In the Country of the Other
Kriegel, Leonard
The legacy is invariable—a brief pang of guilt followed by overwhelming relief at my own escape from the northeast Bronx. I come off the Henry Hudson Parkway and where the traffic light flags...
...Buildings are being steam-cleaned...
...The men installing the window are enjoying their work, enjoying the warm March morning, enjoying the sight of the young mothers marching past with baby carriages and infants in sling pouches...
...It's the goddamn Concourse," said Billy to me...
...I have not seen so many young women pushing baby carriages since I left the neighborhood thirty years ago...
...Even today, when they are not being indicted, the borough's politicians still brag that 20 percent of The Bronx is green parkland...
...But if we were not altogether certain that we belonged to New York, we were still New Yorkers...
...And on Jerome Avenue...
...They voted...
...And the truth was I could go from the wilds of Bronx Park to the smooth lawns of Mosholu Parkway to the chestnut trees of Van Cortlandt Park without ever losing sight of green...
...Old women mix with young mothers pushing strollers and baby carriages...
...They, too, are hungry for the nation's pleasures...
...And that is what I always find myself seeking when I come back to the neighborhood...
...My gaze shifts to the classical spire of De Witt Clinton High School, illuminated by the blue March sky and the unusually warm sun...
...And Riverdale, these people reminded us, had little in common with The Bronx...
...If anything, the people to whom I speak are eager to travel the way they are convinced the rest of New York has already traveled...
...The bar has a pleasant feel to it and that soft, beery smell I still associate with bars in The Bronx...
...Kilroy was here, there, and everywhere...
...On a small patch of earth in front of a two-story house on Hull Avenue, a cherry tree blooms...
...The old saw still accurate—you can take the boy out of The Bronx, but you can't take The Bronx out of the boy...
...The old woman with swollen ankles watches...
...Signatures for which they are praised by those who insist on seeing them as signs of life, as demands to be heard, as a noble defiance of the aspirations society deems acceptable...
...Some of the attention was embarrassing, such as that time in 1948 when two children claimed to have been visited by the Virgin in a yard near Bedford Park Boulevard...
...Apartment building entrances in which blue ceramic Greek vases embrace stone clusters of grapes...
...Politics, parks, trade unionism—plebeian and provincial, but it worked...
...But The Bronx shames even memory...
...And frozen in time, I think now...
...Not anymore...
...Overwhelming it—so that before one can become used to the steam-cleaned brick some local Kilroy has savaged his presence onto it, a "creative" burst of anger with no other achievement in sight...
...Five years ago, I would have thought of how incongruous that tree was...
...And on Hull Avenue...
...I pull into an empty space in front of a bar-and-restaurant whose name I instantly distrustGreentree on the Oval...
...I still see shoppers on Bainbridge Avenue, a great many of them...
...That traffic had always been one way...
...Despite the drug problem, these are not the mean streets...
...new full-pane vinyl and aluminum windows are replacing the old-fashioned wooden windows that were so difficult to open—a boon for people like my mother, who can now more easily watch the life passing in the streets below...
...A man in his late sixties, he nods as if we knew each other...
...But I retreat back into my own provincial longings...
...They smile at each other...
...None of the boys has skates...
...And whenever I come back to the neighborhood, I secretly congratulate myself on having left it in 1957, when I was a twenty-four-year-old recently married graduate student who wanted to teach the glories of Whitman and write with the honesty of Orwell...
...What appeals to the young...
...A lean Hispanic boy of twelve or thirteen is dribbling a basketball in the small yard of P.S...
...A man around my age, dark red hair slicked back in the fashion of movie gangsters in the 1940s, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips, joins the group...
...Like Tracy Towers, the library has about it the look of a besieged outpost...
...Another old saw: Jews own candy stores, Italians own barber shops, the Irish own bars...
...And I laugh, thinking that I have found the perfect Hollywood fade-out for a neighborhood that never hungered for perfection...
...Ten years ago, I had done that in Notes for the Two-Dollar Window, a plea for the neighborhood's losers, the Jews and Italians and Irish who had been left behind...
...My occasional sentimentality about the people who still lived here was no more than a writer's strategy...
...The people who "worked for the city" were the ones we envied—if "envy" is the correct word for what we felt about our own—for they possessed what our fathers lacked: Security...
...They should be in school at this 11:00 A.M...
...New York was "sophisticated...
...Behind him, neatly painted on a concrete wall intended for handball, a large American flag with thirteen stars for the original colonies...
...The Bronx had parks and The Bronx had politics and the two were intricately related...
...I turn left at 205th Street and drive halfway down the block...
