Michael's Brooklyn Memoir: Rooting and Nesting in Brooklyn

Another installment of Michael Nolan's Brooklyn memoir. This one, written 4 years ago, is about his daughter, who lives in Williamsburg.

Took the L Train to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn yesterday. Walked along Graham Avenue, where my daughter Rosy now lives, to Lola's Cafe where she works the counter. It's her "living room." Young artists and musicians like herself drop by for coffee, some breakfast, a bit of neighborhood chatter, and today to meet Rosy's Dad. On the surrounding streets, alongside her young creative crowd lives, works and prays a devoted Italian Catholic community with their chapel to St. Mary of the Snow, men's fraternal associations and card clubs, bakeries, grocery stores, funeral parlors and annual patron saint processions.

Rosanna Lowery Nolan turns 26 this Friday. She was destined to live in my hometown of Brooklyn, I muse. Among the staff of midwives at the Alternative Birth Center at San Francisco General Hospital in the summer of '78 was a handsome African American woman, pregnant herself at the time, named Sharon Robinson. It was Jackie Robinson's daughter. The prospect of having my daughter's birth guided by the daughter of legendary Brookyn Dodger's player was exhilarating. In the end, she was not on duty at the time and the glory of Rosy's birth trumped everything anyway.

Last year, I ran into Sharon Robinson at a book signing at Stacey's on Market Street in San Francisco. We had a delightful chat about both our children born in the same year. Sharon now works for the Major League Baseball Commissioner in New York.

Rosy is named after her paternal Irish great-grandmother who also lived in Brooklyn on E. 2nd Street and gave birth to 13 children, only 6 of whom survived. Blessedly one of them included Harold Francis Aloysius Nolan, her grandfather.

This Friday is also the birthday of our Jewish cousin, Lena Eisenson Koblentz, who at 94 exhibits extraordinary good health and mental acuity. I publish her reminiscences of growing up on the Lower East Side and distribute them to the "gansa mishpuchah" via our family website. On Monday, I sought out the address of her home birthplace, listed in the birth certificate she sent me. The building still stands at 122 Allen Street, between Delancey & Rivington. A recently discovered draft card from 1918 showed that her father lived at 530 E. 11th Street. That building survives as well between Avenues A & B, next to a former public bath house, now serving as a film studio.

Later Lena's family moved to The Bronx and then Williamsburg where her father operated a candy store. The Rosy Nolan Band's most frequent venue is a "Billy Burg" club named Pete's Candy Store on Lorimer Street. Who knew? Just might be the same place.