Did Roz Chast Attend P. S. 217?

Diligent readers of this blague (a "fit audience though few," as John Milton said in a slightly different context) will remember that I've reported on the language, the culture and the sexual politics of P. S. 217 and its neighborhood. 

Newsflash!! It now appears that P. S. 217 contributed to the worldview of the century's finest cartoonist, the New Yorker's Roz Chast.

I had long suspected that Roz Chast was a neighborhood girl -- where else but in darkest Flatbush would a nine-year-old go to bed with "The Big Book of Horrible Rare Diseases?" The most overt clues to her place of origin are found in the 'cartoon a clef' "Ultima Thule," in which a young girl imagines life in various exotic non-Flatbush neighborhoods: "Red Hook, which was filled with drunken sailors, loose women, and stevedores; Flatland, which stretched flatly and unpopulated, into oblivion; and Sea Gate, with its maze of Venetian canals, from which, once you entered, you'd never emerge." In the last panel of this masterpiece, a girl in a green pleated skirt floats freely in outer space: "I just wanted to see what was on the other side of McDonald Avenue."

McDonald Avenue, during my childhood, was the outer limit of homey Flatbush. Every once in a while, when I was feeling particularly adventurous, I'd ride my bicycle across McDonald, but I always hustled back. Two reasons: a) it was different there -- different architecture, different kinds of stores, different people, and b) the streets ran at a 45 degree angle to the norm. Very scary, very 'here be dragons.' 

I had a job on McDonald Avenue when I was in high school: I shelved books at the Kensington Public Library (which was scarcely more than a storefront operation), but the building was on our side -- the Flatbush side -- of the street. I don't think that I ever crossed to the foreign side -- why would a sane person want to do such a thing? So my intuition was that if Roz Chast grasped the mystical end-of-the-earth aura of McDonald Avenue, she had to have grown up somewhere in the vicinity of P. S. 217.              

More evidence:  In the New Yorker for September 4, there's a Roz Chast bildungscartoon called "What I Learned." After nursery school, where she was informed that "if you swallow your gum, your guts get all stuck together, and you die," our young heroine "went to grade school in [her] neighborhood." And there's a full panel of a square featureless brick building labeled "P. S. 217."  The building doesn't resemble the P. S. 217 of my memory except for the concrete schoolyard and the chain-link fences that surround it, but it must be the real thing. The curriculum is ever-so-familiar: Vasco da Gama, "Our Friend, Corn," chain-stitching. Although nothing about the compass and the protractor, for some reason.   

I had read that Roz Chast grew up in Brooklyn, and that her parents still lived in the old neighborhood. Just for fun, I looked up the surname Chast in the white pages. It's an uncommon name;  in fact, there's just one Chast in all of richly-populated Brooklyn. Here's the relevant map. The Chast apartment on Webster Avenue is a block or so from the corner of Newkirk and Coney Island Avenue where P. S. 217 is located; even more startling -- it's no more than a couple of hundred feet from East 9 Street, where I lived from age zero to age 17. Case closed.

Roz Chast's genius cannot be circumscribed.  She's the master of the mock-heroic for which Flatbush is famed; she's to the cartoon what Woody Allen is to movies -- someone who interprets the world through Brooklynish eyes. She's the sly queen of kvetchitude. And she's a graduate of fabled P. S. 217. I'm so proud.   

 

Comments

[Jon Leal]

Roz Chast was indeed a grad of PS 217. She was my classmate for our time there and in Ditmas JHS. I am currently the AP at 217 and I always brag to Ditmas Park yuppies about Roz's affiliation with place. She came to visit us last September!

[Spike]

Dear Dr. M,

I'm glad to read about your PS 217 Roz-related discovery. Your readership delights went you venture to talk about your youth.

Love the blog!