...As its residents tell me, things are getting better...
...The neighborhood will absorb Koch and Friedman and Simon and whatever or whoever replaces Koch and Friedman and Simon as it absorbs the inevitable resurfacing of graffiti—with a shrug of the shoulders and a sense that what happens happens...
...How could she choose the Concourse...
...Our Bronx had always been the borough of the Great Denial...
...Waving to the boy, I drive away, no longer content to be a spy in the country of the Other...
...The bar is horseshoe-shaped, solidly unfashionable—a relief after the red brick entrance and gold sign...
...Spiritually, they were as far removed from our plebeian streets as were people living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania...
...The man with the slicked-back hair frowns, then grudgingly says, "Gone twenty years...
...Why don't you...
...And I knew it...
...Only this is not my Bronx, I remind myself, as I stare at the massive battlements of Tracy Towers Houses, a state-subsidized medieval fortress built in the 1970s...
...We were wooed by politicians and visiting dignitaries who knew enough about this city's priorities to make an obligatory run up the Grand Concourse...
...It still did...
...For they now "do drugs" in the neighborhood, our own mundane passions having given way to what my son terms "the Hula-Hoop of urban narcotics...
...They sought out the borough's splendors, rather than self-righteously clucking over its burnt-out husks, as Carter and Reagan did, pledging to make those savage streets gentle again—and then forgetting their very existence...
...Things change," the others say in unison...
...And the people who lived there knew they didn't count for much as far as "real" New Yorkers were concerned...
...But they aren't...
...Fitting ardor for the tasks of young motherhood...
...I get out of my car...
...In its way, fitting enough...
...And now a legally blind emphysema-racked survivor out of habit...
...I inventory the neighborhood, as I always do...
...I find myself wondering whether he could see the windows of his grandmother's apartment as he followed Officers Zielinsky and Slattery...
...And there does not seem to be very much in the way of organized opposition to the "threat" of co-oping and condoizing...
...The library is scheduled to open at 12:30...
...The Irish and Germans were 620 • DISSENT MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS already there when we arrived...
...As I drive through these streets, I watch them walk through their new America, watch their unconcealed pleasure at the prospects before them, their acceptance of a promise that is still coming...
...Movies and fashion enough there...
...And now they are "rescuing" the neighborhood, the old-timers say...
...The bricks of the neighborhood are warm and colorful—a fitting architecture for working people filled with a sense of moving up, of making life better for their sons and daughters...
...It simply didn't count for much...
...The northeast Bronx is to be condoized and co-oped...
...We even had our moments in the sun, when The Bronx stood at the center of the nation...
...And on that smooth, grassy parkway named for yet another member of the French nobility, the Comte de Mosholu...
...It's getting better," I hear from the old people...
...And the man or woman who lives in Manhattan is the New Yorker personified, one whose soul beds down in dreams with the souls of ancient Thebans and Cairenes, urban standard-bearers to the world...
...And they also possessed the distinction of being employed by those who lived in Manhattan...
...Despite such occasional victories, the neighborhood was no place for prophets or seers...
...And the mayoral reign of Ed Koch had certainly given us an interesting variation on the old saw: Apparently, you could take New York out of The Bronx...
...Stand with your own or stand alone...
...These mock-Tudor apartment buildings, these turrets leaning into the emptiness of sun and sky and now overwhelmed by forests of television antennas— emblems of aspirations that reflected our sense of FALL • 1987 • 621 MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS moving up...
...I smile, he laughs...
...Residents of those shaded, tree-lined streets were ours only legally...
...I like the way the boy's angular body spins out of it...
...Erase the concrete brutality of Tracy Towers and the landscape is fit for Constable...
...Things change," one of the workingmen says, his brogue thickening my absurd pleasure in knowing that someone else remembers Sam's poolroom...
...Even my Catholic friends were suspicious...
...Acres and acres of junk...
...They eye me suspiciously as I drive slowly by...
...Concrete lions invite one into Tudor and medieval fantasies...
...Elevators that have not worked for years are being repaired...
...It's up to you to keep it clean...
...I prefer the ceramic vases and the stone lions and the grapes and the green-and- orange Art Deco entrances— embellishments of an architecture that promised working people they might yet become what they could not altogether envision becoming...
...There used to be a bike store on this spot...
...But if apparitions of the Virgin were questionable, the Yankees weren't...
...The people living here seem engaged in the same search we undertook...
...There are those problems that call to mind only plodding rewards...
...It is these streets alone they claim...
...They have not yet learned that their bodies are their own—and no one has yet convinced them that biology is not destiny...
