Shopping in 1939, before my time: Union Square, Manhattan.
S. Klein’s On The Square

I mentioned in another post that I grew up on East 14th Street in Manhattan and that I am admin for a group of over 1200 nostalgic former Stuyvesant Town, Peter Cooper Village kids who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. This blog post on shopping and the stores in our neighborhood reflects a post series I began on this area: The Automat, Union Square (restaurants and stores).

S. Klein article [ And, I just realized, that the author of the article was the father (Isador) of a friend I met at CCNY, Elaine Barmash! Small world. ]

Here is my Sunday memory:

The Green Coat

If you grew up in Stuyvesant Town chances are your mother took you–or dragged you to S. Klein’s “On the Square” for clothes. It’s run-downness, 1930s-chipping paint, crowds of pushing ladies, loaded tables of stuff, uneven floors, disjointed annex will forever be in my memory.

In 1963 my mother bought me the beginning of a gold charm bracelet, from Klein’s, to commemorate my graduation from JHS 104: I barely wore it: My issue in life was the fear of losing stuff that was difficult to come by. The bracelet is still with me but in a safe deposit box somewhere and maybe that is a lucky thing. My mother also had a gold bracelet with a not-so-lucky four-leaf clover charm, a double decker charm with pearls in the center, maybe even a small sapphire, on a lovely ornate chain, that, along with a Piaget watch (that my dad had scrimped to buy for their anniversary), and, several other heirlooms, (the love birds on a chain from Aunt Sarah) were taken from our apartment, at 653 East 14th Street, apartment 5-H (“as in Harry”) when it was robbed one day. Whoever did the deed took his time: went through everything including sanitary napkin boxes and left cigarette butts in my father’s ashtray. The ashtray was in my parents’ bedroom on his work table where at nights he would repair cameras, a second job. When my sister came home from school, she found the door to the apartment ajar.

The times, they were a changing.

S. Klein’s, 1957

Klein’s was a great place for jewelry, handbags, linens, coats, and I don’t recall if that was the intent, that day, to buy a coat. If it was before 1966, I was still at Seward Park HS and about to begin CCNY. If it was close to 1967, I was about to get married and spend 4 days before finals at The Nevele Hotel in The Catskills in my freshman year. (I was all of nineteen years of age)

What does it matter? It was the day of the coat, the green coat. The wool Melton coat with the beautiful construction, the A-line, the hidden, slits for buttonholes. It was the coat I wore to York and 78th to my first job in the school system. It was the coat I wore on the #5 Dyre Avenue line train that came through the Bronx, via the worst areas of The South Bronx. It was the coat I wore for many years that made me look like part of the establishment and not hippy-dom. And speaking of hippy, it is the coat I wore to school in 1970 when my friend Theresa and I ate Chunky Beef Soup and biscuits everyday for lunch, between graduate classes at Hunter College; after a while, I could not close the bottom buttons of my coat.

On the day we found the coat, the sun was shining; it must have been fall and my memory doesn’t see crowds. The coat had been purchased upstairs. I think coats were on the second floor and linens were on the third. Anyway, it was in a bag that folded over the top with a handle peeking through and we descended to the main floor to poke at the tables before leaving. I put the coat between my feet and rummaged; that’s what you did at Klein’s, you rummaged through the stuff on tables. I must have detected something, felt something, sensed something because in a flash, I looked down and saw nothing. Nothing but my feet and the space between. My coat was gone. It  probably had  cost close to $100, a lot in those days, a struggle of a purchase for my mother who had taken a job with Community Services Society on 23rd St., and now the money was gone and so was the coat, along with some of my innocence.

I had learned a lesson, not to trust, to always be on guard. I was a shy kid who was now coatless. In the nanosecond of my detection of no-coat, something got into me. I lost all sense of time. Something in me snapped into action. I don’t know who I was, but in my discovery of loss I looked toward the doors behind me and saw a woman carrying a bag with a folded over top and a handle poking through and up, into her hand, quickly exiting the bank of doors.  I ran to that door, to that woman and grabbed her bag before my mother knew what was happening. I don’t recall if anyone came to my aid, if there was a security guard or what. I don’t recall if I yelled or exactly what I did beyond grabbing this woman’s bag, I do recall verbalizing, “MY COAT!” I pulled the bag open and there it was; that glorious green, my Melton, fine wool coat, the A-line, the beautifully finished Kelly green coat with the slit buttonholes, the honeymoon coat, the college coat, the grad school coat, the working coat. It was saved, I was saved, my gut saved me. Or God or the Universe or destiny or an angel.

I learned a lot that day: that nothing was permanent, that moments in time string out before you in all dimensions offering lessons of self-trust, inner-strength and self-reliance. That nothing is static: we finish school in a flash, begin to work, change jobs, we age. That we don’t keep things forever: the coat likely ended up at some point at The Salvation Army. Marriages end, we go on with our ephemeral lives and before you know it, a green coat is a memory from over fifty years ago, a vivid memory of an almost disaster where the day was saved and life went on.

A day I saved.