My Old Neighborhood Remembered (18 page)

A while later, I was walking through Washington Square Park with Paul Krassner, the publisher of
The Realist
, a popular underground magazine of the time. I had come to know him through a person who worked at Ziff Davis. I did a comic riff about dating as we walked along and he was laughing. He said that if I wrote it up just the way I said it, he would publish it in
The Realist
. A few days later he called and said, “Where's my piece?” I wrote it and he published it, my first article in print. He went on to publish several other things of mine. Soon after the first appeared, Herb Gardner said to me, “I saw your article in
The Realist
. I am so proud of you.”

Any miscalculations I might have made in trying to become an advertising agency copywriter, and any prejudices that might have blocked my path, had become irrelevant. They were part of an obsolete dream. I watched foreign films when I was a little boy. I was always good at English in school. Did I have to make a career in business? I turned away from business writing. I found a good way of paying my bills, writing free-lance scripts for an educational film company while I tried to become a full-time writer. I wrote a couple of plays that went unproduced and magazine articles that were published. Then I wrote a novel without a contract, hoping to find a publisher. It was
Oh, God!
The first publisher I submitted it to accepted it. A successful movie was made of it. I went on to write the novel,
Kramer vs. Kramer
. A full-time writer is what I had become.

In 1988, I was asked to contribute an article for a
New York Times Magazine
supplement on the the subject of neighborhoods of the city. This is what I wrote:

In the summer of 1955, when I was 19 and the Grand Concourse was in bloom in every respect, I decided to take a walk in my newly purchased Bermuda shorts. These were the earliest days for Bermudas; they were seldom seen on the streets of the city, and you wore them with high argyle socks. I was striding along the Concourse when a middle-aged woman stepped in my path, glared at my bare knees and proclaimed, “You're a disgrace to the Bronx!”

The Bronx was a place people took pride in, especially the Grand Concourse, the wide, tree-lined street where the “better” buildings were found, “the Park Avenue of the Bronx,” or as one of the regulars might have said, “a regular Champs-Elysées.” For generations of people, the Concourse was not only
the
street where Bronxites aspired to live, it was also a social and cultural attraction. Like the successful malls of today — the Galleria in Houston, for instance — it was a gathering place for strolling, shopping, eating, movies.

A few years ago I wrote a novel called
The Old Neighborhood
, in which the main character, rootless and distraught, returns to his childhood neighborhood near the Grand Concourse to find himself. Since then, it has been intriguing to me the way readers have made personal connections to that book, writing to me about it, telling me what it meant to them. Something about the Bronx and the Grand Concourse area has a powerful emotional hold on people.

Part of it has to do, I think, with a sense of loss. The culture in which we grew up there has vanished. In the 1960's and 1970's urban blight swept across the Bronx with such ferocity that its burned, abandoned housing looked like pictures we have seen of London during the blitz. The expression “South Bronx” became synonymous with inner-city disintegration, and what was regarded as the South Bronx moved inexorably north to include much of what been the central part of the borough.

Another reason for people's connection to the place, and my own, I suspect, is the way we romanticize our childhood. For people now middle-aged, the years in the 1940's and 1950's were clearly simpler, more innocent times. But there was something undeniably special about those old Bronx neighborhoods — the tumult, the colorfulness and, especially, the sense of community — which many of us miss today.

I have gone back to look around the Bronx many times, out of nostalgia, curiosity, concern for the area where I grew up. Recently, realtors and civic groups have been talking about a revival of the Bronx and the Concourse area, and so I went back once again to see what was happening there. Walking along the streets, inevitably, I remembered what the area was like when I was growing up. Every neighborhood was linked culturally and geographically to the Grand Concourse, running for over four miles through the heart of the borough.

The Concourse and Fordham Road constituted the main commercial hub of the Bronx, with Alexander's department store at its crossroads, retail stores spread out on all sides. You could get a charlotte russe with fresh whipped cream at a frozen custard stand opposite Alexander's, on the south side of Fordham Road, or an egg cream in the candy store just off the Concourse on 188th Street, a bookies' and bettors' hangout. (Incidentally, for an egg cream, if you put the milk in first, then the soda and the chocolate syrup last, you get a beautiful-looking dark drink with a perfect white, foamy head. But given the passions of egg cream experts, I haven't heard the last on that subject.)

