Thursday, July 14, 2011

Pizza, Ice Cream, Maria

Lenny's Pizza in south Park Slope has taken an advertisement memorial on a nearby bus stop and it's so much better than any other ad you'll see on a piece of Cemusa "street furniture."



"Proudly serving Brooklyn for over 60 years," it says, "Thank you for helping keep our dads' legacies alive." The top part of the ad features the ghosts of Lenny and Chubby floating in heavenly clouds.



The bottom part features a Lenny's Pizza lady and Maria the Ice Cream Girl of Bensonhurst.

If you haven't heard of Maria, as I hadn't, she's a local legend, officially named a goodwill ambassador by Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz for her many charitable and volunteer works. You can read about her in the Daily News in 1995 and 1996, where she was called "Queen of the Ice Cream Girls, an aristocrat in the true Brooklyn sense."



She still drives the truck and runs the ice-cream route her father Chubby started in 1944. She has a website and a Facebook fan page. She's also made almost 200 youtube videos.

Maria's got everything you need to be blog-famous in New York City today--a food truck, frozen treats, hyperlocal Brooklyn style--yet somehow she's stayed off the foodie radar. Maybe one day, when the neighborhood-changing wave of hyper-gentrification hits Bensonhurst. Of course, at that point, it'll be a story about an artisanal ice-cream truck trying to push Maria out.
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5 comments:

  1. BenJuly 14, 2011 at 8:48 AM

    She was profiled in the Times Metropolitan section a few weeks back. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/nyregion/bensonhurst-changes-but-the-ice-cream-truck-doesnt.html

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  2. Jeremiah MossJuly 14, 2011 at 9:07 AM

    thanks Ben. how did i miss that? i wrote this post a few months ago, and should have re-Googled her before i published it, i guess. glad to see she is getting her due.

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  3. ShatteredMonocleJuly 14, 2011 at 9:35 AM

    Wonderful (except your grim final paragraph). Lenny's is great and just steps from Freddy's.

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  4. AnonymousJanuary 23, 2012 at 1:37 AM

    I TRULY LOVE THIS ARTICLE (EXCEPT THE GRIM END-- BUT DONT WORRY-- IM HERE FOR THE STAY-- THEYLL COME
    & GO-- ILL STAY & ROCK ON ;))). BUT THANKS GUYS REALLY WHEN I KEEP COMING BACK TO THIS ARTICLE-- IT KEEPS ON PUTTIN' SMILES ON MY FACE--- AND I LOVE THE COMMENTS TOO- THANK YOU SINCERELY (;/> THE ICE CREAM GIRL

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  5. Jeremiah MossJanuary 23, 2012 at 8:45 AM

    thanks Maria! glad you're still out there going strong.

    ReplyDelete

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