Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Mourning the loss of Dubrow's

The playwright Donald Margulies reminisces about Dubrow's:

"To have come of age in Eisenhower-era, baby-boomer Brooklyn was to feel cheated of the glory days. By the late '60s, public school education, which had served me and my fellow boomers so well for a time, was no longer a panacea for upwardly mobile middle-class kids. The families of those kids moved upward — or outward — to the suburban promise of Long Island and sent once-solid Brooklyn neighborhoods spiraling downward. Once urban flight took hold, the last vestiges of my parents' Brooklyn vanished. Streets and subways were no longer safe. The Sheepshead movie theatre was converted into a roller-skating rink; the Elm Theatre became a bank. Ebinger's Bakery, famous for its chocolate blackout cakes, went out of business and Dubrow's Cafeteria, best known for its kasha varnishkas, closed its revolving doors."

Originally in the Los Angles Times, reprinted in Playbill. You can read the whole article here.