House of the Day: 808 Lincoln Place

Brownstoner:

The ground-floor doctor's office in this house reminds me how common such places were in Crown Heights during the 1950's when I grew up in the neighborhood.

Back then, Crown Heights was saturated with doctors and dentists. Every row-house block had several, and the big apartment houses on streets like St. Marks Avenue and Eastern Parkway were covered with their brass plaques affixed next to the lobby doors or at the entrances to professional suites that were accessible directly from the street.

My family's pediatrician was a woman in an office at the "garden level" of a house off New York Avenue. Our dentists were in houses on Brooklyn Avenue and Eastern Parkway. My sister's surgeon was in a house he shared with his brother, another surgeon, on Eastern Parkway. And our orthodontist was in a mansion on New York Avenue, a big limestone number where he gave annual holiday parties for his adoring fans: all the neighborhood ladies who'd have their children's teeth straightened and proclaimed him an "artist."

My favorite was Dr. G., who had a professional suite in an apartment building along Brooklyn Avenue. He was the old-fashioned general practitioner with a pencil-thin mustache and degrees from a Mid-Western university. A throw-back to the leather-satcheled G.P. who made house calls. Gentle and genial, seeing us kids through our coughs and scarlet fever. (Do people get scarlet fever any more? Somehow it sounds very old-fashioned.)

Dr. G's office was entered through a heavy wood door with a stained-glass window, in keeping with the building's Tudor style. The door was always unlocked for walk-ins from the neighborhood. His nurse had flaming red hair and was such a terrible smoker that her voice scratched like sand paper ("The Rasp," my father called her). But they were a real team, making kids feel welcome when they just turned old enough to visit the doctor's by themselves. (A big moment for kids, only slightly less nervous-making than going to the dentist's for the first time alone.)

What I remember most about their office was that it was freezing cold, the air-conditioning going full blast at a time when most people didn't have any. My brother and I'd sit on the reception room's sofa shivering as much from the cold as from dreading being examined, listening to The Rasp hack into the phone, trying to distract ourselves with comic books, but keeping our eye on the clock over her reception desk, ticking off the minutes to our booster shots. The reward at the end of our ordeal: a stick of licorice.

Our pediatrician was among the first harbingers of the neighborhood's change. During a visit, she pulled out a brochure for the Ebbetts Field Apartments, which at the time promised a middle-class enclave nearer the park. She was moving her office she explained, although she hoped we'd still visit. (I understand these apartments have declined. At the time they opened, however, there were a number of doctors, teachers, and other neighborhood professionals and their families living there.)

One by one, all our doctors and dentists moved away. Only one seemed to hold on at his original location: the orthodontist, whose Cadillac was still visible in his driveway several years after my family left.

Dr. G. also lasted for a while, consolidating his practice with several other doctors in a free-standing office on one of the side streets. For a middle-class kid, it was something of a shock to visit him at his new location. The waiting room felt like a hospital, with bawling kids and their parents rushing around.

I'd come back to the neighborhood after several years away, prefering to see him rather than my family's new doctor in Manhattan. He greeted me warmly, re-introduced me to The Rasp (holding fort at the entrance to the clinic), then ushered to me to his office.

There he winked and said, "Don't tell anybody, but I've decided to move on."

More than any other moment, this visit to Dr. G. came to represent the end of Crown Heights as I'd known it. And I wouldn't go back to my old neighborhood until many years later.

Nostalgic on Park Avenue

Posted by: NOP at November 3, 2008 5:07 PM

MM:

Thanks for the update. On my most recent drive through Crown Heights (some months ago) I didn't have a chance to get up close to any of the buildings to see if they had doctors' offices. It's good to know there are still services in the area, although it's too bad the private practitioner's gone the way of the dinosaur.

Dr. G. was elderly by the time he decided to give up his practice. He was one of those honorable men who served everybody in his community until he was too tired to go on. He and The Rasp were probably well in their seventies the last time I saw them. They'd been together so long, I'm sure there was an interesting story between them, even if it never went beyond the professional.

NOP

Posted by: NOP at November 3, 2008 11:22 PM