Brooklyn’s Buzz-a-Rama Is Heaven for Slot-Car Fans

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/nyregion/19bigcity.html?bl&ex=1232514000&en=c502c41a59a6d6e2&ei=5087

Brooklyn’s Buzz-a-Rama Is Heaven for Slot-Car Fans

They didn’t give Frank Perri the nickname Buzz back in high school because he ran fast, or because he liked to mess around with slot cars, the miniature electric vehicles that zoom around a track. They called him Buzz because he was a star high jumper, and that was the sound the appreciative crowd made when he soared over a pole six feet off the ground: Buzzzzzz.

The owner, Frank Perri, 73: “I’m too young to retire.”
The moniker stuck, and in 1965, when Mr. Perri was 30 and opening a slot-car track in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn, he called the place Buzz-a-Rama. The name captured the energy of the hundreds of teenagers and kids who used to crowd into the room on race days, and also the sound of the cars themselves, a high-pitched, insectlike whine — the sound of constant speed.

Most fads can survive one assault from the next big thing, or maybe two — but 44 years later, Buzz-a-Rama is hanging on, if barely, in the face of several generations’ worth of electronic competition. Coin-operated video games were the first threat. Radio-controlled cars. Computer games. Games on iPhones. Wii. Mr. Perry, now 73 and still known as Buzz, said 30 or 40 other slot-car tracks were operating in the city in the late 1960s, but so far as he knows, Buzz-a-Rama is the last of its kind in the five boroughs. It is now open only on weekends and certain holidays, like Martin Luther King’s Birthday.

“You don’t make money in this kind of business,” Mr. Perri said. “If I didn’t own the building, I’d have been gone, also.”

The decline of slot-car racing seems to coincide with the dwindling of an economy based on things people made, and the rise of one based on numbers magically manipulated. Slot cars, which drivers control with a hand-held throttle, go fast — some upward of 100 miles per hour — but getting them to that point demands slow, intensive, hands-on labor. Enthusiasts spend their free time taking the cars apart, tinkering with the motors, shaving down the tires for better balance and adjusting the gears.

“The kids spend all week working on their cars, and then they come in on Saturday and get to see the rewards,” said Mr. Perri’s wife, Dolores, who, like Mr. Perri, grew up in the neighborhood, and now helps out at the track.

In the late ’60s, some of the last years before Detroit really hit the skids, a whole generation of kids knew how to soup up their tiny motors. Now it’s an obscure hobby, entertained — in Brooklyn, at least — in a space steeped in a nostalgia bred from benign neglect. On the wall of Buzz-A-Rama, the comedian Nipsey Russell, who died in 2005, smiles from a movie poster. An empty phone booth, its phone long gone, stands in the middle of the room. An old Coca-Cola clock remains frozen at 4:35. The slot cars represent miniature versions of actual motor cars; Buzz-A-Rama represents a microcosm of the United States auto industry itself — beloved, historic, and long past the glory days.

On Saturday afternoon, Dolores Perri turned casually to greet Michael Sylmetaj, a barrel-chested man of about 50 with two kids in tow. “Long time no see,” Ms. Perri said with a smile.

Mr. Sylmetaj, who also has never left the neighborhood, showed up nearly every day when he was in his early teens. He had seen the checkered flags in Buzz-a-Rama’s window on Church Avenue earlier that day and decided to bring in his daughter and nephew. The kids, first-timers, sat riveted, throttles in hand, watching the tiny cars they had rented cruise around the track, letting up on the juice at the curves to avoid going off the slots. “So many memories come flashing back,” Mr. Sylmetaj said.

“Good to see you,” Ms. Perri had said to him, as though it had been only a few months since his last visit. In fact, Mr. Sylmetaj said, it “must be 35 years, at least.”

The track attracts a coterie of regulars like Joseph DeMulia, a livery-cab driver who lives in Marine Park, Brooklyn, and has been coming in, on and off, since 1970; and Joseph Migliaccio, a concrete mixer driver from Staten Island, who started coming in 1972, when he was 8; his cousins would pass along their favorite slot cars as they headed off to Vietnam. Mr. Migliaccio, a lover of all things automotive, keeps a picture of the sports car that first won his heart, a blue 1969 Corvette, in a slide show on a cellphone filled mostly with photographs of his wife and children.

“That was the car that first messed me up,” he said, sounding like someone whose love has gone unrequited. He used to race real cars, “but slot cars are a lot less expensive, and you don’t get hurt,” he said. “And you get the same speed.”

Mr. Perri’s accountant has been urging him to give up the track, find a tenant for the storefront and sit at home collecting rent checks. “But I’m too young to retire,” said Mr. Perri, a former marathon runner who, like his wife, usually wears a sweatshirt that reads “Natural Living.”

“My wife’s a nutritionist,” he noted. “She says if I do what she says, I’ll live to 120.”

That would take Buzz-a-Rama to 2056. General Motors should be so lucky.