The Luna Park Gazette

A generation ago, The Lovin’ Spoonful asked the musical question “Do you believe in magic?” and as of Saturday my answer is a resounding “yes!” The cause of the conversion was a pair of lovely run-ins I had with two adorable children as I walked home from the gym. The first meeting occurred on Fifth Avenue as I approached a local nail salon. A woman, presumably the owner or an employee, was standing outside with this beautiful little boy. As I got closer to the store the little guy broke away from his mother and came charging up to me with a flyer in his hand. “Is that for me, buddy?” I asked as took the sheet of paper from his hand. “Why, thank you so much!” I don’t think I’ll be frequenting the place, but I just loved how determined that boy was to help his mom. But it turned out that this young fellow was just the opening act of my exciting morning. I was just a half block from my home when I passed a house on 72nd Street where a young couple and their little girl were ou...

When I first got started in newspapers my mother did everything she could to support me. There was this one time early in my journalism career when my mother was trying to boost my confidence while she ironing some shirts. She was a multitasker long before the term was invented. Now I’m a half-breed, a child of an Irish father and an Italian mother, and that combination was often an issue in our house. “You could be the next Jimmy Breslin,” my mother said, God bless her. “Only you’re not obnoxious. And the reason you’re not obnoxious is because you’re not 100% Irish. Because when it comes to being obnoxious, the Irish, I’m sorry to say, corner the market.” She said this without venom or rage, but in a normal tone of voice as if she were discussing the weather. It was just a fact as far as she was concerned. My mother was the kindest, most loving person I’m ever known in my life and she did not have a bigoted bone in her body. But she was also human and she did harbor this ...

In my own defense, I was drinking a lot that night. While trawling through the cavernous storage locker that is my memory, I stumbled upon a rather odd recollection of one night in Stroudsburg, PA, back in the early Nineties while I was working at the Pocono Record . I worked a 2pm-10pm shift, which was out of synch with most other people, but it did allow me to hit the mall and other locations when they were practically empty. It also meant I stayed up later than most other people and I got into the habit of stopping at the bar near the paper most nights of the week and downing far too many beers before heading to my apartment on Scott Street. I confess that for a while there, I has getting plastered most nights of the week and I just figured I’d be fine the next morning because I could sleep in late. Technically this was correct, but I was also putting on weight, and more seriously, I was looking forward to getting wasted rather dealing with my various problems. Looking ba...

I wish I had taken a picture of that chair. Ever since I got my smartphone I’ve enjoyed snapping photos of just about anything that catches my eye and slapping it up on Facebook. Interesting graffiti, old buildings, theater marquees, restaurant signs, and selfies all get the social media treatment. The other morning I was walking up to my gym when I saw a tiny chair sitting outside a house waiting for the sanitation crew to take it away. I thought it would be a nice picture to put up on Facebook along with a wisecrack in the comments section. But I was running late so I kept going. As I walked on I started thinking about how the discarded chair meant that someone in that house was getting bigger and leaving a part of his or her childhood behind forever. It’s been a six years since we sold our parents’ house , when we had to throw out or give away toys, clothes, furniture, and God knows what else before we could put the place on the market, and that little chair brought bac...

There’s something so comforting about the sound of foghorn. It’s a voice of safety and guidance, a saintly sound that seeks to protect sailors from harm. Now I’m a certified landlubber, but I live near the Narrows in Bay Ridge and whenever the fog rolls in I get an earful of that beautiful noise rolling in right behind it. It’s a nice old timey sound that harks back to another age of sailing ships and fishing villages. Ray Bradbury’s 1951 short story “ The Fog Horn ” features a sea monster that mistakes a remote lighthouse’s foghorn for the mating call of one of its own. The giant creature eventually topples the lighthouse in a fit of rage and the story formed the basis of the monster movie classic The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms . Thankfully that has yet to happen in my neighborhood. I came to appreciate this singular symphony even more during a recent meditation session. Now I’m just getting over a nasty virus that had wrapped my head in a fogbank of congestion, fatigue,...

On the morning of August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman climbed to the observation deck of the University of Texas at Austin with a cache of weapons and started shooting. Whitman’s killing spree, probably America’s first mass shooting, would leave 17 people dead and 31 others injured. It was an incredible, shocking moment in this country’s history and it is the subject of Keith Maitland’s riveting documentary, Tower , which PBS broadcast last week. “It was not something you’d expect from our beautiful tower,” one woman says about the incident years later. I have to be honest--I sobbed so much during this film I must’ve gone through an entire box of tissues. Using a combination of old news footage, current interviews, and rotoscope animation, Maitland tells the survivors’ shocking stories of what happened over the course of 96 horrific minutes. There’s Alex Hernandez, who was shot off his bicycle as he delivered newspapers; and Allen Crum, a manager of the University Book Store Co-...

We heard about the fire from the mailman who had stopped by the office that morning to make a delivery. It was July 21, 1987 and a propane gas explosion had ripped through the block on 50th Street and 18th Avenue. I was working for the Bay Ridge Home Reporter , a neighborhood weekly, and I was assigned to cover the blast. It was one of my first big stories. The smoke from the explosion and resulting fire rose high over this Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. I had never seen so many fire engines, police cars, ambulances and news vans in my life. I was just getting over a nasty summer cold, but I forgot about that as I joined a group of reporters who were penned in an impromptu press area that was formed by two police barriers. All I could see was smoke and rubble. I broke out the paper’s Polaroid camera—yes, seriously--and began snapping pictures. In a case of excruciatingly bad timing, I ran out of film just as a firefighter staggered away from the flames, tumbled on to a stretc...