Street Level/Kew Gardens

By JEFF VANDAM

The New York Times - October 30, 2005

A FEW Sundays ago, Monica Strauss went back to the school on the hill, the school on Kew Gardens Road. It had not changed much in the last 50-odd years: three stories of red brick, with sculptured heads of hooded men peering down at the schoolyard below. The words "Public School 99" were still there in concrete above the front doors, though the steps below are now painted yellow for safety.

It is an ordinary scene, one that passers-by can encounter in countless city neighborhoods. But in the late 40's and early 50's, when Ms. Strauss attended P.S. 99, Kew Gardens was notable as the new home of German and Austrian refugees from the Nazis. Jewish and often highly educated, these transplants brought their culture to New York, and a result was a Little Germany in Queens. German was heard on the street corners, education was highly prized and, as in a European hamlet, no one was a stranger.

"There's something mystical about the place," Robert Lieberman, another P.S. 99 graduate, said of the old neighborhood. "It's the sense of a real village, where everybody knew everybody. As a child, you had no secrets."

It was this special past that had brought Ms. Strauss and more than 50 other P.S. 99 alumni to Kew Gardens on this overcast Sunday, all at Mr. Lieberman's behest.

By day, Mr. Lieberman teaches physics at Cornell in Ithaca, N.Y. But six months ago, he wrote an article called "Kew Gardens Remembered" for a community Web site, oldkewgardens.com, and the response was overwhelming, with e-mail messages from Kentucky, California, London and China. Apparently, the distinctive place - with its curving streets and Tudor-style shops - retained its mystical pull, and so Mr. Lieberman, who is also a film director and a novelist, decided to make a documentary about the old days in the neighborhood. Ms. Strauss, an art historian, agreed to assist.

On the gray Sunday, Mr. Lieberman arrived in a black leather jacket and a red scarf, camera crew in tow. Once everyone had gathered at the school, group pictures were taken, and Mr. Lieberman conducted a few interviews. Several members of his own class, of 1954, were there.

"They're all high achievers," said Mr. Lieberman, whose father had three doctorates. "They're all very interesting and they're smart. There was incredible pressure to succeed for all of us."

For Ms. Strauss, there was another surprise: Ed Feige. When she was a child, she and Mr. Feige lived in the same building, and as she would try to leave the elevator, Mr. Feige would hold the outer door closed - in effect, the building bully.

"It's one of those childhood nightmares that you never got out of," Ms. Strauss said. Of Mr. Feige now, she added, "He is a very pleasant retired professor of economics."

The group then took a local tour, proceeding down Lefferts Boulevard, past Maple Grove Cemetery and the former First Church of Kew Gardens, now the Sung Shin Reformed Church of Kew Gardens. They then walked to the so-called Ponte Vecchio, a bridge on Lefferts that is home to those beloved Tudor-style storefronts, some now clad in aluminum siding.

At one point, Ms. Strauss said, the stores were all German: the candy store, the butcher shop. But the alumni found the Taystee Gardens Chinese restaurant, Linda's Organic Kitchen and Market, and Pac-A-Flic Video. Still, one of the old stores remained, a delicatessen, the Homestead Gourmet Shop. Everyone remembered it.

After lunch at Austin's Steak and Ale House, the alumni gathered at the home of Renee Levine on 82nd Avenue. People recalled their experiences with anti-Semitism and their teenage rebellion - the day's most intense experience, as Ms. Strauss put it. One woman said she had declined to tell her parents about anti-Semitism at school to protect their feelings; others spoke of rebelling by marrying non-Jews or even "an American" - anything to blend in, to leave the past behind.

Mr. Lieberman is shooting more interviews, and he wants to attract more funding to finish the film. And he hopes to get that other famous son of Kew Gardens, Jerry Springer, on film, or at least to name the movie after him.

"Can I use his name in the title?" Mr. Lieberman asked. "Or does he have a trademark on the thing?"