An Unusual Ride to School

Today's photo of the week comes from the recently processed Kasper Family Collection. The Kasper family lived at the Manhattan Beach Veterans Housing Project in South Brooklyn in the late 1940s. The Manhattan Beach project was one of many veterans housing projects that the city created in the late 1940s to respond to a surge in demand as soldiers returned from overseas. As this 2011 Brooklynology blog post notes, "In February 1946, the Times reported that on a single day 500 families applied for housing when only 5 single rooms and 2 apartments were available." In this environment, families like the Kaspers undoubtedly felt lucky to have found a home at Manhattan Beach.

Irving Kasper had been discharged from the U.S. army in 1945. His daughter Carol Kasper (now Hannan), the collection donor, attended dance classes in Brighton Beach around 1948 and fondly remembered getting potato knishes after class at Mrs. Stahl's Knishes at Brighton Beach and Coney Island Avenues. Carol and her brother Marvin attended school at the Floyd Bennett Field Naval Center, and according to their recollections the school was housed in a dry-docked ship. They got to school, along with other neighborhood children, via a pony cart owned by a neighbor. The cart full of children is shown in this photograph from the collection.

In 1953, the city decided to tear down the Manhattan Beach housing to make way for a new park. The last resident departed in January 1954. But that summer, almost 500 former residents gathered for a reunion. The Brooklyn Eagle reported on the event: "No matter how far apart they have settled, their unity still remains."

Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page to search our collections. Questions? Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at [email protected].