sewer king!
The Colonial Theater wasn’t the only theater that we who lived in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn catered to. There was the “Decatur” where you could see a double feature, serial and cartoons for 15 cents. It wasn’t cleanest theater but it was fun to go there anyway. We had the RKO Bushwick, Loews Gates, Monroe and the Alhambra theaters. Every once in a while they would have 8 act of vaudeville at the Gates. Those were fun times.
The Colonial I feel was the one theater every body escaped to especially on those hot summer days. The managers and matrons (not called ushers) would basically manage the theater. They would know most of us who lived near by by name. Theaters today don’t have that feel anymore.
Are there any theaters that have a cafe for food and drink?
Roy