A Student's Journey

My lifelong quest for learning

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This is my first essay in photo format on @instagram. It deals with my observations on Core 9, a course I took at @bklyncollege411 in 1989. #brooklyncollege #brooklyn #college

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I have suffered from panic disorder and social anxiety disorder for 32 years now. I was misdiagnosed as having schizoid disorder by my clinic. In 1988 my panic attacks stopped when I began attending Brooklyn College but my social anxiety remained and after I dropped out in 1990 my social support system collapsed and I began to suffer a relapse of panic attacks two years later. I never became the same again and now for the last 25 years my world became smaller and smaller until I am only able to walk three or four blocks from home. I am trying to increase the distance so I can go to McDonald’s on Bay Parkway and maybe do shopping on either Bay Parkway or 18th Avenue.

https://www.facebook.com/astudentsjourney/posts/1899393706742877:0

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Summer of 1989

On May 24, 1989 I missed my history exam. I promptly informed the history department. They told me to request a makeup exam, which I did. The English 2 test which was supposed to be at Whitehead Hall didn't take place, so I informed Edward Paolella, the lecturer who taught English 2. I spent many hot days during the summer of 1989 to catch up on my final English essay that Lecturer Paolella offered and to prepare for my final Core 4 (Shaping of the Modern World) exam.

I studied at Brooklyn College daily on the third-floor lounge at Ingersoll Hall Extension. Every afternoon I took the B6 bus and got off at Avenue I and Bedford Avenue and walk up Bedford Avenue to the extension building. I spent much time studying at the lounge. I also walked on many a hot and humid day to an un-air-conditioned Boylan Hall and Ingersoll Hall. I ate lunch at the temporary cafeteria on the first floor of Whitehead Hall. At 6 p.m. when the campus closed I left for home.

In the evenings and weekends I took leisure and religious activities at home and away. I watched TV, listened to the radio and often would read the Good News Bible. Late Saturday afternoons were spent preparing for confession, Saturday evenings were spent reading The Tablet and early Sunday afternoons were spent attending Mass. Sometimes I would be ridden in a 1988 red Ford Taurus to various places in southern Brooklyn. I was enjoying the summer as best as I could given my depression and my difficulty writing English 2 assignments.

Then the murder of Yusuf Hawkins happened.

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My confirmation, 1988-89

During my teens I longed to be accepted into and by the Catholic Church. Because of my own rigorist prejudices and therefore sought the way, the truth and the life in being a papal-loyalist Catholic by early 1988 I got tired of the way I was living and began, as I told earlier, to go to confession on Saturdays and attend Mass on Sundays. Since I was never confirmed I sought the sacrament of confirmation through a program for adults beginning in the fall of 1988, which coincidentally occurred during my first year at Brooklyn College.

In order to be fully admitted to the church and also to get married in the church one must be both baptized and confirmed. I was baptized on January 11, 1970 at St. Finbar Church. I still needed to be confirmed, however. Since I was 18 years old I couldn’t enter the CCD program. I had to enter the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA). RCIA lasted most of a year and would culminate in my being confirmed the following spring.

RCIA consisted of a series of lessons on Tuesday evenings from 8 to 9 p.m. in the church basement. After coming home from college at about 7:30 p.m. I would walk the three blocks to the church and receive my lessons. The teachers were the priests of the parish; two of them challenged traditionally help conceptions about the seven sacraments of the church: communion, baptism, penance, confirmation, matrimony, holy orders and the sacrament of the sick. We were given an instruction book, Your Faith and handouts authored by, among other leading lights of the church, Karl Rahner. Many years later upon reading the handouts I would learn the communion was first a meal to be celebrated and shared among the members of the church, not just a thing to be adored from a tabernacle. Eucharistic adoration was not what it was during medieval times. Some of us like me attended RCIA lessons to only receive confirmation while others went to RCIA to be both baptized and confirmed. I’ll mention only two of these people. One, a young man like me, sought to interest me in weightlifting. In two years you’ll be very strong, he said. I took his advice only about ten years ago and began lifting 20-pound weights only five years ago. I sought out a pretty Latina woman only to learn she was already married. What a heartbreaker!

The big day of confirmation finally arrived on Sunday May 13, 1989 at St. Finbar’s. I wore a dark gray custom-made summer suit from Barney’s for the confirmation mass. Attending were my parents, my two godfathers and Newman Club president Mary Meeks which was a pleasant surprise. I chose Peter as my confirmation name because I believed myself to be a papal-loyalist Catholic and I wanted these beliefs to be reflected in my chosen name. Fr. James Zona confirmed me by crossing my forehead with sacred holy oil and the words, “Peter, be sealed with the seal of the Holy Spirit. At last I was confirmed. I was received fully into the Catholic Church.

