Mort Fleischer has spent more than 40 years helping the Civic Council make Park Slope a better place to live. A past president of the organization, he stepped down as a Council trustee just last year. In honor of his hard work, he received this year’s George Lovgren Volunteer Award (click here for more about the award.)
I took the opportunity to sit with Mort recently, and I asked about how he came to settle in Park Slope and understand what it is that led him to dedicate a good part of his life to the civic activities of Brooklyn.
Mort tells his story of being a young man living in the housing projects, moving from Canarsie to Brownsville and then to Crown Heights. According to Mort, nobody was well off but people got along. There was wide diversity in the public schools he attended, and there were teachers and principals who made a difference in these kids’ lives. Mort recalls August LaDato, an exceptionally dedicated principal at P.S. 167 on Eastern Parkway who had an impact on guiding him toward being a success in life. This was a time when neighborhoods were changing quickly, and various ethnic groups all shared the local schools.
He also fondly remembered his days at Erasmus Hall. Erasmus prepared Mort for the working world so that he could land his first real job, in production with CBS in the early 1950s. But the urge to go into sales won out, and Mort found himself with a job selling bank vaults. Initially thinking he was taking a job selling cemetery vaults, he was a little confused when he broke the news to his wife Gloria (the two have been married now for 47 years).
Bank vaults it was, and Mort Fleisher applied himself to it. The job provided opportunity to the scrappy Jewish kid from Brooklyn who needed to break into the fairly exclusive business. Mort and banks worked out better than expected, and the job provided raises, promotions, and opportunities to work with all the major banks in New York. It also allowed Mort and Gloria to buy a home in the southern part of Park Slope in 1977, when the “South Slope” had no official name.
Those were the days when ROSAS, the civic association of the South Slope, began. Mort and Carl Kaisermann, another longtime Civic Council trustee, lobbied to clear up drug dealing and pressure slum landlords to clean up their property. The ROSAS success led to alliances with the Civic Council: Working with the very supportive Council President Joannie Ryan, Mort and Carl sought to expand Park Slope by including the southern section into “Park Slope.”
The efforts took off with the first House Tour centered in the South Slope around 1980. Mort lights up with pride when he tells of raising $14,000 from the House Tour. More importantly, it put the South Slope on the map.
Mort was Civic Council president from 1982 to 1984. ROSAS later formally merged with the Civic Council when the South Slope economically and socially established itself, and the two groups could focus on the entire neighborhood.
As he looks back on his efforts over the many years, it’s clear that Mort Fleisher is immensely proud of his volunteer efforts. When he talks of these accomplishments, you can still see the feistiness and focus that helped him along the way.
— Bernard J. Graham is a past Civic Council president and trustee.
from the Summer 2011 Civic News