Yesterday my wife and I got into our blue time machine — ok, it’s a Subaru, but whatever — and hurtled back 40 years.
We drove 15 miles to Jackson Heights, a lovely bedroom community in Queens, NY.
Ah, the old sod. We lived there from 1977 to 1985. We were kids.
We bit the bullet and moved to a lovely Jackson Heights “junior four” from our one bedroom on West 21st Street, because our Manhattan landlord jacked our rent to a lofty $275 a month.
We hated it there back in the bad old days of rampant NYC crime. It was affordable, but dull, and not particularly safe. Plus, all our friends lived in “the city”. In the late seventies, Brooklyn was still a dicey backwater. We figured we’d save money for a few years, and move back to where most of our friends lived. We figured wrong.
We lived in Jackson Heights at the time of Son of Sam, and so we called our apartment building (“The Berkeley”) The Berkowitz. My wife would wrap her red hoodie around her head when we walked back to our apartment at night. Why? “It’s my Son of Sam helmet,” she’d explain to perplexed guests.
There were shell casings on the glass-strewn courts where I played pick-up b-ball. There were cocaine gang shoot-’em-ups. There was gay-bashing.
Our apartment was gorgeous (sunken living room, roomy eat-in kitchen, so many closets that many were just empty). Our block was leafy. But it wasn’t “the city”.
One day the super plopped a document at our doorstep. It was a red-herring. I was a kid and had no idea what that meant. But I soon understood it was our ticket out of Jackson Heights. A few years later we flipped the apartment and moved to Park Slope, which was, as they say, “on the come.” It was 1985. The crack epidemic was just around the corner. But we survived and the neighborhood thrived, to the point where it became the butt of jokes, a place where tykes were allowed to run amok in restaurants, boutiques, and even bars.
But I digress.
Only one thing tied us to Jackson Heights over the ensuing years: our safety deposit box at Queens Community Bank on Northern Boulevard. They kept “our family jewels” (actually just “important papers”) because no Brooklyn bank near us had a vault.
From time to time, we pulled important family papers out of the vault. There was hardly anything left in our runty Box 141. Fast forward forty years. I received a letter from the bank. It was sold. The bank was scheduled for renovation. I was asked to remove the remaining contents of my box.
Hence the time machine back to our youth.
We drove around the old sod. There stood The Berkowitz. It was beautifully maintained, as ever. But New York City is all about change, and this neighborhood had changes aplenty. All for the better.
I thought about the old sod in recent years, whenever I read of the morgue trucks that backed up Elmhurst General, just blocks from our door. Jackson Heights was ravaged by Covid. The Grim Reaper had a field day. But our sense was the neighborhood turned the corner.
The Arepa Lady (who started her business with a cart under the Roosevelt Avenue EL trestles) had a real retail space right around the corner from The Berkowitz! A cool espresso shop replaced the crummy one-chair barber just down the street. The old basketball courts with Mobius strips for rims were transformed into a kiddie-park green-space that was a wonderland for tykes. A French bakery rivalling anything on Rue Saint-Honore sold masterful macarons.
There was a Greenstreets, bikes-and-pedestrians-only initiative on 34th Avenue! And restaurants galore!
Back in the day, my wife and I would repair to the Mark Twain Diner on Northern Boulevard for standard chee-burgee fare. It was a bit down-at-the-heels, but affordable and nearby. Now? It’s the Jax Inn Diner, and we’re here to report that it was hopping and VERY good.
We ate our breakfast and, for a brief moment, we were in our late twenties again. It was a time of crazy parties and lots of laughter, for the lion’s share of our lives lie ahead. We worked hard, and played hard.
We left Jackson Heights in 1985 and began our quarter-century Brooklyn residency. We had long, rewarding careers, got out of the NYC-native’s provincial mindset, and thrived in a much wider world. Our co-workers and clients were, indeed, some of the best and brightest. We raised our son in a glorious neighborhood.
But yesterday, forty years on, we were back to a time when we had to take a step down in order to get ahead. We thought about those days, equal parts struggle and hope, as we paid the check at the Jax Inn, got back in our time machine-slash-Subaru, drove down Northern Boulevard to 69th Street, turned right onto on the BQE, and headed home. But it won’t be long before we’re back, because I have a hankering for the roast chicken at Pio Pio on Northern Boulevard and 85th Street. And maybe some dumplings at Phayul on 74th Street, and….and…
