EOL at the Tech

December 6, 2024, 8:48 am , by Richard Lutz

Richard Lutz loiters outside history’s door

I’m standing on deKalb Avenue in Brooklyn. A sharp December wind knifes down the busy road, a road that hives off Flatbush Avenue and is filled with noisy traffic, pizza joints, nail bars, with everyone honking their horns.

I’m actually standing on a corner outside a restaurant that’s closed. It’s where we should have been meeting Julie, an old friend. But, as it’s shut, I cool my heels in the cold wind. Ambling back and forth is a homeless lady with a broken trolley. A guy with a huge coat stands on the wall of nearby Fort Greene Park and sings loudly, off key, into the wind. A truck driver shouts at a Mercedes which won’t move.

Opposite the restaurant is Brooklyn Tech. The school has been sheathed in scaffolding and protective netting for a long time now. Builders can’t figure out how to fix the roof. The construction industry can finish that new 80 story high rise nearby in a snap of a finger. But the aging roof is a mystery too far.

Capping the monolithic building, which covers half a city block, is a 420 foot high mast. It’s huge. It points skyward with a red light on top. It’s an anachronism. No one seems to know why it’s still there. Later, my friend Steve sits at Juniors (the place with the famous Brooklyn cheesecake) and solves the mystery by texting a friend to find it’s a relay built in the 1930’s for a radio station now long defunct. At one time, it was used to beam the first educational tv shows to the city’s classrooms. It hasn’t been used for forty years.

Students cut through the wind as they come and go through the main door on the corner of deKalb and South Elliott. They also huddle outside to vape and smoke, down a coffee, gobble a bagel, gossip.

A kind man, a gentleman…

In the 1930’s, my father used the same entrance. That’s him above with a very young me settled on his lap. It looks as if we have the same mouth. Right through the ages, he always wore those heavily patterned woolen overcoats like that one above. Always walked too fast for little kids. He was a kind man, a gentleman, and kids always gravitated towards him at family parties.

He was a teenager, of course, when he went to Brooklyn Tech, probably had a furtive cigarette outside despite the winter wind, came and went just like the kids today as he attended his engineering classes. He didn’t become a civil engineer. He ended up chairing a university economics department. But he could always draw very straight lines and adeptly handle a protractor. Today, 90 years later, I’m an old guy taking in the school doors he used.

Edward Oscar Lutz (fondly nicknamed EOL) was a Brooklyn man. A New Yorker, of course, but a Brooklyn man first. He was a Dodgers fan; eventually married Alice Lessem who went to Erasmus High just down Flatbush Avenue; raised a Brooklyn family, proudly pointed out famous people that emerged from the borough- Mel Brooks, Barbra Streisand, Mike Tyson, Rita Hayworth, Spike Lee, Lou Reed, thousands of others. He survived the war and returned. He taught for decades at Brooklyn College and was proud of how wave after wave of new Americans, from Hungary, Russia, Vietnam, the Caribbean, Korea, Hong Kong all used the college (which had no tuition for a long time) to get a degree, a job, a career, a step up.

I see Julie arrive, hustling along in the cold beneath the scaffolding. There’s some sort of back and forth between a taxi and a van and there’s a low urgent moan from a fire engine barging through afternoon traffic.

The homeless lady shuffles around the block with her rickety trolley. The singing guy in the park has moved on. A stream of folks walk towards the subways to get into Manhattan from their apartments and more students are running into school for the afternoon classes in the same door my father used when he studied mechanical engineering nine decades ago. I can almost see his shadow.

I’m knocking at history’s door here. And in ninety years’ time, I bet that scaffolding is still toughing it out in a winter wind, kids are huddled outside the main entrance and that mast is still pointing to the sky on the roof of Brooklyn Tech.