There was danger outside the gate, we understood that. You could see it. Precariously balanced on the very tip of Coney Island, Sea Gate, where I was raised, is surrounded by water on three sides and divided from the rest of the world by a two-story chain link fence. The fence, broken up only by two actual gates manned by guards, stretches three-quarters of a mile along 37th Street, from New York Harbor on the north side to the Atlantic Ocean on the south.
A Gated Island on an Island
On our side of the fence, tree-lined streets. The closer you get to the ocean, the bigger the houses. From the beach, a view of the Verrazano Bridge. In the 1890s, the Vanderbilts, Dodges, and Morgans built houses here. It was a private beach escape for the rich. You can understand why they fenced the neighborhood off. On the other side of the fence, where today stand residential high-rises, were slums. In effect, Sea Gate was an island on an island.
Growing up in the Sixties, the place was like one big playground. From the Parachute Jump on Coney Island, the symbol of my childhood, you could probably see the Statue of Liberty. This amusement park ride, Brooklyn’s Eiffel Tower, was itself a kind of poor man’s Statue of Liberty — it represented the idea that wherever you were, you could have a bigger view of where you could end up.
The Shadow of Secrets
My mother and I lived with my grandparents in the last house before you got to the fence. We had a view from our kitchen window, through chainlink, of abandoned cars, boarded-up tenements, garbage, and old bicycle frames that had been picked clean, still locked to a pole. In those days, the neighborhood kids had the run of the place. There was a catwalk, too narrow even to fit a bicycle, that we kids called “the Path,” which ran between our house and the fence. The older boys often parked their bikes in our driveway, took the Path, and came back later to pick their bikes up.
Following the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files in January, I began to notice a lot of posts about him on the “I Grew Up in Sea Gate” Facebook group. Someone posted a class picture with Epstein standing in the back row among a bunch of awkward-looking pre-teens at Mark Twain Junior High, where my mother taught English during the years he was a student there. The person who’d posted the photo bragged about attending Epstein’s bar mitzvah, and claimed that Jeffrey had grown up in Sea Gate. I recognized him. Epstein, I thought, had been one of our stickball clients.
Confronting the Past
As it turns out, I grew up on the same street at the same time as Jeffrey Epstein. That’s not a metaphor. It’s a fact. Sea Gate, Coney Island. When the Epstein story broke, the pieces both came together and fell apart for me. I began to think about proximity and coincidence. Following the Epstein revelation, I interviewed one of the now grown-up kids on our block in Sea Gate, Paula, who told me she had reason to believe my grandfather molested Jeffrey Epstein.
Absurd as it may be, and kind of shocking, I realized that I would not be surprised. I must credit my beloved mother for this paradox, as well as for the many other secrets and contradictions that filled our lives. “I’m shocked but not surprised” was my mother’s mantra. Like me, she, too, had been molested by my grandfather, her father. And yet, she seemed to find her decision to assign us to the same bed when I was a child neither shocking nor surprising.
I have often wished, these last months, that I could tell my mother about Epstein. He grew up on our street, Mom, I would say. Given the family, the neighborhood, the government, the culture, and the world in which we live, I’m pretty sure I know how she would respond. Nodding. Hand to her head. I’m shocked but not surprised.
I always felt proud to say I grew up in Sea Gate. I see now, though, that whenever there’s an inside the gate and an outside, there will be secrets, and danger, on both sides of the fence.