I hoped and planned that I would be a faithful Catholic eating the flat, thin communion wafers every weekend, doing my part to follow the royal road to heaven, or so I thought. But even the best-laid plans would eventually come to naught in six months by two incidents that would forever change the way I view the leadership of the Catholic Church and her institutions. That shall be told later. The two incidents would make the royal road to heaven so rocky I was forced to take another path.

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The Kingsman and The Excelsior

If the Daily News and the New York Post have been engaged in a tabloid war for forty years, then by analogy The Kingsman and The Excelsior have been engaged in a campus newspaper war for nearly thirty years. The Excelsior was created by the Brooklyn College Student Government after The Kingsman published an anti-Semitic cartoon and mislabeled a rock band photo that was so offensive to Haitian students that they, in an apparent violation of the First Amendment, dumped copies of The Kingsman on the campus quad. Thereafter, President Hess condemned the paper and it was defunded in a campus referendum. Thus The Kingsman was sent into exile off campus for a year.

The Excelsior had a rocky start, for its office was vandalized before publishing its first issue which carried an article on the vandalism which mentioned that the word “Exsmellcior” was scrawled on one of its walls.

The Kingsman was originally created by the Brooklyn College administration. Harry Gideonse, being president of the college at the time, after the Faculty-Student Council of the college shut down Vanguard in 1950 purportedly for not having a faculty advisor and for not presenting equal points of view on a controversial topic but actually for alleged Communist influence. (After Vanguard was shut down two off-campus papers briefly appeared, Campus News and Draugnav.) Gideonse suspended and later harassed editor Willam Taylor for many years thereafter, informing his various employers and would-be employers of his alleged Communist ties.

I wrote a letter to The Excelsior and a article for The Kingsman during my time at Brooklyn College. The letter was published in the spring of 1989 and dealt with a $10 fee for the Brooklyn College football team which was passed in a referendum. I voted no and explained that students strapped for cash couldn’t afford to pay for the football team. The article was published in the fall of 1990 during my fading days as a student, the subject being the Newman Catholic Center and the various amenities it offered.

I also, in the fall of 1989, tried but failed to have an article published in The Kingsman which involved my attempt to start a singles club. This attempt to form a club and the article about the Newman Center will be discussed in a future post.

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The Brooklyn College campus, 1988-90

The Brooklyn College campus that I loved so much in August 1988 consisted of thirteen buildings filling a (by urban standards) a vast space variously listed as between 26 and 40 acres that was originally the Wood-Harmon property which the City of New York purchased in 1935 for use as the campus of Brooklyn College of the City College of New York.

The Wood-Harmon property was, at the time of the City’s purchase, a golf course and the site of a circus at a time when tents were used to attract spectators (using arenas would come later). Designed by Randolph Evans, the campus consists of three buildings in Georgian style - Library, Administration and Science - surrounding a central quadrangle. Three more buildings - the Gymnasium and two others - would surround the quadrangle on the west side of Bedford Avenue. Only the Gymnasium was built, leaving the immediate west side an empty, grass-filled place. A power plant for heating and an athletic field would fill the far western end of the campus. Construction of the five original buildings on campus would take two years and was completed in the fall of 1937. The first classes after leaving its original Downtown Brooklyn location would take place in October 1937.

The thirteen buildings I would eventually visit over the next two years are described as follows:

The central focal point of Randolph Evans’s design of the campus is the LaGuardia Library with its clock and tower, home, with the Gideonse extension, of the Brooklyn College Library. Its spacious, ornate Reading Room contains all the periodicals and newspapers of academic interest. I would on rare occasions look at issues of The Times of London or The Washington Post, usually appearing a few days after publication. I also noticed a newspaper with a purple banner, The Guardian Weekly, containing the best of The Guardian and The Washington Post. I didn’t read any of The Guardian Weekly’s issues, as I didn’t pay any attention to what in my mind was an obscure paper. Combined with an extension, the Gideonse Library (finished in 1959), named after Harry Gideonse, the second president of Brooklyn College, the Brooklyn College Library contained about one million books.

Boylan Hall, named after the William A. Boylan, the first president of Brooklyn College, houses the President’s Office, the Student Life Office (now the Student Affairs Office), the SEEK program, the English and Art Departments, the bookstore, and, the last semester I was there, the basement cafeteria.

Ingersoll Hall, named in 1958 after Raymond V. Ingersoll, Brooklyn Borough President when the campus opened, houses the Math Department and used to house all the science departments until Ingersoll Hall Extension opened in 1973. The extension is home to the Computer Science Department, the Writing Center (now the Learning Center) and many labs. On the first floor the 600-foot corridor leads to a lobby and entrance overlooking the beautiful lily pond on the side of the library and a wide walkway leading to the East 27th Street entrance.

