Neighborhoods

...Even under siege the city remains a wondrous place to live—appreciated by newcomers more than by hardened New Yorkers...

...Here in Flushing I encountered my first Jew-baiting, when a friend was razzed, pummeled, and wrestled to the ground by some tough kids from his class at the local public school...

...Near Main Street, where the subway ended, small apartment houses full of commuters sprang up during the 1950s and 1960s, but further out, where we lived, a network of separate little communities was linked by an expanding car culture that belonged to Long Island, not to the city...

...At the present rate of change, such films could soon become as much a remembrance of things past as The Naked City...

...now they battle to ward off unwanted attention...

...Even our little block on Henry Street seemed like a complete unit of its own...

...Feeling isolated among lower-middle-class Irish and Italians in Flushing, my folks kept up the umbilical tie to the old neighborhood, which had the only good bakeries and delicatessens, the only real synagogues and yeshivas, the best bargains, and so on...

...There was great housing, good shopping, and a zestful community spirit on the West Side in those years, but there was also a palpable tension on the street that could flare up at any moment into a menacing incident...

...I was in a keyed-up and sentimental mood, and as we passed the house on Henry Street where I had spent my first decade, I turned and beamed, as if this were Mecca and Medina rolled into one...

...A friend had his car stolen off the street, stripped to a metal hulk, and dumped in what the police then called "Korea," a no-man's-land around Manhattan Avenue and 109th Street...

...now, with wives working as well as husbands, the city attracts them in ever-greater numbers...

...The yeshiva my parents sent me to, in part to keep me away from the neighborhood riffraff, was only a block away, while the one my even more religious cousins went to was around the corner on East Broadway...

...Meanwhile, the aspiring young who are transiently poor must move in with their parents, take on exorbitant sublets, or hunt up housing in distant parts of the city...

...One stretch of Broadway between 104th and 108th Street, long a dead space in which few businesses really thrived, has now become Restaurant Row, where spiffy East Side types, hard-bitten locals, and Columbia students mingle without visible ill will...

...Living in New York, like living in the twentieth century, has often been horrible but never dull...

...The Lower East Side had always been poor...

...The casualties of gentrification can be seen on every block, and it is easy to detest the kind of money that's moving in...

...And there were no doubt worse things I never saw: rat-infested tenements that survived from the days when Mike Gold addressed the "workers' Revolution" as the "true Messiah" that would "destroy the East Side . . . and build there a garden for the human spirit...

...Foreigners have come to love New York because they find it dynamic, diverse, and immensely energizing...

...The rest of Manhattan was a vast mystery, except for the route of our favorite excursion—to Rockefeller Center, where we could get tickets to radio shows, make faces at ourselves on a television monitor, have lunch (meatless) at the Automat, and walk up Fifth Avenue to the Central Park Zoo...

...others allegedly burned the place out...

...The good citizens on Gladwin Avenue in Flushing no doubt felt threatened by the prospect of a welfare house for homeless babies on their well-kept block...

...Like the callow heroes of so many nineteenth-century novels, I could only find myself by making my way to the big city...

...In those days every few blocks along Broadway became a world unto itself, with its own supermarkets, banks, dry cleaners, theaters, its own sandbox on Riverside Drive, where the child-people and the dog-people battled for turf...

...The West Side was then spiraling downward into a different kind of slum from where I had grown up...

...I thought I had long since put the Lower East Side behind me...

...I wasn't fazed by any of these incidents: they were the cost of doing business...

...Though Flushing couldn't supply its people with too many good jobs, it was anything but a bedroom community surrounded by shopping centers...

...we speculated endlessly about what went on in the small adjoining residence where two ancient nuns kept house for one or two elderly priests who had been on this block forever...

...In Flushing it comes from a large influx of intensely entrepreneurial Chinese and Koreans who are emulating the migratory patterns and social mobility of earlier immigrant groups...

...I myself have passed through every corner of New York, but my life has always been mediated by the neighborhoods I've lived in: the Lower East Side in the 1940s...

