Ever wondered who was cooking pot roast on your antique stove in 1940? Who hid that stamp beneath the floorboards when you were gutting your Willow Street coop bedroom? How much that Middagh Street apartment cost to rent 70 years ago? Now’s your chance to find out. In partnership with Archives.com, the U.S. National Archives released Census records from 1940 online on April 2—comprising 3.8 million images scanned from some 4,000 rolls of microfilm.

The website offers access to maps and hand-written info about every known address in all 48 states in the Union, allowing you to find census maps and descriptions to locate an enumeration district, browse census images to locate any household interviewed in the 1940 Census and then save and/or download images. The Search page is here.

Warning: The site is slow, if not clunky, as hundreds of thousands are discovering this fascinating window to the past all at once. It’s also a bit unnerving to navigate. The best tutorial I found is at Gawker.com here.

Happy hunting! Be sure to share anything revealing with all your friends here on the BHB. We’ll also be scouring for tidbits over the next several weeks.

(Image: Gawker.com)

This in from the Brooklyn Heights Association:

Dear Friends: In a last minute appeal, we hope that you will consider making (or buying) a pie for the Thanksgiving Dinner served to elderly citizens at Grace Church. It is organized by Heights and Hills, a provider of supportive services to community dwelling older adults in Brooklyn.

The dinner is open to senior citizens, regardless of their economic status. It is an annual Brooklyn Heights tradition, held at Grace Church at NOON on Thanksgiving Day. A full dinner (cooked and donated by the Cobble Hill Health Center) will be served at the church to 250 people, and 75 meals will be delivered to frail, homebound elderly. They need more pies!

If you can either bake or buy a pie (apple, pumpkin, pecan, etc.) and deliver it to Grace Church before noon on Thursday, it will be warmly appreciated.

Monroe Place resident Lois Osborne prepares to blow out the candles at Grace Church this morning. She will be 99 tomorrow, Monday, October 10.

As reported in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, accessible pedestrian signals will be installed at a number of major intersections throughout Brooklyn to make the streets easier and safer for seniors and people with visual impairments.  Notably, many of these devices will be in the downtown Brooklyn area.  Perhaps of most relevance to the BHB community, there will be an accessible pedestrian signal installed at the corner of Court Street and Montague Street.

In Brooklyn, the intersections to get these devices will be:
• The Adams Street Pedestrian Crossing, mid-block between Fulton and Johnson streets.
• Nevins and Fulton streets at Flatbush Avenue, the eastern end of the busy Fulton Mall.
• Adams Street/Boerum Place and Livingston Streets, another very wide intersection.
• Adams Street and Atlantic Avenue.
• Bedford Avenue between Avenue I and Campus Road, near Brooklyn College.
• Court and Montague streets, a high-volume intersection near the courthouse complex.
• Adams and Fulton Streets, the western end of the Fulton Mall.

Local politicians, including Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, State Senator Daniel Squadron, Assembly Member Joan Millman, and City Council Member Stephen Levin, have signed a letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo urging that funds for senior centers in New York City, including the St. Charles Jubilee Center at 55 Pierrepont Street, which is threatened with closing, be restored to the budget. The text of the letter follows the jump.

Dear Governor Cuomo:

In this difficult year for funding, we write regarding the proposed change to Title XX funding, which would, according to a proposal released by the New York City Department for the Aging on March 3rd, result in the closing of 105 senior centers throughout New York City. Such closings would cause enormous pain for a vulnerable senior population that depends heavily on the centers in neighborhoods throughout the city; it would be an unacceptable outcome of the current budget negotiation.

There is an opportunity to prevent these closings without requiring further cuts in other areas of the budget. We understand that, in the joint revenue projection reached on Wednesday, March 2nd, there is an additional 155 million dollars that were not projected to be available in the original Executive budget proposal.

We urge you to apply a portion of these dollars now to offset the change to Title XX funding for New York City so that the Department for the Aging does not close these centers, depriving seniors who depend on senior centers for nutrition, social services and companionship of these vital lifelines.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

The St. Charles Jubilee Senior Center at 55 Pierrepont Street, a gathering place for Brooklyn Heights seniors fo many years, may be forced to close as of April 1 because it has been denied funding under Governor Cuomo’s budget.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle: Many of the centers slated to lose funding are in Brooklyn. Although space prohibits this paper from listing them all, among them are the St. Charles Jubilee Senior Center in Brooklyn Heights, the Bay Ridge Center for Older Adults, the Red Hook Senior Center, the Shalom Senior Center in Crown Heights, JASA (Jewish Association for Services to the Aging) centers in Williamsburg and Luna Park, the Fort Greene Senior Action Center and the Midwood satellite office of the Senior Citizens League of Flatbush (which Borough President Marty Markowitz headed in his 20s).

the Eagle story quotes State Senator Eric Adams (D-Crown Heights/Windsor Terrace) as “calling on Cuomo not to stop the ‘millionaire’s tax,’ the resumption of which would produce $3 billion in funds that could easily pay for the $25 million needed to fund the senior centers.”