Roosevelt Hall, named after the 32nd president of the United States, was originally named the Gymnasium, home to the Physical Education department as well as the offices of both the Excelsior and the Kingsman newspapers. The entrance, once overlooking the grass in the old days prior to the construction of the Plaza Building, was adjoined to the Plaza’s long monotonous corridor at the time I was there. Roosevelt Hall Extension, adjoined at Roosevelt Hall’s southern end, also houses many physical education programs.

The athletic field was the home of the Kingsman football team; the nearby power plant facing Ocean Avenue supplies heat to the college.

Whitman Hall is the college’s main auditorium, the home of the Brooklyn College Center for the Performing Arts. Dance, concerts and films, many open to the public, are performed here. Adjoining Whitman Hall was Gershwin Hall, former home of the Music Department. I only visited Gershwin Hall once and never attended class there. It has since been torn down, to be replaced by the Tow Center.

Whitehead Hall contains the History and the TV/Radio Departments. I would spend the Spring 1989 semester and the Fall 1990 semester attending a class there. Until 1990 it also temporary housed the cafeteria on the first floor. The Student Center across the street on East 27th Street and Campus Road, is the magnet for much of Brooklyn College’s student life for many club and Greek fraternity and sorority meetings take place there. Replacing the Ditmas House, in built in 1962 (two additional floors were built in 1968), the center, known as SUBO, has a sixth-floor penthouse that has sweeping views of Brooklyn and much of Manhattan.

The Brutalist buildings on the west and extreme southern ends of the campus - James Hall, the Plaza Building, while giving an appearance of solidity, began to fall apart within 15 years of construction. These mostly bland buildings, constructed between 1969 and 1973, have not aged well. When I made a rare visit to Roosevelt Extension top floor the floor was dirty and unwashed with the tiles coming up.

James Hall houses the Judaic Studies, Psychology, Political Science and Sociology Departments. I would spend much time in the fall of 1988 as I attended a section of a course, Core Studies 4, People, Power and Politics, taught by Dr. Ron Miller and for which I received an A.

Adjoining James Hall was the Plaza Building, a very important building in more ways than one. Not only did it house the Admissions and Financial Aid Offices, the Computer Center, a swimming pool and a basketball court which was home to the Brooklyn College Kingsmen men’s and women’s basketball teams, the Plaza Building also supported the Upper Quadrangle with its pillars, benches and tables. The Upper Quadrangle, surrounded by James Hall to the north and Roosevelt Hall to the south, was joined in the east by a bridge crossing Bedford Avenue and leading to a series of steps to the Central Quadrangle.

The Plaza Building, along with the Upper Quadrangle, the bridge and the steps, which were all deteriorating and too costly to repair, were torn down in stages between 2003 and 2005 to make way for the West Quad Project, restoring Randolph Evans’s original vision of the Brooklyn College campus.

Such was the good, mostly good, but also some of the bad and the ugly of the Brooklyn College campus during the late 1980s. (The Newman Catholic Center and the Hillel House will be discussed in a future post.)

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Another one of my favorites!

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August 1, 1988: The journey begins

Monday, August 1, 1988 was a hot day. I took the B1 and B6 buses from my apartment in Bensonhurst for the ride to the college I’ve never seen. Just the previous Friday, in an effort to conquer my panic attacks and prodded by my therapist, I took two buses to Rockbottom a discount store on 86th Street between 4th and 5th Avenues in Bay Ridge. Since I found I could shop without too much nervousness, I proceeded to take the bus to the college as my therapist recommended.

I left the B6 bus on Campus Road and Bedford Avenue in front of Midwood High School. Over the summer I was accepted to Brooklyn College having barely made the cutoff score for admission. I originally planned to enroll in the Spring 1989 semester but the woman handling admissions over the phone said the college only handles admissions for the next immediate semester, which in this case was the fall of 1988. I crossed the street and arrived at the Plaza Building (torn down and replaced by the West Quad Building, Rafael Viñoly-designed structure opened in 2009). I proceeded to the Financial Aid office and began the arduous process of filling out forms, responding to an audit and presenting documents in an effort to have the federal and state governments pay for my tuition through a Pell Grant, a Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) grant and a SEEK grant for educationally disadvantaged students like myself.

This was the beginning of a month-long journey into my being enrolled at Brooklyn College.

In addition to having my tuition paid I had to take and pass the CUNY Assessment Tests in both reading and math, which took place in a lecture hall in Ingersoll Hall Extension. Having passed my tests, I still needed to register for the fall. That involved waiting in long lines and dropping and adding a course. Then there was a snag involving my grant money. Although I plunged into a deep sadness, being near tears and fearing I wouldn’t enter college at all, I eventually received the grant money in time for the fall semester.