...New York has always been a changing city, but for many years it was thought to be a city in decline, distrusted by many Americans as an offshore island closer to Europe than to our own heartland...

...The slowly graying population of an earlier era hangs in, but the yuppies are gradually making the neighborhood their own...

...The special organic qualities of the three neighborhoods I have described were in part due to their stagnation, which I experienced as stability...

...There was a druggist at one corner who freely dispensed medical advice, offering first aid to children with scrapes and bruises, minor infections, and sties or cinders in their eyes, and there was a small grocery on another corner that supplied us with dark, thick-crusted pumpernickel and bottles of milk that had a generous head of cream...

...The Lower East Side as I remember it was a small world, remarkably self-contained though far from homogeneous...

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...My own ties grew frayed and were eventually forgotten, buried beneath an Ivy League demeanor and a not wholly convincing new personality as an intellectual and a citizen of the world...

...Even today, people in Flushing still talk about "going to the city" or "going to New York" when they mean Manhattan...

...The security and stability of a neighborhood can be a nurturing form of community...

...And I vividly recall the lights and music and dancing as the street was closed off for block parties when the war ended and the soldiers were welcomed back...

...Once most of these people would have been bound for the suburbs...

...The borders of the neighborhood were sharply defined, especially for a child...

...But a few producers set out to find authentic locations to give these films a documentary look...

...Flushing had a well-established, lower-middle-class population: people who owned their own homes, breathed better air, saw greenery every day, and, if they could afford it, bought small summer cottages further out on Long Island where they could really get away from city life...

...The mix of people on and off Broadway on a Saturday afternoon is still exhilarating—yuppies in jogging suits, fierce pensioners wheeling their carts like weapons at Fairway, students browsing along the shelves at Shakespeare and Company, Korean greengrocers, three or four to a block, displaying their wares in all seasons, winos roosting on benches in the middle of the traffic island, young couples with strollers braving the crowd in an everexpanding Zabar's...

...Much has been improved in this upward push, especially for those who can afford it...

...Despite the pastoral amenities of life in Queens, including fine parks in nearly all directions, I was bored and alienated by the life we had...

...Only dying cities remain the same, preserving old neighborhoods under glass as museum pieces and tourist attractions while the real activity of the city, if there is any, takes place offstage...

...When my wife and I moved back to New York with a six-week-old child in 1966, there were still large rent-controlled apartments with high ceilings and spectacular views in once-elegant, well-constructed prewar buildings...

...Yet for me the neighborhood remains a recreation of the kind of community I dimly experienced as a child...

...North of Northern Boulevard were larger white-collar homes with beautifully landscaped lawns—a touch of suburbia that always made me envious...

...I recall walking babysitters home at 2 A.M...

...On the Lower East Side and Upper West Side, the pressure comes from soaring real estate values, reflecting larger changes in the city's economic life: the shift from an industrial base, with many blue-collar jobs, to a service economy employing more professionals, as well as the growth of foreign investment...

...Money is a great solvent, and neighborhoods can be colonized as dramatically as 606 • DISSENT MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS underdeveloped countries...

...At the end of the block, where Henry met Rutgers Street, there was a large Catholic church which was as mysterious and fascinating to the Jews as a Gothic castle...

...Outsiders were incredulous when I said I lived in a small town, but there were times when I didn't venture south of Columbus Circle for six months at a time...

...The protest movements of the 1960s had encouraged people to "do their own thing," and this lent impetus to a growing pluralism...

...Yet the changes accelerate from week to week...

...teaching and writing would be my version of the rabbinate, a substitute for the Talmud I had studied so restively and the preaching to which I must have been inwardly inclined...

...Everything looked smaller than I remembered, as if isolated under glass, but charged with a strong emotional current...

...The building was a walk-up with four three-room apartments on each floor...

...I took to spending more and more time in the public libraries, where I devoured everything I could lay my hands on, and at the local synagogue, where I chanted the weekly Torah portion, organized the junior services, joined the Boy Scouts, won a teenage checkers championship, and even preached a sermon now and then...

