My Old Neighborhood Remembered (7 page)

One of the greatest ballplayers in the history of the game, Hall of Famer, Hank Greenberg, came from the Bronx and played for James Monroe High School in the Bronx. People of my generation were too young to have experienced his full greatness as a ballplayer. He began in baseball in the 1930s. During the war when our awareness of baseball was developing, he was in military service. He came to our notice dramatically when he returned to baseball for part of the 1945 season to lead the Detroit Tigers to a World Series victory. Hank Greenberg played until 1947. One of the major home run and RBI sluggers of baseball history — from the Bronx — from a nearby high school — Hank Greenberg couldn't inspire our hopelessly asphalt-locked group to play baseball.

Poe wasn't from the Bronx, but he did live there, unlike Joe DiMaggio and Babe Ruth who only worked there. He lived in a cottage near Kingsbridge Road, historians tell us, from 1846 to 1849. While in the Bronx he wrote
Annabel Lee
and
The Bells
, giving the Bronx a nice poetic arc from Edgar Allan Poe's
Annabel Lee
to Dion DiMucci and Ernie Maresca's,
Runaround Sue
.

At P.S. 33 our teachers made sure we knew about Poe.
The Raven
, “Once upon a midnight dreary. . . . ” with its mystery and rolling cadence was much appreciated. We were abundantly aware he had lived in the Bronx. He was our guy because a few blocks away from P.S. 33 stood Poe Cottage, his home in the Bronx. The cottage had been moved from across the street where it was first located and it had been restored. Open to the public, Poe Cottage contained furnishings Poe supposedly used, Poe marginalia and a bust of Poe. A small park on the Grand Concourse near Kingsbridge Road, Poe Park, was created as a setting for the cottage.

Poe's name was used for neighborhood businesses like the Poe Garage and the Poe Raven Bar. Across the Grand Concourse from Poe Park was the best known bar in that part of the Bronx, Poe Cozy Nook. With the drinking age at 21, it was going to be a long time before I or any of my friends set foot in the place. We all knew about Poe Cozy Nook, a bar that promoted itself with wit. The matchbooks for the bar said, “Flat Beer. Rotten Food. Crummy Liquor. Lousy Service.” Poe Cozy Nook was famous for its advertising; billboards in the nearby subway stations, a question mark leading into an all-type design filling the entire sheet, graphic design ahead of its time, text as the visual.

Poe Park was a narrow stretch with trees and benches, the cottage at the northern end and a bandstand in the center. Dances with big bands attracting large crowds were held in the park. At first I was too young to go to a dance in Poe Park and then when I was dance age, I wasn't socially adept enough to go, so dances at Poe Park were never part of my neighborhood life. But what would Edgar Allan Poe, historically regarded as dark and brooding, have thought of the idea that one day people would be jitterbugging outside his cottage? I suspect he would have been more comfortable with the idea that teachers would be teaching him and that local Bronx children would be captivated by his mysterious raven . . . and the bells.

The phrase sounded like a line from a spy movie. By 5th grade we were wandering through office buildings in the Rockefeller Center area, making the rounds of foreign government trade offices accumulating “information” — promotional brochures for the foreign governments' commerce and exports. We would present ourselves at the receptionists' desks. “Have you got any information?” we would say and if we hit the jackpot, we would walk away with our winnings. Seldom did a building employee stop us from entering the elevators. We did not look like children up to no good. We looked like children there for “information.” That is what we would say if we were ever stopped, “We're looking for information,” and we were passed through. Everybody knew what “information” meant.

Latin America was a key focus of the brochure-gathering. We studied the culture and products of “our neighbors to the South.” The Disney movies,
Saludos Amigos
and
The Three Caballeros
had been released during the war and Latin America was in our consciousness and in the minds of curriculum planners and teachers in the New York City schools.

At the end of a period of study, the teachers would organize culmination parties and show us products of the countries we studied and sometimes introduce their food for us to taste, like guava jelly from our friendly Latin American neighbor, Mexico, which we declared was awful.