In visiting the campus never had I entered an area where there were as many quiet, pleasant places to sit, to walk and to shop. One can think of many places: the benches near the Bedford Avenue gate, the steps near the Plaza Building entrance, the guard post in the Plaza lobby (when the guard wasn’t around), the corridors in the newer, air-conditioned buildings on campus, the chilled water coolers in the corridors, the campus bookstore in the basement of Boylan Hall, me looking at those roller-ball pens with their brightly colored inks, the tall trees lining the central quadrangle walkways and the evergreens surrounding the gate and the campus building at the perimeter, and the Upper Quad with its benches and tables and the pillars and buildings surrounding it. With such a beautiful campus I knew I was going to like it here.

For the next two years Brooklyn College would become my second home.

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It was 29 years ago today.

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March 1990: An introduction to A Student’s Journey

It was on March 7, 1990 that I paid a visit to Brooklyn College, one of the crown jewels of the City University of New York (CUNY). I had dropped out a couple of months before, having earned 14 credits over three semesters. I dropped out after having withdrawn from my four classes in the fall of 1989: English 2, Italian 1, Core Studies 1 (Greek and Latin Classics, mostly Greek) and Core 9 (African, Asian and Latin American cultures). The course I was having the most difficulty was in English 2. 

This was the second time I was taking this course. The first time was in the spring of 1989 when Edward Paolella was teaching my course. I didn’t do as well in English 2 as I did in English 1, which I took in the fall of 1988 and for which I received an A (which surprised me since I expected a B). Although I received an A in the final essay for English 1 I was not exempt from taking English 2 although somehow toward the end of the fall of 1989 I received a letter which I still have informing me of my eligibility for English 5. (What’s English 5? An advanced English course for talented students like myself. Does being selected for English 5 exempt me from English 2? I wonder.) In the assigned essays for English 2 for which I wasn’t exempt I received Cs; in English 1 I received Bs and As. The confidence which I experienced during English 1 evaporated; when I was assigned a final essay on Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar I experienced such a loss of confidence that I wasn’t able to finish the essay in time. Complicating matters, I missed the Core 4 (Shaping of the Modern World, a global history course) final in the spring. It had to be made up; I studied a great deal of history at Brooklyn College during the summer; I would eventually pass the Core 4 exam in October 1989.

After summer turned into autumn I took English 2 for the second time. The professor’s name was Leonard Ashley and he assigned our class ten essays for the semester, with the capstone a research paper comparing the book reviews of a certain book that the student selects. He was not an easy man to deal with; he berated students and told one of them to “drop dead.” My lack of confidence in the spring semester spilled over into the fall and I got usually Cs, and when I failed to finish my research paper I got an F, which I had changed to a W.

So I dropped out of all my courses and here I am, no longer a student and standing between Whithead Hall and the LaGuardia Library making a phone call to the info line, asking whether a person without student ID can enter the Student Center. I wanted to attend a lecture by Fr. Joseph A. O’Hare, then president of Fordham University. No, it wasn’t possible, the woman on the other side of the line replied. My not being able to attend the lecture (or the library, for that matter, unless one can scrape up $50 a year) showed how far I had fallen: I was excluded for the things on campus that mattered to me the most: the library, the Student Center and feeling of belonging on campus. Despite my trying hard to study, my difficulty in connecting with other people and the sadness that was the result in not feeling valued either in class or in club was the cause of my academic failure. The winter and spring of 1990 was one of the saddest times of my life.

I was a papal-loyalist Catholic at the time of my enrollment in Brooklyn College, with some, as I learned later, fundamentalist, Jansenist tendencies. This severe fundamentalist Jansenism which I unknowingly had would contribute to my emotional and social difficulties at the college.

In this blog I will recall my journey which begins on being accepted by Brooklyn College in the summer of 1988, continues with academic and social adventures in the fall of 1988 and the 1989 calendar year, and comes to an end in the fall of  1990. I continued to make a number of attempts at enrolling and paid a number of campus visits in 1991 and 1992. I last visited the campus in the spring of 1992, the term I would have graduated with either a B.A. or a B.S. (I was officially undecided although in the fall of 1988 I leaned toward Computer Science.)

In addition to chronicling my journey I will also post my views of the current situation on education in general and CUNY and Brooklyn College in particular. I hope that these comments are tactful and contribute to making the educative experience more hard fun for students, educators, and administrators. 

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Hello, I will be reblogging my favorite posts this week. This was my very first post. Enjoy!

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English 2: My first attempt

As I recounted in my very first post I passed English 1 in the fall of 1988 with an A but I didn’t do well enough in my final essay to be exempt from English 2. I thought, with my very good writing skills I would do as well (get an A) or almost as well (get a B) in English 2 as I did in English 1. Unfortunately that didn’t turn out to be the case. My taking English 2 at Brooklyn College in the spring of 1989 was the first of three attempts in what turned out to be a futile effort.