...Eventually, college and graduate school became my way out...

...There the immigrant experience provided a set of common bonds: a shared culture, common religion, family ties, and similar hopes for a better future...

...So one day I found myself driving a good friend around the streets of the Lower East Side, which I hadn't seen for ten years or more...

...The 604 • DISSENT MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS West Side had its low-rise tenements on Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues but also its grand residential buildings sliding inexorably into shabby gentility...

...Now all three are being buffeted to different degrees by the fabled "rebirth" of New York, as new investment, new construction, and shifts in population disrupt patterns that had persisted for decades...

...I remember the block best as an intricate playground: the wide space in front of our building that was perfect for sidewalk games, the tall stoops further down the block that provided hiding places for secret clubs and crude sexual exploration, the punchball and stickball games in the middle of the street, and the huge rock-candy formations of piled-up snow that survived for months after a big snowfall like the 1947 blizzard...

...As an undergraduate at Columbia I discovered the West Side, and despite periods when I hated New York and wanted nothing more than to live elsewhere, the West Side has essentially been my home ever since...

...Here too a common culture binds people together: cosmopolitanism, professionalism, political liberalism, some involvement with books and the arts, an unusual degree of civic-mindedness, a sense of having seceded from the cruder aspects of the American Dream...

...Festering SROs and residence hotels are renovated into expensive condos yet little new housing is provided for those who are displaced...

...whenever I did, the crowds made my head spin...

...Here was Columbia Street, where my father grew up and his brothers lived...

...No doubt the location was chosen with little sensitivity to the community's fears...

...Everything seemed close by...

...After a long period of amnesia, I somehow remembered where I came from...

...Flushing, Queens where my parents still live—in the 1950s...

...Mine was one of them...

...As the old German Jews in their ten-room apartments were dying off, the fear of crime was relentlessly driving the middle class to the Upper East Side, if they could afford it, or out of the city...

...To Fritz Lang, arriving for the first time in New York Harbor, the skyline of the city was like the face of the future: it was the image that inspired his film Metropolis...

...Despised by much of the middle class, neglected by landlords and city alike, this run-down neighborhood, once so correct and respectable, became a refuge for many who were in flight from the suburbs or from Flushing, from the Middle West or the South—a place where unpublished authors, undiscovered artists, and indigent young lovers could be poor and happy on nothing a year...

...But the cost of housing and the spiraling commercial rents have changed everything...

...Our parents were indignant that we were living in a combat zone...

...I suppose the house was a slum, though I remembered it as a clean building, a cut above its surroundings, with stable, hard-working tenants, most of whom held down blue-collar jobs...

...Why then did this "slum," long since taken over by Hispanics and then Chinese, look beautiful to me...

...Though it seemed to some, but not to me, that I might end up a rabbi, I was only hungry for culture, secular or religious, another Carol Kennicott, struggling against the limits of my own benighted Main Street...

...These crowded streets of the Lower East Side, with their grimy tenements and narrow sidewalks, their tiny candy stores, pushcart peddlers, and slope-backed cars, gave me back some vivid images from my childhood...

...Despite these sweatshop hours, to which I never dreamed of objecting, the subways I learned to use so well became precious keys to freedom, links to magical city events like baseball games, museum exhibitions, and stage plays with live actors who delivered risque lines to "sophisticated" audiences...

...wide Delancey Street, with its grand movie palace and innumerable lanes of traffic leading onto the Williamsburg Bridge on which the film's brilliant climactic chase takes place...

...Yet this gave the area a mild bohemian flavor, since it made room for students sharing the rent, for young couples living together, for junior academics from Columbia, for writers and musicians whose income was marginal or unpredictable...

...its tiny apartments had airless rooms with windows looking out on narrow shafts...

...with my fingers curled around my keys — to do maximum damage if I had to defend myself...

...My friend was silent for a long time, then said haltingly, "But . . . this is a . . . slum...

