The House Next Door to the Stooges

A Visit to the old neighborhood

I was born in New York City but left when I was five. So, when I moved back here three years ago, I looked forward to visiting some of my family’s old haunts. My parents and my grandparents had all been born in New York. My great grandparents had emigrated from Lithuania, Latvia and Hungary. On my mother’s side, my great grandmother Hannah and her husband Isaac raised their large family in a sprawling Victorian house in Bensonhurst, purchased thanks to my great grandfather’s thriving shoe factory. Isaac lost his personal fortune during the Depression when his business partner embezzled the company funds and fled to South America, so the story goes. More honest than wise, Isaac insisted on paying back the company’s creditors with his own personal funds, a move my great grandmother never let him live down, but they kept the house. Their daughter, my grandmother Ida, helped the family through these hard times with her job as a music teacher and band leader at PS-128 in Bensonhurst. Growing up, I’d always heard about this house, and I was eager to see it, but I moved to NYC at the height of the pandemic, and for that first year or so, I didn’t get out so much. I had plenty of time, I figured – occasionally, I’d look at photos of it on Google Earth.

My mother had been born in the house at 122 Bay 26^th St., as had my uncle and their uncles and aunts. The Three Stooges had grown up right next door – Moe, Curly, and Shemp (Larry was a later addition and not related), and everyone in my family knew them. Like the Stooges, my great uncle Bill had gone into acting. His stage name was Tiny Brauer, and he appeared in various shows of my childhood as a character actor, including more Stooge films than anyone besides the Stooges themselves.

(Shemp Howard with Tiny Brauer in Fling in the Ring, 1955)

Moe married Helen, a cousin of ours. I even met Moe when I was ten and visiting my grandmother at her house in Long Beach, NY. He was staying with my Uncle Allan at his beachfront house and my grandmother brought me over to meet him without telling me at first who this gnomish old man was who came to the door. When she revealed who he was, I wouldn’t leave the poor man alone. We all went to the beach and I have a vivid memory of him sitting on our beach blanket and me asking him dumb questions and asking to do Stoogish things until he finally said something to the effect of “Knock it off, kid,” though without poking me in the eye. But he said it quietly, pitifully, and now I feel sorry that he had to put up with my ten-year-old obsessive self. He was a kind man, unlike his persona, and he entered into a short correspondence with me, sending me a letter, (which I’ve lost) and two publicity stills signed to “Cousin Robin” (which I have in my safe deposit box). The photos don’t feature the genius of the Stooges, Curly, unfortunately, but the pale Curly substitute who took Curly’s place after he died: Curly Joe.

The closest I ever came to visiting our ancestral home, and the only time I visited Bensonhurst, was the day of my brother’s wedding in New Jersey in the early 80s. Weddings naturally make people nostalgic, and my great uncles and aunts were in a particularly nostalgic mood that day. I drove back with them in my Uncle Morty’s giant boat of a car, filled to brimming with my great aunts and uncles, and Ann, one of my grandmother’s friends who might as well have been a great aunt. My uncles Morty and Bill wanted to visit the old neighborhood, though my Aunt Carrie was against it. I sat between her and Ann, who was mourning the loss of some orange pills that had turned to goo. Her pills had melted during the ceremony on this steaming August day and she was inconsolable. As we approached Bensonhurst, the others in the car not preoccupied with melted pills, issued a chorus of complaints against New York.

“Don’t think of New York as a city,” Carrie told me. “It’s a garbage pit. New York used to be a city of neighborhoods. Not anymore. You can’t even recognize it now. It’s a dangerous and filthy place.”

“Bensonhurst used to be Jewish,” Bill said, as though being Jewish was the highest honor to which a neighborhood could aspire.

“It’s all Italians now,” Morty said. “It’s an Italian neighborhood.” This information bore repeating apparently.

We parked on the street across from the synagogue that my great grandfather had been a founding member of. Apparently, there was a plaque inside with his name on it. The house we parked in front of was well-kept and had a white picket fence and a grape arbor which my family eyed with suspicion.