The class was taught at Boylan Hall by a lecturer, Edward Paolella. The goals of English 2 composition were to refine and sharpen the writing skills learned in English 1. Lecturer Paolella wasn’t as inspiring in English 2 as Professor Lee Haring was in English 1. He assigned us a number of works of literature instead of a composition handbook such as The Little, Brown Handbook. The works of literature assigned included three plays, Inherit the Wind, Bent and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and one short novel, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I believe we had to do six essays; we weren’t assigned a research paper that included such things as footnotes and a bibliography.

One time Lecturer Paolella posed a question to me as part of a class discussion. He asked me what I thought about the acceptability of homosexuality. I replied that my church, the Catholic Church, teaches to hate the sin but not the sinner. Another time Lecturer Paolella assigned me a track from an album. The album, he said, was American Pie (1971) and the track was named “Vincent.” American Pie was Don McLean’s album. At the Gideonse Library I listened to the album using a Sony studio headphones. “Starry, starry night,” McLean began “Vincent.” He was referring to one of Vincent Van Gogh’s works, The Starry Night. The song indeed was about Vincent Van Gogh, not me, as the song recounts the sad tale of his life that ended in his suicide. One track that I didn’t hear that day but only heard much later was the title track, “American Pie,” that reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1972 despite being over eight and a half minutes long. The song recounted “the day the music died.”

Near the end of the semester Lecturer Paolella told our class that the final English 2 exam would take place in Whitehead Hall. I wasn’t confident of my writing skills as I was the semester before, as my essays were marked C. On the exam day in May I went to the exam room at Whitehead Hall only to find the room empty. When I inquired what happened Lecturer Paolella gave me the option of submitting an essay on Julius Caesar over the summer but things didn’t turn out the way I had hoped. My lack of confidence in my writing skills and my depression caused me to miss the end-of-summer deadline for submitting my final English paper so I received a NC (no credit) just as he said he would when he gave me the option.

I went from the mountain peaks of success to the abyss of failure. I went from getting A and B essays in English 1 to C essays in English 2. This impotency in English 2 would continue when I took the course two more times, in the fall of 1989 and again in the fall of 1990 and it, along with my emotional problems caused me to drop out of Brooklyn College - twice.

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May 1, 1989: Student protest at Brooklyn College

On May 1, 1989 there was a student protest at Brooklyn College’s Boylan Hall as there were at a majority of the then-20 campuses of the City University of New York (CUNY). The protests were mainly over a proposed tuition hike at CUNY. The protest shut down Boylan Hall for the day; some classes took place at Midwood High School. President Robert L. Hess and his staff moved to Gershwin Hall (since demolished). The Brooklyn College administration posted signs on the entrances of campus building warning of the consequences as spelled out under Article XV of the CUNY bylaws. There was a rally outside Boylan Hall where students and faculty voiced their displeasure. Newman Center director Fr. Thomas D’Albro was there; I’m sure other leaders were there. Locked out of Boylan Hall, I saw a banner placed there which read something like “Hey Cuomo...No Tuition Hikes.” I didn’t believe that tuition hikes, while devastating to some students, was severe enough to justify a takeover of a campus building and disrupt classes. While the Brooklyn administration agreed with me they tolerated the protest and classes resumed the next day.

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My trip to the bowling alley with some members of the Newman Club

Anthony Rosalia was the closest person I ever knew at Brooklyn College. I met him when he was treasurer of the Newman Club in September 1988 when he gave me a grand tour of the Newman Center. It was there at one time he discussed the intricacies of machine language. Using another machine at home called the telephone I had a conversation with Anthony that lasted three hours with him doing most of the talking. One other occasion that he was talking to me he invited me to a trip to a bowling alley in Mill Basin on a Sunday evening in the spring of 1989. I accepted.

There was a gang of us at the bowling alley with Mill Avenue and the Kings Plaza shopping center nearby. There was a woman to whom I wasn't very much attracted but whom I might have taken her out. Should I have done so? That might be one of the regrets I have had. I didn't engage in much conversation that night. I saw her at the Newman Center on occasion. We had snacks, I don't know if I had nachos or pizza. I wasn't a very good bowler. I think I was bowling in the 60s - 70s range. I was lucky to have bowled at all.

It was the first and last time I went out with my Newman Club friends.

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Core 4: The Shaping of the Modern World

As a child I assumed that history was all names, dates and events: When did the Revolutionary War began? What were the causes of the French Revolution? Who won the Civil War? Which nation started World War II? Who were the leaders of the civil rights movement? Those assumptions changed when I took Core 4, The Shaping of the Modern World, taught in the spring of 1989 by Professor Ruth Kleinman of Brooklyn College.