...It has been the city's basket case for so long now that it is allowed little in the way of individuation...
...When we moved there in 1937, the neighborhood was a way station for first- and second- and third-generation Italian and Jewish and Irish immigrant families...
...He waves at her as if he were shooing a dog...
...Decoration to suggest possibility, that which had been approved by history beckoning us on in the guise of the new...
...And our votes mattered...
...In the neighborhood, the names of bars evoke instant nostalgia: Murphy & Maloney, The Green Derby Pub, Ireland 32...
...Brooklyn had never allowed itself to be defined by Manhattan...
...But I don't live there...
...Irish watering holes...
...And on 206th Street...
...The neighborhood's moving up again...
...He ties his apron on and takes his place behind the bar...
...80 schoolyard...
...Manhattan bars offer a currency of the contemporary...
...The orange-tinted brick of the building below the library shines in the springtime sun...
...Ethnic identities—a minor tale of capital...
...Junk now...
...And now, with the men they marry and the children they bear, they are staking their claim to a neighborhood most of my own Irish friends left when I did...
...New York geography had always been a question of psychology rather than place...
...The small park behind the library is empty, despite the warmth of the morning...
...The Jews and Italians used to be the new people in the neighborhood...
...Other than their graffiti, these houses are respectable, well cared for, like their owners...
...The guard opens the door to let her in...
...In Manhattan, one learns to mythicize not the landscape but the self, like joggers in Central Park who buttress each other's egos with references to "the wall...
...In bold black lettering that reminds me of an eye doctor's chart, a sign in the window proclaims: "This is your Library...
...What has passed us by...
...Three men are working on setting a window in the store next door...
...hour on a late-March day...
...Staten Island and Queens had been pulled into New York's psyche kicking and screaming, the one content to remain a psychological vassal to New Jersey (the only borough in the city where jokes about New Jersey are not considered funny), the other swollen with itself, a knuckle on that finger of land known as Long Island pointing back toward Europe...
...All over the neighborhood, buildings are being steam-cleaned...
...I come off the Henry Hudson Parkway and where the traffic light flags me down, at the pocked and rutted joining of Gun Hill Road and Mosholu Parkway, I feel myself sucked back into old wars that seem so permanent a part of my memory...
...Toscanini had lived in Riverdale...
...The allure of crack should be sufficient testimony to that...
...For twenty-five cents a child could buy two hours of time to teach himself to ride a two-wheeler on the quarter-mile dirt track of the Oval, the WPA's great gift to the neighborhood...
...Lunch is served at the Greentree from 12:00 on...
...As the light changes, I gun the motor and my eye catches a cluster of students charging across the road...
...At best, The Bronx was a place to come from for writers of memoirs and novelists smart enough to understand that even as they wrote of their origins, life was richer for their having gotten out in time...
...It might have been meaningful had I been able, as my journalist son had done a year ago, to follow two cops from roof to roof, hunting not for my past but for the future that had come to the neighborhood...
...It is better for an old woman waiting to die to live with an old man waiting to die—although neither my mother nor my uncle can tell you why...
...They never were...
...They, too, watch the 6:00 P.M...
...And on Bainbridge Avenue...
...A subtle sense of betrayal...
...She is from a small town a few miles south of the Ulster border...
...Modest ambitions to have pulled from streets that served as a farm system for the moneyed technicolor fantasies of Hollywood producers and the equally moneyed, equally technicolor fantasies of Seventh-Avenue fashion designers...
...And it is easy enough to feel the rising sense of optimism in these streets...
...But our neighborhood Kilroys have been nowhere...
...They are new immigrants, fleeing the Beirutization of Belfast and Dublin's lack of economic opportunity...
...The Germans disappeared, except for scattered groups who kept the Lutheran church on 206th Street functioning...
...And we had no illusions about our provincialism...
...Now its flagstone is graffiti-slashed...
...Initials and names spin like rogue comets out of control, pressing their claims against the impermanence of stone and brick...
...They are each in their late twenties, each Irish...
...I park directly in front of the flagstone entrance of the Public Library...
...Better that than initials fixed to such casual hatred...
...Only now people like me were part of "them...
...I watch three teenagers practice shooting a hockey puck from one side of Perry Avenue to the other...
...The neighborhood is still distinct and insular, I discover, as I drift through these streets in the days that follow...
...Politicians wooed The Bronx because the borough housed working people who were unionized and who believed that they had as much right as anyone else to share in the American pie...
...Even a casual visitor to Bay Ridge or Boro Park or the recently gentrified Park Slope envied the sense of neighborhood he discovered in Brooklyn...
