P.S. 131, 44th Street, Brooklyn

This item, from the series "New York's changing scene" (New York Daily News Sunday Magazine, March 4, 1979), has traveled with me for years. I clipped this column (with permission) on a Sunday visit to my grandparents' house in Brooklyn. I'd have never seen it otherwise: we were a Times family.

My mother went to P.S. 131 in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and I had her first-grade teacher, Mrs. Frazier, in the 1962-1963 school year. That span of time no longer seems amazing to me: there's nothing remarkable about teaching at the same school for twenty-odd years. But that my teacher was already teaching during the Depression: that's difficult to take in, and it makes me wonder when Mrs. Frazier's first-grade teacher began teaching.

I clipped this column not only for its school. Before my parents fled the city for New Jersey, we lived in the first-floor apartment of the rowhouse right next to P.S. 131: 1143 44th Street. A cranky landlady lived upstairs. My grandparents (my mother's parents) lived down the block. Oh memory!¹

Other P.S. 131 posts
P.S. 131
Some have gone and some remain

P.S. 131 class photographs
1962–1963 1963–1964 1964–1965 1965–1966 1966–1967

Related reading
P.S. 131 today (Insideschools.org)

¹ Repeated three times, the poignant phrase Louis Armstrong adds to his vocal in a 1931 recording of "Star Dust."