What did she teach at Whitehead Hall? She taught that history, instead of being just a collection of names, dates and events, is shaped by ideas and movements as well. Marxism, for example, attempted to explain the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism by the increasing concentration of capital by the owners of production (the bourgeoisie) This leads to rising inequality and the workers of production (the proletariat) getting less and less capital. This, according to Marxism as explained by The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels, 1848) will lead the proletariat to revolution. The Communist Manifesto would lead to the rise of both Marxism and social democracy in Europe and the United States and would lead eventually to the Russian Revolution led by Vladimir Lenin with his own Marxist-Leninist philosophy in November 1917 that would lead to the seeds of both the Soviet Union and of the evil flower of communism that would spread like a cancer after World War II to Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, Vietnam and Nicaragua. That evil flower began to wither after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in November 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Although I have given Marxism as an example of the origins of communism, my favorite period in Core 4 was the French Revolution and the role of the Third Estate.

We were assigned our history textbook and a source book published by Brooklyn College. I would put both to good use when on May 24 I realized I missed my Core 4 exam because I overslept. I had to take a makeup exam in October. How well I did on both the exam and the course and how I studied to get there shall be told later.

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Core 2.1: My visit to the Met (and the Guggenheim, too!)

Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych by Jan Van Eyck, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The above photo, from metmuseum.org, is in the public domain.

Professor Michael Jacoff, who taught Core 2.1 (Art History), assigned us students a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to write to him our impressions of three works: Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych by Jan Van Eyck, Parade de cirque (Circus Sideshow) by Georges Seurat and a painting by an English whose name I have since forgotten. Jacoff gave this assignment because, as he told us, the works shown in lecture slides and in History of Art were “reproductions” and that we’d better make the trip and see real works of art, not photos of art.

So I took the trip to the Met on a Friday, May 12, 1989. I took the B train and then the 4 train to the 86th Street Station and then walk a couple of blocks west to the Met Museum. I went inside the great hall then went to the wing where the European Old Masters were located. The presence of being among so many priceless works of art is something I’ll never forget. I recall I went to view the Seurat painting first, then searched all over the European wing for the British painting and then, finally...my favorite painting, the crown jewel, of all the works in the Met’s collection! There it was, the tiny diptych secured in a glass case flush against the pastel blue wall, Van Eyck’s Crucifixion and Last Judgement which despite its small size was rich in detail even though it was created nearly 550 years before, when Europe and especially the Netherlands were in the midst of the Renaissance and was entering the modern era, coming out of the dark ages just as a tulip bursts out of flower to bloom. I shall never forget looking at Van Eyck’s diptych in front of many curious onlookers.

I didn’t have to do what Angie (played by Geena Davis) and her partner in the film Angie (1994) did when they tried to eat crackers at the Met. After viewing the paintings I went to the cafeteria and had a ham sandwich. Then I peed in one of nicest men’s rooms in Manhattan. Later, after exiting the museum, I sat on the marble steps built in 1970 under the direction of the director of the Met, Thomas Hoving; I was asked by a guard not to sit on the top step so I moved a few steps down to eat my pretzel. The Met is always obsessed with keeping spaces clear for public safety.

After leaving the Met it was on to the Guggenheim Museum, the only public building in New York City designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and opened in 1959 shortly after his death. I wanted to be considered an adult so I paid full admission. I went up the spiral walkway and viewed artwork of stringy bursts of color for which I have no conceptual understanding. Except for the walkway I didn’t enjoy it very much. After I exited I sat on a stone bench and listened to the news on WNEW radio.

After I submitted my impressions to Professor Jacoff and took the final exam I received the expected B. Thanks to Michael Jacoff and History of Art I shall never forget the impression that art in the context of history has had on me. Core 2.1 was one of the golden courses during my time at Brooklyn College.

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Core 2.1: Art History

The first time I went to a museum was on a class trip to the Museum of the City of New York on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. All I remember was a vague recollection of early Americana items there and the fact I sat next to the teacher, Mrs. Wolin, to and from the museum. While I might have developed an appreciation of the early history of America I didn’t develop a taste for art until I took Core 2.1, Art History in the spring of 1989.

Art History was taught by Professor Jacoff in one of the six lecture halls of Boylan Hall. I remember Professor Jacoff presenting, sometimes awkwardly, the various slides of art in his lectures. Our textbook was the best-selling History of Art, Third Edition (Prentice-Hall, 1986) by H.W. Janson and Anthony F. Janson. The textbook was originally published in 1962 with H.W. Janson as sole author and was a standard text in art courses around the country. It has gone through eight editions, most recently published in 2015 with about a half-dozen coauthors. There is a Ringling Brothers connection to both the Brooklyn College campus and History of Art coauthor Anthony F. Janson. The now-defunct Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus had one of its big tops on the Wood-Harmon property that would eventually be the site of the Brooklyn College campus that opened in October 1937. Anthony F. Janson was chief curator of the John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida. This museum was founded by John Ringling, one of the seven Ringling Brothers and owner of the Ringling Brothers Circus.

