Street Scene

From my heroic Park Slope childhood.

Two Houses is a newsletter of stories about art, feminism, grief, and Time excavated from the Soho loft where I grew up. Posts are free and illustrated with the work of my long-divorced parents, the painters Mimi Weisbord and Lennart Anderson.

I WAS back in Park Slope over Thanksgiving weekend, visiting my childhood friend Anita and her family. We shared a Friendsgiving. After the big meal, I was looking up at their living room’s ceiling fan, thinking about the chandeliers in the brownstone I grew up in a few blocks away on Union Street. I wondered aloud if there’d once been chandeliers in their house, too.

Anita’s husband Greg said he didn’t know, but when they’d renovated, they’d found live gas lines that had, at one time, fed lamps in the walls and ceilings. The lines were running every which way, and they’d had to remove them at great expense. When electricity was installed in these old brownstones, the lines were just capped, he said. Ceiling fans could set off this buried explosive. 

I USED to smell gas in our brownstone. Once, the smell was very strong coming from the tenant’s basement apartment. My father wasn’t home, and I found my brother on the top floor by Dad’s studio listening to Talking Heads records. Three years older, Orrin wasn’t interested in my gas fume fears. 

I was about eleven years old, so when I called my mother, she told me to get Orrin on the phone immediately; her voice dropped low. I don’t know what she said to him, but eventually, there were various emergency vehicles on the street in front of the house.

Orrin was now acting official. He let me know that a fireman had opened the door under our stoop to the tenant's place and been hit by a wall of gas. 

It was a big street scene. There were firemen and police officers at the house by the time Dad walked up the block in a suit and trench coat (rare for him; that alone makes this memorable.) From the bay window on the parlor floor, I watched Dad standing in the street in the twilight, talking calmly to the emergency personnel. 

He didn’t come running into the house to find us like I imagined my mother might have (always so hysterical). Instead, his shoulders looked resigned as he trudged up the stoop. He must have known the explosion that was coming.

IT MADE a strong impression on me when my mother took me seriously and didn’t hesitate on the phone. It also made a strong impression that the cause of the gas was our tenant, found in her wedding dress with her head in the open oven.

Our tenant survived, and the house never blew. But the near-miss did light a fuse in my mother.

I can imagine her terror. She’d recently moved to Soho from just two blocks away from the brownstone on Union Street. I can imagine how far Park Slope must have felt when I called her.

“The whole house could have exploded!,” she told us again and again. “Just one spark and it would all have been over!”

She said this accusingly and over days. Bad things were avoidable in my mother’s way of knowing. Blame was always assignable.

Dad looked at me with a kind of futility because what could he have done?

I didn’t know. I just knew that I did a good thing that had also got him in trouble. 

A WEEK later, our tenant invited me downstairs to sit facing her in the basement apartment’s dark, below-street-level living room. She explained that she’d been out of her head because her father had just had a heart attack (He was fine now.) and how grateful she was that I’d saved her. She was attractive and smelled of perfume, but it was awkward to sit there. I didn’t know what to say.

When I told my mother about it, she thought that was a very strange reason to be in your wedding dress with your head in the oven. She wondered about the marriage. 

Eventually, I would associate the incident with Sylvia Plath, the poet who died that way with her children in the next room. At the time, however, my parents were heading to divorce court after years of separation. Our newlywed tenants captured my imagination.

The husband of my damsel-in-distress was a handsome psychologist who saw patients downstairs during the day. They would wave to me, headed through our gate with their big, fluffy white dog. I’d always wanted a dog. Walking up our stoop, I’d gaze too long through the glass panes of their windows.

MONTHS later, I smelled gas in the bathroom on the brownstone’s top floor and told my father. I figured this was my job now, sniffing out gas, a special talent I had.

Dad regarded me wearily. It wasn’t dangerous, he said. There was nothing to be done.

I wasn’t so sure. I kept pacing around, needling him, my nose toward the ceiling.

Finally, he called Brooklyn Union Gas.

When the gasman came, he sniffed at the air and basically agreed with my father. There was nothing to be done.

Dad glared, triumphant. He let me know how much that bill would be.

And I felt my heroics wilting.

OUR TENANTS moved out less than a year after the incident. Privately, I was sad to see them go. Aloud, I said I thought they were nice.  

My mother just looked at me like I was crazy.

BELOW IS the large Street Scene my father painted years earlier at the American Academy in Rome before he had children. (The figure reaching and wearing a white shoe is my mother.)

Lennart Anderson, Street Scene, 1961, oil on canvas, 77 x 99 in. Collection of BNY Mellon. ©Estate of Lennart Anderson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.