...Melnick and Marshall, Klein and Lauren—they, too, had learned their lessons on Rochambeau Avenue...
...My eyes lock with those of the oldest boy, who tightens his grip on the hockey stick he holds away from his shoulder like a rifle at parade rest...
...Only the inevitability of struggle has not changed...
...Only one neighborhood hand is in the bar when I enter it at 12:00...
...There is scaffolding everywhere in the neighborhood—the visible symbol of improvement...
...What the neighborhood shared with other neighborhoods in The Bronx was its incorrigibly optimistic architecture, so much more playful in its aspirations than the heavy stones of Manhattan...
...Gold shamrocks and green awnings and the thrust of memory frozen into the very congeniality and peace that was lacking...
...Which accounted for why I thought of myself as a spy...
...The three men smile...
...Nothing is more important than that the people in the neighborhood believe once again that their corner of The Bronx has a future...
...History, I have read, has many cunning corridors—and all of them seem to lead to fantasy...
...Then she makes her painful way down the three steps...
...The Yankees mattered...
...It is now 11:40...
...We were the first or last subway stop on the IND's D Train...
...Sam Pistone owned the poolroom...
...But we mattered...
...Built in 1953, it was once the neighborhood's pride...
...The reason I still travel to the neighborhood every three or four weeks is that my 87-year-old mother still lives there, sharing an apartment with my 80-year-old uncle, once a furrier, a radical, a passionate trade unionist...
...In the 1930s and 1940s, they moved to these streets because the neighborhood was 618 • DISSENT MEMORIES AM IMPRESSIONS cleaner, its sense of deprivation virtually nonexistent, its graffiti localized to the tunnel of Williamsbridge Oval Park: "Mickey does it...
...But it was the Irish who dominated the neighborhood now, the newest as well as the oldest of the new people...
...Sam looked like the Pope's twin...
...In 1948, the first hint I had that the cause of the workingman was not as hopeless as Gallup and his pollsters predicted came from my younger brother, who followed Truman's motorcade up the Grand Concourse and conducted his own poll of those lining the sidewalks...
...Curiously enough, politics does not seem to enter into that future...
...It has recently been steam-cleaned...
...The Italians seemed altogether invisible...
...He does not wear skates...
...At the narrow avenue named by a city bureaucrat— his sense of history matched only by his sense of humor—after the Comte de Rochambeau, who led the French armies fighting alongside Americans struggling for independence, I make a sharp right...
...I watch an old woman with swollen ankles painfully mount the three steps, ignoring the pantomimed imprecations of the guard who suddenly appears behind the door to wave her away...
...I drift over to them...
...The bartender turns out to be the man who knew the fate of Sam's poolroom...
...The only upscale part of the borough, Riverdale, didn't even consider itself part of The Bronx at all...
...Or so we believed...
...Some of us hated them...
...And these teenagers look like the older brothers of the boys who taught me street hockey when I moved to 206th Street at the age of eight...
...Even when the neighborhood—what old guidebooks call the Norwood section of The Bronx —bubbled over with optimism and recited its litany of streets named after heroes and events of the War of Independence and the War of 1812 —Steuben Avenue, Gun Hill Road, Gates Place, Knox Place, Perry Avenue, Decatur Avenue, Bainbridge Avenue—we were not altogether certain that those of us who lived there could claim New York...
...He points to the sign depicting the library's hours...
...It was my son, Mark, not I, who journeyed with Officers Zielinsky and Slattery of the 52nd Precinct on rooftop forays in which they tried to spot adolescent "steerers" directing traffic to the crack sellers on De Kalb Avenue or Knox Place...
...My mother returned there from our own small apartment on 206th Street after my father died in 1976...
...The old woman stares at him silently...
...They are moving up, looking for the rewards of Americanization...
...Street hockey was always an Irish game—"seeded by the geometry of the city," I wrote in Notes...
...Maybe it could have been different for them, for my father, and for me...
...A bitter love letter to the neighborhood...
...Only when its ravaged streets are featured in a movie like Fort Apache: The Bronx or its burning tenements are used by Howard Cosell to illuminate a dull interlude in the World Series is The Bronx made part of this America...
...You might succeed in teaching him how to place these streets in a book...
...It had an ingrained sense of boundaries, as did all city neighborhoods...
...New York was "downtown...
...When I enter a pub or luncheonette and engage them in conversation, I hear them fondling memories of life back there, the way my father would fondle celebrations of holidays on a farm in Galicia—for the moment ignoring the cossacks lurking in the wings...
...Truman was in, he assured me...