I would learn from Core 2.1 and History of Art the Egyptian pyramids, the Greek Doryphoros, Roman and Ionic Columns, the Renaissance and Impressionism. But my favorite period and one which dovetails with my rigid Catholic faith, was the Renaissance and the high-water mark of the Renaissance and the visual and cultural expression of my Catholicism was Van Eyck’s Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych on permanent display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The focus was on Jesus Christ crucified. Those who follow him will go to heaven as depicted in the upper half of the right-hand panel and those who fail to follow his ways will go to hell, tortured and eaten alive forever and ever as shown in the lower half of the right-hand panel.

The Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych was one of the works I was assigned to see at the Met. Next I will describe a visit to the Met as well as a trip to the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum a few blocks away. I will also describe how well I did in Core 2.1.

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April 1, 1989: My visit to Yankee Stadium with a few friends

April 20, 1985 was my first visit to Yankee Stadium. The Yankees were playing the Cleveland Indians and it was Calendar Day sponsored by Ivory Soap. The filed, scoreboard and stands were up close like I’ve never seen it in my life. One could at least experience the game better than TV. Bob Sheppard was announcing. I could still hear him say something like, “The Yankees like to thank Ivory Soap for sponsoring Calendar Day.” Yankee Stadium had more seats than its replacement - about 56,000 - and was more affordable. It was not always pleasant or convenient. In 1988 a stadium attendant yelled at me for taking too many paper towels given me by my mother’s boyfriend to clean up the filthy toilet. In 1991 in my final visit there was no coffee. And on April 1, 1989 there was the unpleasant experience after a Mayor’s Trophy exhibition game between the Yankees and the Mets, won by the Yankees, 4-3.

I never attended a Yankee (or Met) game alone. I was with the pastor of St. Finbar’s, Fr. Anthony J. Failla, Brooklyn College Kingsman sportswriter Joe Bongiorno (who would be one of my two godfathers) and a couple of youths. Asked to take off my Met hat and jacket, I complied. (The Mets are considered the enemy in Yankeeland. Why I wore Mets gear? Maybe it was out of habit, not out of a petty spite against the Yankees.) When we entered the stadium we were in the nosebleed section, the upper deck along the first base line. All the players below seemed tiny. I recalled that former Yale president Dr. A. Bartlett Giamatti became baseball commissioner that day. (He lasted five months, most of that time spent investigating Pete Rose’s betting on baseball. On August 23, 1989 Rose agreed to a lifetime ban; Giamatti died of a heart attack on September 1.) I remember Darryl Strawberry hit a home run to right field almost out of the ballpark. I could still smell the Budweiser I couldn’t have for nearly two years.

It was cloudy and chilly. I needed to go to the rest room for about half the game. After the game I went and tried to pee but couldn’t. A bathroom attendant suddenly appeared and told us we have to leave or he’ll lock us in the rest room. I was upset all the way home (we went to and from Yankee Stadium by minivan). What an unpleasant way to end a ballgame!

A great many fans claim that Shea Stadium and its successor, Citi Field, is a more pleasant experience and has more amenities and better food. Although I have only been to Shea Stadium once and have never been to Citi Field I can understand why. The stadium experience (at least at Shea) is somewhat more pleasant than the old Yankee Stadium (I haven’t been to the new Yankee Stadium either). At least I didn’t have any bathroom attendants yelling at me!

[astudentsjourney]

Kingsman-Excelsior letter: Why I voted no

During my Brooklyn College career I wrote a number of letters to the editor to newspapers such as The Tablet, the Daily News, The New York Times, the Brooklyn Spectator, the Kingsman and the Excelsior. Some of these letters were published. Even before I entered college, when I was still in my fundamentalist Catholic phase, I wrote to The Tablet agreeing with Father Ronald Lauder’s criticism of secularism, writing that “secularism is everywhere.” (I have since been converted to the positive value of secularism’s role in culture and government.) Thus I was able to write and have published a letter on an issue of burning importance. I would write a second such letter, this time to both the Kingsman and the Excelsior; the issue: a $10 increase in the student activity fee passed in a referendum by a 5-1 margin in early March 1989.

