#806 When All This Was Bay Bridge- Tim McLoughlin
This a nostalgic story about old Brooklyn. Daniel visits the old neighborhood the day of his father’s funeral. He remembers a time when he was seventeen and arrested for spray painting a subway car in Coney Island. His father, a former cop, got him released and warned him that it was his free pass. His father laments the changing of the neighborhood.
“When all this was Bay Ridge. He was masterful, my father. He didn’t say when it was all white, or when it was Irish, or even the relatively tame when it was safer. No. When all this was Bay Ridge.”
On the day of his father’s funeral, he visits the old Irish neighborhood bar, the last bastion of the Irish working class in Sunset Park. He talks with his father’s friends and tries to get them to reveal a secret in a photograph he has. Like the solid wall that cops create to protect each other, the old guard won't budge. They protect their own secrets, even against kin. It’s generational, and with each passing one, they get further from their roots and from what they remember as the old days.
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