“You all stay here,” Morty said as though he were about to make a bank heist. He wanted to go inside the synagogue and see the plaque with my great grandfather’s name. Why we weren’t allowed to accompany him? The car was air conditioned and no one else wanted to go outside into the sweltering heat. I don’t even think I was given the option of joining him – anyway, I was wedged in too tightly between Carrie and Ann. Presently, he returned and we were on our way back to Long Beach where we spent the rest of the afternoon on my grandmother’s porch catching the ocean breeze and recalling the world before it had been destroyed by grape arbors and such. That day, Morty and Bill taught me a lot of Yiddish curses, some of which I still remember. Lie with your head in shit and grow like an onion. That was my favorite.

Recently, I decided it was time for me to take a trip back to Bensonhurst, in the throes of a borrowed nostalgia, I guess. But when I googled 122 Bay 26^th Street, I didn’t see the house at all. What I saw was what looked like a construction site. A little more research and it seemed that I was too late – the house had been sold and knocked down to build condos. I could hardly believe it – I had been living here for three years, and the house had sold in November of 2021 for 2.8 million. The condos were now on sale for three quarters of a million dollars each (I also learned that the house was not actually in Bensonhurst but in adjacent and much smaller Bath Beach). An article in the Bkylner from 2017 “A Haunted Bath Beach Victorian Stands Amidst a Changed Neighborhood,” https://tinyurl.com/44v3m9kz featured photos of the house as it had stood until recently (please click the link if you’d like to see those photos). The “haunted” part piqued my curiosity. I wondered if Hannah and Isaac had refused to move until forced out by the condo developers, my own Jewish version of Beetlejuice. Borschtjuice? The owners of the home had been recluses and the house was in disrepair, simply creepy, not haunted in any documented way. The photos of the house circa 2017 showed at least one boarded window. If it was haunted, the article speculated that the ghost in question might have been Dr. Joseph Jaches who dropped dead in 1912 at the dinner table from “acute indigestion,” according to The Brooklyn Daily Eagle https://tinyurl.com/y69tjvwn. My great grandparents must have purchased it shortly after the good doctor’s fatal bout of acid reflux (which kind of sounds like a heart attack – I mean, really.) as the synagogue Isaac co-founded was built in 1919. The last inhabitants of the house had been constantly harassed by developers according to the article, but most had not made it “past the front door.” One neighbor tried fruitlessly to have the house placed on the historic registry as it was likely the only period house in the area that had never been altered and was once part of an 1880s development known as “Bensonhurst-by-the-Sea.” Rumor had it that the house was like a “time capsule” inside with “4 mahogany and marble fireplaces, plasterwork, a grand staircase, and a maid’s quarters.” Had I known it would be razed, I might have added that it was my family’s ancestral home, though only I cared about that.

On a recent Spring day, I finally made my pilgrimage to 122 Bay 26^th and the ugly condos that now squatted on the spot where the Brauer family had once lived in grandeur next door to the Stooges (a sentence that I’m sure no one else has ever come close to writing). I was reminded of when I was eighteen years old and went with my mother on a trip to England that she organized as a creative writing class. She lined up some amazing meetings with British writers, Dame Rebecca West, Alan Sillitoe, and Iris Murdoch. We visited Rebecca West in her spacious apartment in London. Mostly deaf, she did all the talking, regaling us with stories of the other famous writers and artists she had known. The one that stays with me has nothing to do with great artists but great mansions. When she was a little girl, she had walked every day by a stately mansion with spacious grounds. She vowed that one day she would live there. The mansion, she said, had been torn down and replaced with the very apartment building in which she now lived. “So my dream came true,” she said with a laugh.

There was no way I wanted to live at 122 Bay 26^th. Even if I had wanted, I couldn’t afford the place. And the building that had replaced the house that had stood there for over a hundred years had all the charm of a storage unit. So why did I bother visiting? Why not skip a trek to see a bunch of ugly condos? All I can say is that maybe I’m not so unlike my great uncles and aunts who, if they were haunting me as I took the subway to both the past and the present, probably felt vindicated in their sour judgements about Bensonhurst and New York City. Moe undoubtedly would have called me a wiseguy, and said, Why I oughtta . . . while knocking my head against an ethereal Curly’s. But sometimes you just want to go see for yourself even if you know you will be disappointed, so you can pay your respects and put the old neighborhood behind you once and for all. I didn’t stay long and I didn’t make it inside the synagogue to read my great grandfather’s name. Somehow, I even forgot to note whether the grape arbors still exist.