Heights and Hills Community Council, an organization “committed to improving the quality of life of older residents of Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill”, is conducting a survey of area residents 55 years of age or older to determine what can be done to improve the lives of older residents of these communities. You can take the survey online by going here. As your correspondent, who just took it, can attest, it’s simple and not time-consuming. As the Brooklyn Heights Association notes:

The results of the survey will be invaluable to planners and other public officials as they seek to find effective solutions for the future. The GREATER THE RESPONSE, the greater the impact.

You will not receive any follow-up inquiries or solicitations, and no personal data will be disclosed. If you have any questions, you may contact Anne Perzeszty at anneper@verizon.net or 646-265-7835.

This in from Heights & Hills Community Council, and the Brooklyn Heights Association:

Heights and Hills’ annual Thanksgiving Dinner will be held at Grace Church on Thanksgiving Day, serving older adults in our community. Heights and Hills also delivers meals to about 75 neighborhood seniors who are too frail to get out and join the festivities.

The dinner is open to senior citizens regardless of economic status. It is a community effort that is co-sponsored by Heights and Hills, Grace Church and Cobble Hill Health Center with assistance from the 84th Precinct and the Brooklyn Heights community.

Volunteers are needed to bake and bring pies to the Church (on or before Thanksgiving morning), and to help with delivering meals to the homebound, seating and serving the elderly, cleaning up, and socializing with the guests.

If you can donate your time between 10:30 AM and 2 PM, please call (718) 596-8789 to sign up, or for further information.

In the words of Grace’s Rector, Steve Muncie: “You have no idea how much pie they can eat.” So, if you can bake a pie or two, good karma to you. If you can come and help serve, so much the better.

BHB photo by C. Scales

A native of the Albany area, educated at Dartmouth College and UCLA Law School, Gillibrand spent the first ten years of her career in New York City, first as a clerk to a federal Court of Appeals judge, then as an associate at the prominent Manhattan law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell. After that, she worked in Washington as Special Counsel to Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew Cuomo. She then moved back to Upstate New York and was in private law practice until, in what was regarded as a stunning upset, she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from a district that had been solidly Republican for many years.

Sen. Gillibrand spoke briefly about some matters she’s been addressing during her first term. She drafted a bill to repeal the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy concerning lesbian and gay service members. She is also behind a bill to facilitate lending by community banks to small businesses, a problem in today’s economy because the banks have been weakened by their investments in real estate. The Senate committees on which she serves are Environment and Public Works, Agriculture (she’s the first New Yorker to serve on this committee in forty years), Foreign Policy, and the Special Committee on Aging. On this last committee, she’s concentrated on combating fraud against the elderly. She stressed her commitment to greater transparency in government, to which end she discloses her full daily schedule, including meetings with lobbyists, on her website.

BHB contributor T.K. Small asked the first question: Why didn’t the Community Choice Act, which would allow Medicaid funding of home care as an alternative to institutionalization in a nursing home, get included in the final version of the Obama Administration’s health care bill? Gillibrand described this as a “missed opportunity”, observing that home care is often more cost-effective than institutional care. As a follow-up, she was asked if the GOP threat to repeal the health care act was a real threat, or just political posturing. She said it was the latter.

Your correspondent then asked if she thought there is any prospect for additional federal aid to mass transit, referring to the MTA’s present difficulties. She noted that New York City accounts for fifty per cent of the mass transit usage in the U.S., and said she saw her job as facilitating the MTA’s access to funds. To advance toward that goal, she supported the Administration’s energy bill, which would have provided substantial additional federal funding for mass transit. Asked if Senators from less urbanized states opposed mass transit funding, she said some support it because it provides funds for projects in smaller cities. She also noted that, for every dollar New York sends to Washington, it gets about seventy cents back.

One of the reporters present told her of the “decrepit” condition of the World War Two memorial in Cadman Plaza Park. She said she would look into this, and also told of her efforts on behalf of veterans, including sponsoring a bill to allow tax credits to employers who hire them.

The Heights and Hill Community Council is serving its annual Thanksgiving Feast for Seniors on Thursday at Grace Church, and needs as many apple, pecan or pumpkin pies as possible. Seconds, even thirds, on pie are always in demand. If you can bake a pie, or two, to feed hungry seniors at this event, you will bring them much joy. Please bring your pie or pies to Grace Church, 254 Hicks Street, between Grace Court and Joralemon, during the day on Wednesday or on Thursday morning no later than 11:00. Your generosity and baking talent will be greatly appreciated.