...Somehow, it does not matter, just as it does not matter that everyone I speak to warns me to avoid the walks and public buildings of the Oval after dark...
...Which is why, I try to tell myself, men have always stamped their signatures on the works of others...
...Hispanic pockets flourished north of Gun Hill Road and dotted the streets below Gun Hill off Webster Avenue...
...The neighborhood has escaped the fate of all other Bronx neighborhoods FALL • 1987 619 MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS south of Fordham Road...
...Only such fantasies are now challenged by graffiti...
...But they had the look and feel of winners to the rest of America...
...Aware that I am watching him from my car, he switches hands, slapping the ball behind his back, then spinning to the basket...
...We were provincials...
...news and wonder what it is they are missing out on...
...But she has no politics...
...But on my way to Manhattan I had passed the parks as well as the provincialism by...
...The new gold sign stands out from the red brick of the entrance to the bar...
...Diplomats lived in Riverdale...
...Only in dying has The Bronx been collectivized into an American object lesson...
...A darker-skinned borough now—and easy enough to ignore...
...The neighborhood has survived the ravages that afflicted most of the rest of The Bronx...
...An optimistic architecture...
...But I was smart enough to make it a love letter from a distance...
...She has come to America to get away from such things, to enjoy herself...
...The game remains...
...No one I speak to is interested in the scandals of the Koch administration or the dethroning of Stanley Friedman and Stanley Simon...
...And when the Sunday News featured a full-page color photo of Pius XII in all his finery, some steady customer pasted it to the poolroom door, where it remained, colors shining through dirt and grime, until I left the neighborhood...
...The presence of the new Irish immigrants is everywhere, in the voices still filled with the lilt of Ireland, in the surprising number of pubs that seem to breed through exilic mitosis on Bainbridge Avenue and Gun Hill Road and Webster Avenue...
...Riverdale, New York—that was the postal address they preferred...
...doctors and dentists and lawyers and stockbrokers and belt manufacturers who spoke proper English lived in Riverdale...
...What's in, what's out...
...Where but in The Bronx could one have found Communists erecting the doomed Allerton Avenue co-ops to rival the successful Socialist Amalgamated Housing Co-op that wedged its promise between Mosholu Parkway and Van Cortlandt Park...
...The dullness of Park Avenue and the staid thickness of West End Avenue were not to be found in the Art Deco lobbies and mock-Tudor apartment buildings that sheltered cab drivers and plumbers, furriers and garment cutters, bus drivers and subway conductors...
...In the space of a single avenue block, I count four of them...
...In the dining room, an attractive Irishwoman in her twenties wipes off the table at which I seat myself, hands me a menu, and, in a brogue even more delightful than that of the man outside, asks, "Do you know what it is you want, sir...
...There is probably something to the argument...
...A left at Van Cortlandt Park East takes me past the graffiti-dripping red brick of the P.S...
...And its windows are thick sheets of plastic, a scratched and faded insurance policy designed to keep vandals and the world at bay...
...Even its name is clipped, a blubbery invitation to nose-thumbing: "The Bronx / No thonx," wrote Ogden Nash, and those few of us who had heard of the New Yorker winced with how little we mattered to our sophisticated cousins in Manhattan...
...Like the old woman, the guard is white-haired...
...I get out of my car...
...Together, they live in the same apartment to which we moved in 1937, when I was four...
...q 622 • DISSENT...
...After all, "creative people" —which is how they were known in the neighborhood—didn't move from Manhattan to The Bronx...
...Bouffant hair, blond and redhead, clearskinned and freckled, these are not the daughters of the women's movement...
...My mind transforms faces and colors into those of my adolescence—from black to white, from Puerto Rican to Italian, from Jamaican to Jew...
...And yet, that does not seem to disturb the people in the neighborhood, anymore than the way the graffiti return as soon as the bricks have been cleaned...
...Now it seems lovely and natural...
...and New York belonged to "them...
...There used to be a poolroom here," I offer, slapping at my sweating brow with a handkerchief...
...And I am pleased to see them drive the puck, slashing at it...
...And now the Jews who remained were old, their children having followed the American dream elsewhere...
...The daughters of Ireland, they have come to the neighborhood from both the southern counties and Ulster...
...A thin black woman, neatly dressed and very proper-looking, mounts the stone steps, a paper bag from the McDonald's on Bainbridge Avenue in her hand...
...Or shall I run through the specials...
...And it is after this turn that I once again think of myself as a spy in the country of the Other...
...Only their connection to this America is tenuous, ill-defined...
...I write about The Bronx—probably more often FALL • 1987 • 617 MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS than I should...
...From Manhattan, where I still lived...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