...When I grew a little older I would scurry with friends across the walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge to set foot on that mysterious continent, "Brooklyn," with all the wonderment of Balboa facing the Pacific or Admiral Peary at the North Pole...

...I also found time to explore Flushing, hardly part of New York at all but essentially a small American city of the 1920s...

...As Jane Jacobs showed long ago, people in New York identify less with the city than with their own neighborhood...

...The city has absorbed great changes in the past...

...Like some of our soldiers in Vietnam, they risked destroying the block in order to "save" it...

...The other side was the pleasure of being close to the center of the city yet living in what often felt like a small village, a cultural mix that was also a ghetto full of people of one's own choosing...

...Yet everywhere we turn, the fabric of community life seems threatened...

...These were the furthest reaches of the world I remember...

...I suppose nearly everyone was Jewish in 131 and 133 Henry Street but there were no other orthodox families, though the block was dotted with small first-floor synagogues where Jews from different East European towns prayed separately, as they would eventually be buried in different sections of the cemetery...

...The answer is bound up, I think, not only in nostalgia for one's formative years but in the role neighborhoods play in the life of a city like New York...

...I could recall seeing much worse when I was growing up: dark, dingy apartments with bathtubs in the kitchen and toilets off the hall...

...I remember being relieved of the contents of my wallet by three young toughs in front of my building one June evening, and being dunned for a ten-dollar "loan" on Amsterdam Avenue by someone who offered me his gun, wrapped in a newspaper, as "collateral...

...Like so many Jewish families, my parents had gotten out: moved to Queens in 1949, when I was nine, to open a small business, just when mom-and-pop stores had pretty much had their day...

...Once community groups fought the neglect of their neighborhoods...

...Now that New York has become even more of a world capital, especially in the arts, in finance, and in everything related to communication and style, the city's preeminence has become a mixed blessing to those who live here...

...For fear that I might forget who I was, my parents kept me going to the yeshiva on Henry Street, which added nearly three hours of travel to a school day that already stretched from nine to six, including Sundays...

...The spirit of the 1960s has left behind a reservoir of local energy that provides some civic resistance to the greed of private capital and the development-mindedness of politicians who are either corrupt or simply willing to give the city away if only to assure a solid tax base...

...1987 607...

...As some blocks are rescued from decay, others are destroyed by the forces of development, and the city becomes more of a playground for the well-to-do...

...it will no doubt assimilate these as well...

...Some neighbors merely protested...

...Flats that sell today for half a million dollars could be had then for a few hundred a month, if you could find them— which often meant months of scanning the ads in the Times, pounding the pavements, and haggling with agents, supers, and departing tenants—then perhaps paying some money "under the table," a pittance by today's standards...

...Instead, our neighborhood stretched east towards the East River Drive—where we piously discarded our sins (symbolized by stale bread crumbs) on the first day of the Jewish New Year—and north past Seward Park towards Grand Street, Delancey Street, and Houston Street, though the Avenue B bus also connected us to the shopping around Union Square...

...In short, the Times-reading, college-educated professional and academic class, the fruits of the immense expansion of higher education after World War Two...

...and the Upper West Side since the 1960s...

...but at their worst they become exclusionary, almost xenophobic, incubating the kind of anger and hatred which recently surfaced in Howard Beach...

...As sushi bars and designer ice-cream spread, as boutiques sit astride bodegas and numbers joints compete for space with outdoor cafes, the contrasts from block to block become more striking than ever...

...Many of the low-rise buildings once inhabited by the respectable poor have been FALL • 1987 • 605 MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS swept up in the co-op gold rush, as Columbus and now Amsterdam Avenues are being gentrified beyond recognition...

...I belonged to the culture of the West, not the parochialism of the ghetto...

...This was still the era of the great studios, which could simulate virtually anything on the back lot...

...There's probably no neighborhood in New York with a busier street life at virtually any hour...

...On the same streets, a legion of homeless people panhandle for their next meal...

...The chief landmarks on this terrain were the cramped apartments of aunts and uncles, where boisterous cousins in families larger than mine made life much more exciting that it was at home...