Loew's Paradise was on the Concourse south of 188th Street, that huge, eccentrically baroque movie palace, with nymphs adorning the walls of the theater beneath the stars and moving clouds on the ceiling. Across the street from the Paradise was Krum's, the quintessential soda parlor, and in those simpler times you sat at counter with a date and didn't consider it déclassé.

If you wanted to be “intellectual,” a few blocks south, on the Concourse and 183rd Street, was the Ascot Theater, one of the first art movie houses in New York.
Open City, The Bicycle Thief
, the Marcel Pagnol
Fanny
trilogy all played there when they were first released in this country.

The Concourse was where you promenaded in your best clothes on the Jewish holidays and on Easter Sunday. The true boulevardiers never spent much time in a synagogue or a church on those days, they just checked out the action.

During World War II, the Concourse was the scene of big parades on Memorial Day, and when the war ended people crowded along the parade route to cheer the returning servicemen from their neighborhoods.

And the Concourse was where you strolled, just strolled, with friends at night — “Walk me for a soda.” On a recent return trip, I take the IRT No. 4 train uptown to the Bedford Park Boulevard stop, which is in the Concourse's northern section. This area now probably has the highest percentage of white residents of any part of the Grand Concourse region; farther south the proportions change, and the neighborhoods are predominantly Hispanic and black. Favored by geography, with the New York Botanical Garden on the east and the Jerome Park reservoir on the west, the northern Concourse is an area with low-density population and a limited amount of housing that could have become blighted. It looks much as I remember it did in the 1940's.

Near Kingsbridge Road, I pass a scene that makes me smile. A few feet from a sign that says “Positively no ball playing allowed,” a group of Asian youngsters are batting around a ball, just as we would have done in our day.

Apart from a fenced area protecting the Edgar Allan Poe cottage, which has been restored and maintained, sadly, Poe Park is filthy, the grass, what there is of it, burned out; I assume that either people have recently been abusing this place with litter and soda and beer cans, or it hasn't been cleaned properly in weeks.

I pass Alexander's department store. The Fordham Road-Grand Concourse section of retail stores is clearly still a viable shopping area. The streets are crowded with shoppers, mostly black and Hispanic. You see few empty stores here; the businesses are similar to those you would find along 34th Street or 86th Street in Manhattan, stores selling clothing, shoes, electronics. Some of the chains are here — Seaman's, Radio Shack, Kleinsleep, Trader Horn, Newmark & Lewis. The Loew's Paradise has been subdivided, so to speak, and is now four theaters; young people are standing in line.

I am now approaching the street where I once lived, and as I walk on I realize that the highway signs I first noticed farther north, which I took to be somehow necessary because streets like Fordham Road are major thoroughfares, continue all along the Concourse. They are exit signs, and some of the exit signs they point to are ludicrous — small side streets. They are not little signs, either; they are nearly the size of the signs on the Long Island Expressway. Later, I learned that they were placed along the Grand Concourse several years ago in order to aid motorists. Aid motorists? These large, hideous signs announce to everyone walking along the Concourse, or living there: Don't deceive yourself into thinking this is a street for people any longer. This is a highway and don't you forget it.

I lived in an apartment whose windows faced the Grand Concourse, on Field Place, between 183rd and 184th Streets, a five-story red brick walk-up with a white facade entrance, retail stores on the street level. The red brick has become sorely darkened with time and the white facade has faded. Fisher's candy store used to be on the corner. It was a slightly higher-level operation than most Bronx candy stores in that it featured an active lunch counter. It also sold a house specialty that I have never seen since — a “frozen malted,” ice milk served soft in cups and cones. Fisher's is now El Tropical Cuchifritos Restaurant.

