Childhood home of kid from B’klyn
How she brilliantly argued my case before the ’75 Supreme Court
Eighty years ago — a lifetime before she assumed the black robe, lace collar and heavy mantle of America’s highest court — a little girl named Joan Ruth Bader woke up each morning in the first-floor back bedroom of a modest clapboard house in Midwood, Brooklyn.
Her family called her “Kiki” — she was a “kicky” baby — and that boundless energy endured throughout her life.
It propelled her to leap across garage roofs just like the boys, fueled her focus as she twirled a baton in front of packed crowds at Madison HS football games and fed her formidable mind as she pored over books at the public library on her way to becoming a pioneering feminist and consummate legal mind.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who succumbed to the spread of pancreatic cancer at age 87 on Friday, will always be a daughter of Brooklyn, where she spent her childhood in the 1930s and ’40s and where her spirit was felt Saturday in the neighborhood that shaped her.
“Nothing stopped her. She was 5 feet tall and a powerhouse,” said the current resident of Ginsburg’s childhood home, Diana Brenneisen, 77, a retired legal secretary who also grew up in that same back bedroom but who is sad to have never met the legendary jurist.
“The bedroom is the same,” said Brenneisen, who shares the home with her husband, William, 81, a retired bank worker.
“Just a paint job, and that’s it. It’s about 9-by-11, and I believe it was white, the room, but it’s presently yellow,” Brenneisen said.
“It’s a nice honor,” she said of having slept in the same room as the young Ginsburg.
Ginsburg, William said, is the quintessential Big Apple success story.
“She was a good example,” he said as a stream of mourners left flowers and written tributes at the home’s tiny front yard. “If you work hard, you can make something [of yourself ] in life.”
Ginsburg, whose father came to the US from Russia when he was 13 and whose mother was the first of her family to be born in the US, was born in 1933 and grew up in the shadow of World War II and the Holocaust.
The family ran small retail shops to get by, and as a Jew, Ginsburg was shaped by the experience of growing up an outsider.
“It makes you more empathetic to other people who are not insiders, who are outsiders,” she told The Forward in 2018.
Leroy McCarthy, who last year pushed for a street to be renamed for Biggie Smalls, said Ginsburg — whom fans had nicknamed “The Notorious RBG” in a riff on the late Brooklyn-born rapper’s own moniker, “The Notorious B.I.G.” — also deserves one.
“I’m very proud of her, being a Brooklynite myself,” said McCarthy, 63, who visited Ginsburg’s old home to pay tribute.