...its population at the turn of the century had been more dense than Calcutta's...

...By the end of the 1960s this universalism seemed a trifle hollow, even within the cosmopolitan literary culture of the Upper West Side...

...Here was the city itself as it appeared in the 1940s, the real protagonist of the movie, with Mark Hellinger on the sound track saying, "There are eight million stories in the naked city...

...Young couples with young 602 • DISSENT MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS children were squeezed into many of them, hungry for light and air...

...It had its own college, where much later, to my infinite surprise, I returned to teach, its own hospitals, department stores, libraries, garage mechanics, movie theaters, and business districts, including some light industry...

...I was only a few minutes into Mark Hellinger's famous 1948 movie The Naked City when I began to feel like Proust munching on the madeleine...

...Perhaps I can call upon some of my own memories to shed some light on the patterns of neighborhood life in New York since 1940...

...Once a rarity on film, the city has now become a favorite haunt of filmmakers, though the images they convey can be spooky (After Hours), chicly superficial (Desperately Seeking Susan), or lovingly elegiac (Hannah and Her Sisters...

...Here I encountered the classic American mix of prewar frame houses, closely packed together, newer brick row houses, each with a small front and back yard, and shopping blocks of one- or two-story buildings that held small businesses, including my father's dry-goods store...

...The ethnic and generational mix was one of the strengths of the neighborhood, yet it was becoming more explosive every year...

...Rows of brownstones, built originally as town houses for Our Crowd, have been rescued from crime and decay and turned into our most beautiful urban blocks...

...Years afterward it surprised me to learn that I had grown up only three or four blocks from South Street and the river, only a few blocks from the beginning of Chinatown and not much further from Little Italy, and virtually in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, which crossed Henry Street further down like a immense viaduct of gigantic steel girders—all alien territory to my parents and off limits to me as a child...

...Only in retrospect did I come to appreciate a small-scale neighborhood where people of modest means could live decently...

...But the neighborhood is becoming more distinctively middle class than it was even in its heyday...

...The neighborhood was still dotted with Irish bars, remnants of the old blue-collar population that had given way in the 1950s to Puerto Ricans, for whom the neighborhood was a big step up from the grim poverty of the island...

...Going to New York wasn't really necessary, since there was very little that couldn't be had in the great shopping hubs around Main Street (which nowadays is heavily middle-class Chinese), Northern Boulevard, and, in a pinch, Jamaica, which had yet to begin its own slide into becoming a neglected black slum...

...But for now Flushing was a soulless wasteland to me: I hated being a young intellectual in a business-driven community, hated living just above my parents' store on the only commercial block in the vicinity...

...Those of us who were already there, who held on when the neighborhood—and the city—hit bottom, managed to survive in this game of musical chairs, while losing the mobility we once prized...

...I felt crushed under the weight of a sociological category I had never previously considered...

...If you stayed in the neighborhood, you had to do it ALL...

...Was there anything that couldn't be bought within a five-block radius...

...How shall I describe the shock and excitement of moving from this busy little immigrant enclave, neither fully American nor European, to a distant neighborhood where there were no tall buildings or subways and so few Jews that the (Conservative) synagogue could barely get ten of them together on a FALL • 1987 603 MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS Friday night...

...They celebrate these mean streets as if they could disappear at any moment...

...Having survived the depredations of crime and decay, the West Side must now endure the improvements wrought by wealth and greed...

...Many of these same qualities can still be found on the Upper West Side...

...What it didn't have, to a family that had moved out from the Lower East Side, was any decent bread or cake, or any of our noisy Jewish uncles and cousins, who felt vaguely that they were in the country on the rare occasions they visited us...

...Central Park and Riverside Park gave the neighborhood a pastoral quality that made it possible for us to raise children in the city, while the overflow from Columbia gave the area a cultural intensity that we rarely associate with trees, light, and air...

...They have made the city a place to park their capital, and often themselves, contributing much to the partial, one-sided economic boom...