Brooklyn, NY

On the morning of July 9, 1948, in the seaside suburb of Coney Island, a vitally important moment in history occurred that was to have a lasting impact on the world as we know it.

Meanwhile, in another part of the neighbourhood, my father was born.

For the first twelve or so years of his childhood he and his parents lived in a modest one-bedroom unit in Coney Island, a suburb of Brooklyn, which in turn is one of the five boroughs of New York City. His father, a Polish immigrant, was a key figure in the New York Garment Workers Union and his English mother also found a job in the clothing industry. It was not a prosperous environment to be raised, by all accounts, but it was comfortable enough. At any rate, it could not have been more different to the childhood I experienced, which is why I'm looking forward to my father's self-styled "Brooklyn Roots Tour" today. It is purely a happy coincidence that the epicentre of American Hot Dog culture, Nathan's, also happens to have its origins in Coney Island.

"I've always been meaning to go to New Zealand", says Steve, but he's never made it. Steve is the partner of Linda, my father's high school girlfriend, and he and Linda have kindly agreed to drive us to Brooklyn and accompany us on the Roots Tour. "I met a lot of Kiwis when I was stationed in the Philippines in the early '60s. They were absolutely crazy, we hated 'em. Every morning they'd be up at dawn making us go for six mile runs. All we wanted to do was sleep!"

I explain to him that New Zealand Armed Forces have always prided themselves on high levels of fitness. It helps make up for our other shortcomings, such as a lack - or total absence - of weaponry, ammunition, and troops.
"Well, those guys were nuts. We hated 'em because they made us look so damn lazy. Which we were".

Steve grew up in neighbouring borough of Queens, a more affluent and socially harmonious area of New York, and he's happy to admit as much. "Yeah, we didn't spend much time in Brooklyn or hang out with Brooklyn kids. We had a couple of guys at school go on to make pretty big names of themselves. One of my good friends at school is quite a big name actor now. Ever heard of James Caan?"
Have I ever heard of James Caan?!
"Yeah, me and James were good pals. Boy, was he crazy though. That kid was insane. My mother always used to say to me, 'stay away from that Jimmy kid, he's nothing but trouble!', and his mother would say to him, 'Stay away from that Steve kid, he's nothing but trouble!' Boy, did we have some fun".

We arrive in Coney Island to discover that, as my father had earlier predicted, it has regressed a long way from its halcyon days of the early twentieth century. A hundred years ago, it was a resort area frequented by wealthy city folk on weekends. Even during my father's childhood it remained a popular leisure destination. But the last amusement park closed in 1964 and with it so did the visitors, whilst middle class homes were torn down to make way for housing projects. The neighbourhood now displays telltale signs of urban decay: tattered apartment blocks, empty lots, boarded up shop fronts, young delinquents glowering on every corner. Now I understand what my father meant when he used to say, "if I'd stayed where I grew up I'd either be dead or in jail now". If I stayed where I grew up I'd be dead too; but through boredom rather than misadventure.

My father has already arrived in a different car by the time we pull up on a tired looking street a block back from the main road through Coney Island. He's standing next to a barbed wire fence that protects a vacant, overgrown lot, with a nostalgic smile on his face.
"The house where I grew up", he says brightly, pointing to a heavily graffitied shipping container surrounded with weeds as tall as a man. "Well they've knocked it all down now, but here's where it was".

Turns out they've knocked everything on the street down except his old primary school, the imaginitively named PS-188. My father leads us through the back gates into a small courtyard. "Here's where I used to play handball", he says, and we all pause for a moment to take in the mental image of my father as a youngster, running into walls and tripping and grazing his knees on the asphalt".

Two black children, possibly brother and sister, stop from the task of pushing drink trolleys down the street to stare at us in wide-eyed amazement. We must look pretty funny, all six of us, standing in the courtyard of a primary school dressed like uncool honkies and gazing up at a brick wall.
"I went to school here!", my father says to the girl. "A long time ago. Fifty years ago".
She stands there for a while longer, then says "that's nice" and resumes pushing her trolley down the street. Her brother lingers a while longer, then eventually plucks up the courage to say, "if you want to go inside, the main entrance is round the front". We don't want to go inside, but thanks anyway, young man.