People from Brooklyn referred to going to Manhattan as “going to the city.” We said we were “going downtown.” The trip downtown on the subway was a direct ride on the D train from our neighborhood to Rockefeller Center and most of the trade offices were there. The excursion sometimes included a stop at the Automat. It was intriguing to us how the compartments that were empty suddenly snapped shut and then opened again and the food was ready, macaroni and cheese, baked beans. Coming from a world of small apartment houses and narrow candy stores, we were enthralled by the skyscrapers, the offices, the Automat.

We were about eleven and twelve and not only moving freely through the Bronx, we were traveling by ourselves without adults to accompany us into midtown Manhattan, making our way back, sometimes doing it solo. This was, no doubt, also true of our peers in the other boroughs. Children of the emerging suburbs enjoyed privileges we might have envied, if only we knew better. But as city kids we didn't have to be driven anywhere by adults. Independent, we got there on our own. We got the “information.”

“The nuns hit.” The Catholic boys in parochial schools told us that and used it as a proof of how tough they were. As we grew older, some of the Catholic boys studied daunting Latin in parochial school, which earned the respect of the Jewish boys.

Outsiders may have thought the Bronx then was primarily Jewish. I never assumed it was, not with so many Catholics in my neighborhood. The U.S. Census did not break down population by religion and the best available estimate then was a 1952 survey by HIP of Greater New York estimating nearly half the population of New York City was Catholic, about a quarter Jewish, and slightly less than a quarter Protestant. The Jewish population in the Bronx was undoubtedly proportionately higher than the citywide estimate and some neighborhoods in sections of the east Bronx may have been largely Jewish. Not where I lived. In the Concourse-Fordham area the sense we had was that we were in a half Catholic, half Jewish neighborhood.

Peter Decker, the former archivist for the The Bronx County Historical Society, lived a few blocks north of my apartment on the northern side of Fordham Road. He has written that he estimated his neighborhood was 40% Jewish, 60% Christian, the Christians overwhelmingly Catholic.

With several Catholic churches, a Catholic university — Fordham University — the Catholic schools, St. Simon Stock and St. Nicholas of Tolentine in the neighborhood, and with the widely known Cardinal Hayes High School a bus ride away, the Concourse-Fordham area was a magnet for Catholics.

The Catholic presence, not only in the neighborhood, but in the city at large was always apparent to me.
The Daily News
, which came into the apartment every day, was intimately allied with the Catholic Church in a conservative political and cultural outlook. Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York, an outspoken conservative in church and non-church matters, was a major celebrity within its pages. Another luminary frequently featured in news stories — and this was the tabloid
Daily News
, crime was its beat — was the Catholic Manhattan District Attorney, Frank Hogan. The upper echelons of the Police Department and the Fire Department were dominated by Catholics and
The Daily News
was particularly thorough in covering Police and Fire Department officials and activities. The Catholic William O'Dwyer became Mayor of New York in 1946.

The most important Catholic in the world, Pope Pius XII, whom we saw in newsreels and in the newspapers, was so spiritual looking with his gaunt, solemn face, he seemed otherworldly and
very
religious. The Jews had no one who looked quite like him.

Some of the Catholics in the neighborhood went to church on Sundays. Given the large number of synagogues in the Bronx, some Jewish families must have been attending Sabbath services, as well. Not my family or the families of my friends.

Movies of the time,
The Song of Bernadette, The Bells of St. Mary's, Going My Way, The Miracle of the Bells
, with good priests and good nuns doing good deeds, contributed to the idea the Catholics had something going for them that we who were Jewish did not. We were not given
The Ten Commandments
with Charlton Heston as Moses until the mid-1950s.

In 1945, after Joseph Vitolo Jr. said he saw the Virgin Mary in a vacant lot a few subway stops north of where we lived, people began to hold a vigil for the Virgin Mary's return there. The devout, along with the ill seeking to be cured, came to pray and to be touched by the boy. Candles were lit, flowers were placed. Eighteen days after he first made his claim, the crowd coming to the site reached the estimated 30,000. For Jewish children of my age — I was nearly ten, about the same age as the boy — the situation was beyond our capacity to understand.