At the entrance to our building is a step where I would sit and read or daydream. I sit down again on my childhood stoop, facing the street where I remember belly-whopping down a hill with abandon after a snow. Seen through my adult eyes, the hill is merely a slight downgrade. I am so flooded with memories and with a sense of the passage of time that I simply cannot handle sitting there for more than a minute. I move on.

The Ascot Theater is now a porno house. But at East Mt. Eden Avenue, Bronx-Lebanon Hospital is being expanded with a new building facing the Grand Concourse. A sign at the site proclaims, “The Bronx is rebuilding its future with pride.” South of 170th Street, the last five vacant buildings on the Concourse were recently turned over to private developers for rehabilitation, and work on them has begun. Since 1981, more than $120 million from Federal, city and private funds has been invested in restoring over 150 buildings on the Concourse and, to a lesser extent, adjacent streets.

Facing the entrance of Public School 64 on Walton Avenue and East 171st Street, there is a gutted, abandoned apartment house. This is the sight children have had to see every day on their way to school. But a sign has just gone up announcing that the building is being rehabilitated.

As I continue along the Concourse to 161st Street, and walk the side streets, I notice very real examples of urban renewal. The area is certainly looking better than when I came through here several years ago. The place was so rundown then it was almost unbearable to see.

Perhaps because I have written about the Bronx, I have become a kind of Bronxologist. I am often asked by people who also lived there — What happened? We moved away, and a few years later we were reading about massive blighted areas.

What happened in the Bronx was replicated in many of the inner cities across the country. Tremendous shifts in population during and after World War II changed the nature of city neighborhoods. But the decline of the Bronx was particularly rapid and vast.

During the 1930's and then in the 1940's, when I was growing up there, the Grand Concourse and its side streets were a magnet for people from the Lower East Side of Manhattan and from the east Bronx. The newcomers were predominantly Jewish, but there was, too, a large Irish-Catholic population. The neighborhoods linked to the Concourse were white and, by the standards of those years, middle class.

After the war, rural Southern blacks poured into Northern cities in search of factory jobs. In New York they were joined by large numbers of Puerto Ricans, many with poor English-language skills. Settling in Harlem and East Harlem, this new population eventually filtered into the southeast Bronx. Meanwhile, people in the Bronx were moving from the east Bronx to the Grand Concourse area, from the Concourse to Queens or to the suburbs. We all knew people who were leaving; they were “the rich kids.” For young couples the old neighborhood was beginning to feel old. Home ownership beckoned in the new communities on Long Island and New Jersey, and many found it culturally unacceptable to live near their parents.

As blacks and Hispanics began moving into Bronx neighborhoods, many whites began to retreat in white flight. Bluntly, part of what some whites of my generation and older are nostalgic about concerning the Bronx is the fact that they were able to live under apartheid right here in New York City.

The postwar relocations had to change the character of Bronx neighborhoods. But couldn't these areas have remained relatively as stable and as racially mixed as the northern Concourse is today? I asked Robert Caro, who wrote the highly praised biography of Robert Moses,
The Power Broker
, if he thought the deterioration that took place in the Bronx was inevitable, given those geographical shifts in the population of the city that had resulted in shifts in economic levels. “Not necessarily,” he said. “The farther away you get from the Cross Bronx Expressway, the more stable the neighborhoods are.”

It was the building of the Cross Bronx Expressway and the construction of Co-op City that accelerated the decline of the Bronx.

In 1945, Robert Moses, wanting to link the George Washington Bridge to the Bronx Whitestone Bridge, received permission from city officials to build a major roadway and for the next 10 years proceeded to smash a six-lane highway across seven miles of the Bronx, devastating neighborhood after neighborhood, scattering populations, tipping poorer neighborhoods into slums that were inhabited by the economically insolvent, creating chaos.

To really see the Cross Bronx Expressway you have to be at a stationary vantage point, not in a car. I stood at 174th Street and the Grand Concourse. From that high point, the arrogance is palpable. From east and west there is a continuous flood of trucks and cars. The huge, ugly tongue that is this highway seems to spite not only the immediate area that was leveled, but everything within its vicinity.