A walk along the main avenue takes us past blocks of run down shopfronts and vacant lots where casinos were once planned but were never built. The locals are predominantly Russian now - many of the store window signs are in Russian - but there is also a large Caribbean community. No one looks very wealthy or very happy. That is, of course, until we come up to a busy street corner and catch a glimpse of Nathan's for the first time.

Nathan's Famous hot dog store has been a fabled part of the Coney Island community for over a hundred years now. Although it now has franchises throughout the country, this site is the original and the best, proudly consuming an entire city block with its vast flashing neon facade. My father lets out a gasp of delight upon discovering that they still serve his childhood favourite, lobster rolls. Otherwise the menu is limited but quite deliberately so, because the only reason anyone would come here is for a hot dog. So much so that the world hot-dog eating contest is held here every year, where eating champions the world over converge in a bid to eat upwards of 50 dogs in ten minutes.

I'm just going to settle for the two dogs, I've decided. But there is a seldom-seen feature of the menu that has me rather alarmed: right next to each food item it displays its calorific content. The news is bad, I'm afraid: my hot dog, chili dog and small fries comes to 1359 calories. Factor in the bite I took out of my dad's lobster roll, and the fries I stole off Joey's plate when he wasn't looking and I'm close to hitting three-quarters of my daily recommended intake in one hit. Is it worth it? Hell yes. The dogs are meaty and wholesome, especially doused in American mustard and washed down with a guilt-free diet coke.

On the other side of Nathan's is the world famous boardwalk, probably best known to New Zealanders as being the setting for the Harvey Keitel Steinlager P*** advertisement. On the boardwalk there is little sign of the malaise that has taken over the rest of the area: children on school trips are running about on the beach, people are playing handball on special courts, a reasonable queue of people are waiting for their turn on The Cyclone, an 80-year-old wooden roller coaster (I'm not among them. Bit of a belly ache from lunch, you see).

This is the boardwalk that the Drifters sang about making love under in the 1964 song, and just standing on it I feel I'm part of a history that stretches a long way further back than that. It has seen booms and busts, good times and bad times, communities coming and going. It has sustained the city during heatwaves, been a staging point for vicious gang warfare and latterly, may represent a lifeline for the down-and-out community. A $1.5bn cash injection for the adjacent Astroland theme park and the successful establishment of a local minor league baseball team, the Brooklyn Cyclones, has provided a glimmer of hope that with a change of attitude, one day the area may recapture its former glory.

In the afternoon we drive a couple of miles to the more affluent neighbourhood of Sheepshead Bay, where my father spent his teenage years. For a man who frequently gets lost in shopping centres, he has a remarkable memory of the neighbourhood he left over forty years ago. There's his friend's dad's diner, there's Larry David's house, there's where he got ice creams after school every day, and there, finally is the house he lived in. It looks much as it did in the 1960s, a brick terraced house in a long row on a quiet, leafy street. A few kids playing hockey on the street stop and stare at the few old farts who have got out of their cars to stop and stare at an apparently featureless house. Everyone has gone into a bit of a nostalgic silence, so I say the only thing I really can say - "fuck it's hot" - and get back in the car.

The last stop on the Roots Tour is my father and Linda's old high school, PS-52. My father was able to deftly balance his time between going here and playing ping pong for cash in Manhattan, although I don't think his parents ever knew this. The school itself looks much as it did in my father's day, except that now almost every student is black. In the 1960s every student was called Rosenberg, Greenberg, or Rosengreen, but times have changed in Brooklyn. Driving down a main road to our dinner venue, almost everything is Russian. At one point I see a Georgian restaurant, an Azerbaijani restaurant and a Ukranian restaurant on the same block. There's even an Armenian "Beer Bar", which makes me wonder what they would normally serve at bars in Armenia.