The boy did not have the vision again. A small shrine was erected facing the Grand Concourse after the crowds dissipated. The shrine was still in view when I traveled home on the bus from high school. It is there still.

The Catholic children who did not attend parochial school might have resented the fact that they had to go to school on days we were excused for a medley of Jewish holidays. I didn't even know what some of those holidays were for. What was Shemini Atzeret? And yet we were usually given two days off from school, the second day for the supposedly more religious among us. “Is it allowed?” was my standard question of my mother concerning these Jewish holidays. “Is it allowed to go to the movies?” “Is it allowed to play ball?” “Is it allowed if I play ball, but I don't run?” The rules for me became — no ball playing or movies on the High Holidays, but it was all right on the other Jewish holidays since we didn't celebrate them and my mother and my uncle went to work on those days and I figured my mother probably didn't know what they were either.

Although we didn't go to services, my mother sometimes slipped in for a memorial service on Yom Kippur. We did stroll along the Grand Concourse with the other Jews on the High Holidays. And we usually had a holiday meal to begin the important holidays. For Passover, we had matzo on the table and appropriate Jewish dishes, but it wasn't a seder, we didn't have a Haggadah. I had to dress “nice,” for the High Holidays. By the second day of Rosh Hashanah, still excused from school, I was playing ball while dressed “nice.”

For the Jewish children of my generation, our parents might have been able to speak Yiddish, and more likely their parents, but by our time, the language did not reach us, Yiddish overwhelmed by assimilation. The Yiddish language
Daily Forward
was sold at the candy store downstairs, tucked in a rack with other foreign language papers. Only a few copies of
The Forward
were ordered by the candy store each day. None of my neighborhood friends who were Jewish spoke or understood Yiddish and I did not. My aunt and uncle did not know Yiddish and never signed a Yiddish word. My mother, whose parents were Yiddish-speaking, said that she might have been able to follow a conversation in Yiddish and perhaps speak a little. She would not have had a reason to do so.

A teacher in 4th grade asked us if a second language was spoken in the house and barely any hands went up. In a sense, with sign language we spoke a second language in my house. I did not volunteer that information.

For Jewish children, Catholicism was mysterious. With what little we knew of the Catholic faith, and we knew very little — our guides were Catholic children our age, hardly divinity experts — we could not track the ideas and the miracles behind the religion, lacking the belief or the knowledge.

This passed for a theological discussion on a street corner: A Catholic boy says that Catholics have a real religion and the Jews don't because the Messiah came to the Catholics and the Jews are still waiting for the Messiah. We have no rejoinder, not knowing how to answer. What is a Messiah and are we still waiting? The Catholic children were given the answers, we didn't have any.

“I have to go to Hebrew,” were the words we spoke as we withdrew from a street game or left our friends hanging around. You had to go. It was decreed as part of your upbringing. A few days a week from when we were about ten years old until our bar mitzvahs at thirteen, with occasional Sunday School sessions, we went to “Hebrew.”

My Hebrew School was part of the Concourse Center of Israel synagogue, a half block from the apartment. Bronx synagogues ranged from small buildings, which were converted private houses, to larger, more elegant synagogues built from the ground up, like Temple Adath Israel on the Grand Concourse where the Metropolitan Opera tenor Richard Tucker once had been the cantor.

The Concourse Center of Israel was one of the larger Bronx synagogues with substantial seating and a balcony. Identifying itself as a Conservative synagogue in the 1940s, the synagogue took a position that would have been considered Orthodox in later years — women and men were required to sit separately. I wouldn't have been aware of it. I never went into the synagogue. It wasn't a requirement for Hebrew school students to attend services and so I didn't go.

In Hebrew School we were not taught Hebrew as a language as we were to be taught French or Spanish in regular school. We were only taught to
say
Hebrew words. Pronunciation of the words was drilled into us. We read aloud. We wrote Hebrew letters and words in notebooks. That passed for Hebrew instruction because the principal intention was for us to stand up on the day of our bar mitzvahs and chant properly.