My concern with the fee increase was that students were already paying enough as it was in tuition and fees. I wrote that I had desired to pay $5, not $10, more to fund athletics. Brooklyn College faced a $4.5 million budget cut which could have affected both tutoring and lab services as well as the number of courses offered for the fall 1989 semester. “But why would I want to pay an additional $5 for an upgrade” (1) in athletics when the college faced a downgrade in academics? I concluded my letter:

Students should spend their money towards maintaining those services rather than on something they cannot afford at a time of a budget crunch. That is why I voted “no” to raising the student activity fee $10. (2)

For while the student activity fee cannot be used for academics and while the increase to the athletic program was $130,000 per year (3), a drop in the bucket compared to the $4.5 million budget gap (about $350 per student) (4) I believed cuts should have been made wherever possible to non-essential athletic and extracurricular programs as well as even academic programs lacking sufficient student support. If the gap remained, nominal tuition increases would have been acceptable to me.

The point I have just made about cutting non-essential academics was only made in hindsight, at the time of this Tumblr post, not at the time of writing the letters to the editor of both the Kingsman and the Excelsior. But the point I made then and now is academics over athletics! School over sports! Students can always form their own makeshift teams, join an amateur team (not affiliated with a school, of course) or even join a semi-professional or professional team.

Soon, as will be told later, I will have made an appearance in the “Voice of the People” feature of the Daily News and reach millions of readers with a “timebomb of bigotry” (5) observation in the light of the killing of Yusuf Hawkins in a dark deserted street while looking for a used car with his father on the night of August 23, 1989 which would both affect the way New Yorkers - Black, White, Latino and Asian - view race relations in the city and also, more importantly and with a consequent result, the mayoral election that year which made Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins the city’s first Black mayor.

(1) “I Voted No,” Kingsman, March 6, 1989. See also an identical letter I wrote to the Excelsior, March 6, 1989.

(2) Ibid.

(3) “Football Team Wins, 972 - 196,“ Excelsior, March 6, 1989, p. 1; see also "BC Athletics Romp," Kingsman March 6, 1989, p. 12. About half of the increase was for the football team, which was disbanded in 1991. See “List of defunct college football teams” at Wikipedia. Accessed on July 18, 2017; "Brooklyn College Cancels Football Season" at The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 25, 1991. Accessed on July 18, 2017.

(4) “I Voted No.” $350 per student estimate obtained by dividing 4,500,000 by 13,000 (the approximate number of students at the time based on what is implied by the Excelsior article, ibid.: $130,000 divided by $10 per student equals 13,000 students)

(5) “‘Thoughts for the day,’ Voice of the People,” New York Daily News, August 31, 1989, p. 52.

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March 23, 1989: My Holy Thursday trip to Midtown Manhattan

After my first trip to Manhattan alone on November 20, 1988 when I feared for my life after an attempted mugging I wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again. So on a fair-weather Holy Thursday, March 23, 1989 I ventured into Midtown Manhattan once again by subway. I wanted to prove myself that I could see the sights and visit a library safely.

I took the B train in the late morning to Herald Square and went to Macy’s I knew from previous visits that the department store lobby where perfumes such as Obsession were hawked would smell nice. After spending a short time there I went to the Empire State Building. I bought a ticket and then went straight to the rapid elevator leading to the 86th floor observatory 1,050 feet above street level. The view was awesome - I could see the five boroughs and northern New Jersey, including Giants Stadium (since replaced by Met Life Stadium). I shall never forget that I could hear an unending din from the busy streets far below. After viewing the city I went inside to a cafeteria and ate a hot dog.

After leaving the Empire State Building I walked several blocks up Fifth Avenue to the New York Public Library (NYPL), a Beaux-Arts building stretching for two blocks that was completed in 1911 and was designed by Carrère & Hastings. I entered the building and stopped at the foot of the huge lobby. A woman chided me for blocking the entrance. I then went to see the art displayed there before proceeding to the Reading Room. How wonderful that was! Old Masters-type Murals adorn the ceiling in this vast room filled with row after row of long tables flanked at the ends by copies of the second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary. I read my copy of the Daily News at one of these tables. The tables, of course, were surrounded by stacks and stacks of research books since NYPL is a research library; the main circulating and reference library then as now is the Mid-Manhattan Library that is cater corner from NYPL and is at 40th Street and Fifth Avenue. I entered there and looked around. Although the stacks upstairs were crowded with both books and people I liked best the modern ground floor lobby as I was able to sit comfortably on one of the sofas there.

After leaving the Mid-Manhattan Library I went to 30 Rockefeller Plaza (30 Rock). What was crowded with people this time was the lobby where I sat on a bench full of humanity. When I tried the men’s room it was littered with paper towels and toilet paper. I then entered the 47th–50th Streets–Rockefeller Center Station from the lobby of 30 Rock and took the B train home. Thus I successfully completed a trip to Midtown Manhattan with no incidents. In the evening I partook of Holy Thursday communion at St. Finbar’s and as a catechumen preparing for my confirmation I was at the altar having my feet washed. An end to a memorable day!