The Washington Heights Spectator / Miracle on 204th Street
Conlon, Edward
THE WASHINGTON HEIGHTS SPECTATOR Miracle on 204th Street by Edward Conlon F or weeks after Margarita Duarte saw the image of Jesus Christ on the bathroom window of Rosa Diez's fifth-floor...
...Excuse you...
...Last summer, there were so many bullets...
...A sergeant wrote an affidavit, on crumpled loose-leaf, attesting to the fact that the landlord promised to give it back...
...vendors sold tamales and flavored ices...
...Thousands...
...It's the best thing that could-happen...
...A compromise was brokered whereby the police wouldhold on to the window, and the landlord would return it to Rosa at some later date...
...A nun came last night...
...He said he wasn't seeing nothing...
...James B. Jacobs The Contraception Paradox Jessica Gress-Wright Bauhaus Blunders Witold Rybczynski A Nation of Cowards Jeffrey R. Snyder Does Money Buy Happiness...
...Then one girl tried, and she could...
...He was mental sick, and threw himself from the roof...
...And the guy Morley, he was the last murder...
...How do you say it in Spanish...
...I knew the guy...
...Edward Conlon is a writer living in the Bronx...
...B ut even though the apparitions occurred in the parish of St...
...The priest washed it, with Clorox and soap, but it didn't come off...
...Now there's a lot of people in other windows...
...Others have more practical accoutrements, such as the bus seat one tenant sports on the landing...
...Still another image could be discerned by some in a window on the opposite side of the courtyard...
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...A few hung out laundry to dry and bedding to air, equally indifferent to public inspection and the prospect of the miraculous...
...We think that was a robbery, a holdup...
...They said prayers in house...
...Rosa said maybe it be dirty or maybe it be something else...
...Other faiths, in other boroughs, have seen their prayers answered with similar ambiguity: Menachem Schneerson, nonagenarian leader of the Brooklyn-based Lubavitcher Hasidim, has not with any vigor discouraged his followers from the belief that he is the Messiah...
...The statement concludes with a sentence that attempts a paralegal specificity but attains instead the grandeur of the prophets: "It is the window in which Jesus Christ appeared...
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...Even though the window itself had been removed and boarded up, a second, though less distinct image of Christ had appeared, one apartment over, and the Virgin Mary was spotted in another window, one apartment below...
...There were no towels or toiletries in the white linoleum room, and the 54 The American Spectator November 1993 Should Hate be a Crime...
...Small wonder, then, that the consolations sought in this climate of apocalypse are of an upper celestial order...
...I want to see if this neighborhood changes, if this changes the neighborhood...
...Such proofs of the supernatural fed quickly into the rumor pool and added to the legend of the window...
...Three guys tried to take it off, but they couldn't...
...And the guy, who hanged himself up...
...Charles A ma uthammer The ePublic Address Interest Su scription Dept...
...T he Diez women 'were content with the vatic assurances of the policeman, and the multiplication of icons seemed to bear them out...
...Over the next few days, reinforcements from neighboring precincts were called in to police the crowd...
...We used to call this place 'Vietnam.' " "That man coming home from the party, in 105, in the late morning...
...Earlier this year, a few blocks to the north, the first rabid raccoon was captured in Manhattan since Wall Street was a wall...
...When they were asked what the last big thing to hit the neighborhood was, the vehement chorus resumed: "Crime...
...I saw him shot...
...And Emilio, in his aunt's apartment in 104...
...P. O. Box 3000, Dept...
...One rather harried parish priest was peremptory in his dismissal of the vision, hastily adding that he had "all respect for these good people...
...Santa Maria...
...The last priest that came, he believed it...
...Murder...
...The landlord demanded that the window be removed, and Rosa claimed that he threatened her with eviction unless she acquiesced...
...2 years-$38 (circle one) Signature IASI 0!4j David Henderson Peter D. Salins NUMBER 113, FALL 1993, PRICE: $5.50 "the most politically interesting quarterly in the English-speaking world" —The Economist chain from the light had been accidentally pulled off by one of the devout...
...Lots of shots last summer...
...But they couldn't take it apart at the hardware store, they couldn't get the metal off, the outside part...
...Diez does not speak English, but her sisters, Finetta Delarosa and Yomarys Flores, and sister-in-law, Belkas Martinez, translated for her and supplied plentiful commentary and explanations...
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...He has suffered a series of cerebral accidents but not yet met with either death or visible divinity, and so the bets, technically, are still on...
...The plague to the south has been less well contained: a murder in Washington Heights occurs roughly once every three days, and the neighborhood has a fair claim to being the busiest retail drug outlet in the country...
...So too, the Diez women, who have in the Latin fashion politely ignored curial impediments to their devotions, persevere in their hope that God has not forgotten 204th Street and Post Avenue...
...Also there was the lady who jumped off the roof...
...I guess...
...Across the river, the Bishop of Trenton put the kibosh on a man in Marlboro Township, New Jersey, whose backyard shrine attracted thousands each weekend in the hopes of a glimpse of the Blessed Mother...
...Hundreds came...
...Belkas Martinez showed me the bathroom from which the window had been removed...
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...The Diez apartment is spacious and spare, with a large, fluid population of relatives and friends...
...The courtyard is surrounded by five five-story buildings, and many tenants looked out their windows at the crowd, staring back with the same bold scrutiny to which they were subject themselves...
...It's not an easy neighborhood to live in...
...Over a hundred were there one recent evening at sundown, milling about, speaking in excited giggles and hushed whispers...
...That the window was dirty...
...And the guy who did, off the fourth floor...
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...Except for the sight of the faithful, there was little in the vicinity to admire, still less to worship...
...Saint Mary...
...THE WASHINGTON HEIGHTS SPECTATOR Miracle on 204th Street by Edward Conlon F or weeks after Margarita Duarte saw the image of Jesus Christ on the bathroom window of Rosa Diez's fifth-floor apartment, on 204th Street and Post Avenue, in the Inwood section of Manhattan, the crowds gathered in the courtyard below...
...Ilyth breaking is the business of The Public Interest...
...What about the other priest...
...Binoculars and telescopes were passed around...
...Asked about the last image, one young man answered, "It's the white shadow of a woman," while a second said, "I don't know how to say it in English...
...To me, I think it's a miracle that comes to this house...
...Beneath the boarded window the congregation huddled in the courtyard, around the remains of a garden—patches of gravel and an ankle-high tree stump—confined behind a hurricane fence...
...The priest heard about it and he came over...
...CI The American Spectator November 1993 55...
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...Witnesses to the first image were able to attest to a likeness no more vivid than the better snapshots of Nessie in her loch, and the others were still less intelligible...
...She believed it, too...
...Jude, patron of lost causes, they have not been welcomed by church authorities...
...If that's it, why does she and the other neighbors think it was Jesus...
...She don't know, 'cause she don't get into personal people's business...
...They say, 0 my God...
...The guys that hang out down there, they believe it...
...M any of Rosa Diez's neighbors have devotional pictures and signs on their doors including one that read "YO V A CRISTO" in bouncing, multicolored letters...
Vol. 26 • November 1993 • No. 11
