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          The Legend

of Martense's Lane

      in Sunset Park

The original "Legend of Martense Lane" is the oldest folktale of the Sunset Park community, dating back to the Dutch days.

 

This is my attempt to update the legend with a modern twist and historical information.  It is a work in progress and I will continue it if there is interest.

Episode 1

      How many mornings have you rolled over in bed and before looking at the clock, said “Oh, please don’t be time to get up yet.”? This was not one of those mornings, I was looking forward to the day. It would be a great day, I couldn’t wait to get started. It was the best time of the year, summer is cooling off and we’re heading into the fall. Colors all seem deeper and more

colorful as if the cooler weather granted the leaves and flowers a special beauty before heading into winter’s death. My back yard garden had yielded buckets of big red tomatoes and the Italian woman next door had given me twice as many tomatoes from her garden - she enjoyed growing them but couldn’t use very many. Yesterday the mailman dropped off my ebay purchase, an old fashioned tomato grinder and I planned on turning all these tomatoes into a fine tomato sauce at lunch time.

But first I had to head over to 58th Street where I had an appointment to provide home instruction for a young girl who had become too sick to continue attending classes at the High School of Telecommunications. “Tela” as the neighborhood kids called it began life as Bay Ridge High School, an all girls school. As a teen I would park my motorcycle outside the building on the 4th Avenue side and rev the engine to let my girlfriend Cathy know that I was outside waiting to give her a ride home to 57th Street. But I have to admit, I loved how all the windows of the building would fill with the faces of teenage girls stretching to see who it was making all that noise. I imagined that it drove the teachers crazy and I enjoyed that. But now I was a teacher and had a better understanding of how annoyed those teachers must have been, but it didn’t stop me from enjoying my childhood memory.

 

     As I walked up 58th Street towards 4th Avenue I saw an ambulance parked by my student’s house. As I approached I saw my student Maria being wheeled out to the ambulance. As always she was in a good mood, but looked very weak with an oxygen mask covering her mouth and nose. I spoke to her mom Iris and gave her some worksheets for when Maria felt better. I called my supervisor to tell her I was available for reassignment for the next two hours and headed home to crush some tomatoes.

 

     At home I turned on the radio and heard that a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I stopped what I was doing and went up to the roof and saw smoke, dark black smoke rising above the site. I came downstairs and turned on the tv. I watched the second plane hit and immediately understood what was happening. I called my wife’s cell phone and she told me she was in the park watching the tragedy unfold. I immediately thought of our youngest daughter, she had just graduated St. Agatha’s last June and after much research we found a great high school for her downtown and today was her fifth day in the new school. I realized, we had put her in harm’s way. I called my wife back and told her I would pick her up on 41st Street & 5th Avenue at the corner of the park. She was there as I pulled up and we drove towards the disaster. The sound of sirens was so constant and uniform that it almost became silent.

 

     Our plan was to drive as far as we could and then abandon the car and go on foot. She would go for our daughter and I would go for our youngest son, who we didn’t know was watching from his school window with such clarity that it seemed like a disaster movie on a giant theater screen. Traffic eventually came to a total deadlock, I pulled the car fully onto the sidewalk so I wouldn’t block emergency vehicles and we continued on foot. I watched my wife disappear into a dark cloud. She was walking rapidly her back turned to me and the entire range of my vision showed a mass of humanity, hundreds of people, all races all ethnicities but all walking towards me, their faces seemed larger than they were, my vision was being distorted as I watched my wife alone walking into the darkness while all these faces were walking away from it. I realized that it seemed to be snowing. Minutes before the sky was the deepest most beautiful blue that I had ever seen and now it was snowing. Little white flakes, much smaller than snowflakes were falling all about me. I was breathing them in, not knowing at that time I was inhaling the remains of what shortly before were living, feeling, thinking human beings.

 

     I turned to begin walking to find my son, I was turned several times by the crowd and smoke now reached us and my thinking was clouded. I don’t remember my eyes closing, I don’t think I lost consciousness, but I was no longer where I stood a second before. I was now surrounded by very lush green bushes and large trees. There was a path near by. Not a street, an unpaved, hard packed dirt road with deep ruts in it. The kind of ruts that would be made by wagon wheels. There was a gentle breeze, I looked in the direction that the breeze was coming from, and there before me was a panorama of bucolic beauty, rolling hills leading downward towards a huge cove. A waterfront view that an artist would have loved to have captured on canvas. I stood still and tried to give my senses a chance to catch up and tell my brain what was going on. My eyes were lulling me into a sense of peace, nature and comfort, my ears were filled with a cacophony of bird sounds and rustling leaves and my skin felt the warmth of the sun and cooling gentle ocean breeze. I have to admit, my nose was confused. I had never smelled such clean, pure air. Could this be what air should really smell like? The only sense that wasn’t responding was my sense of taste and that would soon be satisfied as I took a few steps across the path to a rambling watermelon patch. The melons didn’t look like the ones I was familiar with, they were smaller and rounder - actually most were kind of lumpy looking. But I picked one up and smacked it smartly against a rock and broke it open revealing a deep red inner fruit...and oh my was the taste incredible!

 

     Now was time to process all of this. I imagine, looking back, a psychiatrist might say that I was having an episode. I was blocking out the fearful, horrific reality of what was going on and “going” to a safe place in the recesses of my mind. But at the moment I really was on this country road with no thoughts of what was happening in 2001.

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