Fiorentina's was recommended to us by a jolly fat man in Aspen - and if a jolly fat man can't point you in the direction of a good Italian restaurant even in this day and age, the world is in far worse shape than anyone dared think. We enter the restaurant and are immediately glad we took his word for it. It's an unpretentious, old school, proper Italian eatery; one big carpeted room with lavishly wallpapered surfaces and waiters who have been there as long as the decorations have. I'm sure I've seen this place somewhere before, probably The Sopranos. It's that authentic. Certainly the well dressed gentlemen at the far table could be mobsters, but they've got their families with them so the chances of a shootout appear low. "I was in an Italian restaurant in Queens once when there was a shooting in the carpark outside", Steve kindly volunteers.

On my way down to the bathroom I pass small but fierce-looking old man talking into a mobile phone to a person almost certainly named Tony. "Look, don't worry about it, it's done", he says in a broad New York Italian accent. Oh God, what am I about to walk into in there? Two dead Russians with their brain matter sprayed all over the lurid white bathroom walls? I take a deep breath and enter, and am tremendously relieved to find no bodies, just a couple of toilets and a washbasin. Unless there's another mobster hiding behind the door, ready to blast any foolish interloper who walks in on the shooting at the wrong time... which there isn't.

The food is delicious, uncompromising, no-bullshit Italian food as the chef's grandmother would've intended it. No side salads or fancy garnishes that you'd get at newer Italian places. My father and I share a veal parmigiana and a lasange (which was not on the menu but prepared anyway at our request). I figure I'm at about 2,450 calories for the day, at an extremely conservative estimate. But anything under 2,500 is fine, surely? Elvis was eating 94,000 a day when he died. That's over 285 Nathan's hot dogs a day, in case you were wondering.

The waiter, a kindly little man who has been working there since 1968, suggests I try a cannoli for dessert as they are the "best in town". Does a cannoli hold less than 50 calories? I doubt it, since it's all butterscotch and cream, but what the hell, I eat one anyway. It's terrific. And besides, when am I going to be back here again? I can't see the need for another Brooklyn Roots Tour any time soon.

On the long drive home I find myself looking ahead forty years to when I take my kids to show them where I grew up in the dreary Auckland suburb of Epsom. If there was an annual award for world's most boring suburb, Epsom would have a monopoly on it. It is the kind of nondescript middle-class Waspish suburban nightmare that inspired American Beauty. Nothing has ever happened there, in total contrast to Brooklyn, where just about everything has happened at some time or another.

I lived on Bishop Street, the most boring street in the most boring suburb, until the age of 12. It was a short, wide cul-de-sac of ten or twelve houses. I can only remember two things ever happening there in my lifetime. Firstly, an Asian family moved in across the street from us, causing mild consternation. "There goes the neighbourhood", said some of the older members of the street - or at least that's what I imagine they said in the privacy of their own homes, while eating roast lamb and watching Country Calendar.

The other thing that happened was a tour bus full of Japanese tourists, for reasons unknown, turned into the street and then found itself unable to turn around again, owing to its considerable length. Over a period of an hour or so, most of the street came out to contribute their opinions on how the bus might best extricate itself, and eventually it did, at which point everyone went back inside and resumed knitting. I won't pretend it wasn't a good place to grow up, because it was, but it sure as hell was not an exciting place. That's why I really worry about the quality of stories I'll have for my children when I go back with them.

"And there - see there? - that's where the bus backed into the hedge and flattened it a bit. Of course, it's all grown back now, but imagine how it looked when it happened, heh, heh".
"Nice one, dad".
Of course I'd take them to my alma mater, Royal Oak Primary School.
"And here's where I hurt my knee a bit while trying to do a Zinzan Brooke impersonation. And see that grubbly patch over there next to the art room? That's where Louise Newbury slapped me after she found out I had a crush on her".

In some ways, I envy my father for growing up in a time and place where everything was happening at a million miles around him. It would've been an amazing time to be a youngster, with the world rapidly evolving around you, from both your own perspective and wider society's perspective. One thing is for sure, when my son sits down to write about an Insipid Journey about his Epsom Roots Tour, it won't be half as bloody long as this.