Paradise bronx, p.18
Paradise Bronx, page 18
Let us pass over the image of Morris, the man who wrote the words “in order to form a more perfect union,” having assignations with the wife of a Prussian diplomat while riding in his carriage in Berlin and Leipzig. He repeated this kind of socializing with various ladies and non-ladies in other European cities, but Morris’s candor in his diary should not be given too much attention. He was a loner to the point of eccentricity and had nobody besides himself in whom to confide. Seeing as many places and meeting as many types as he did, he became the first American, after Franklin, whom one could call a citizen of the world. As he traveled Morris witnessed marvels unknown back home, such as a set of locks in Scotland that could lift and lower canal boats through an altitude change of more than a hundred feet. This ingenious piece of engineering made him think again of the wealth of the American interior, and how a canal might connect New York to it.
He pursued justice, where he could, and performed good deeds. He looked up Louis XVI’s only surviving child, a daughter, and gave her the money Louis had entrusted to him to arrange the escape and raise an army (though almost none of it remained). For a while, Mme. de Flahaut was traveling with the young Duc d’Orléans, who also could not return to France. His father, a cousin of the king, had voted for his execution, becoming a pariah among his fellow nobles before going to the guillotine himself. The young duc wanted to travel to America, and Morris sent her money to help him. Decades later, the duc would become King Louis Philippe. Nor did Morris forget the Lafayettes. He kept pestering the Austrians about them, and he attended the small ceremony when they were finally released in October 1797 near Hamburg. The couple thanked him rather perfunctorily for his efforts, he thought.
In the summer of 1798, he made plans to return to America. He would sail from Hamburg, a city where he had often spent time. As a favor to a friend, he was accompanying a family with children, one of whom caught smallpox; the group waited several months until the child recovered. On October 4, almost ten years after he’d departed from America, Morris and his charges sailed from that city on the ship Ocean. After living in Europe for almost a decade, he would never return to it. The voyage tried everybody’s endurance. During the long crossing, the ship almost ran out of food. In November, it came to within eleven miles of Sandy Hook, but bad weather diverted it to Rhode Island. Then for ten days it tried to get out of Narragansett Bay against unfavorable winds. The ship didn’t reach New York Harbor until December 23. Parties of Morris’s friends fêted him in Manhattan, and on New Year’s Eve he attended services at Trinity Church.
On January 5, 1799, at dusk, he returned to Morrisania. Lacking his attention for all these years the house had developed leaks and was falling apart, but still standing.
14
SOMETIMES PEOPLE WHO don’t live in the Bronx, don’t visit it, and rarely even pass through it tell me what a terrible place it is. The very name struggles with prejudice; in certain parts of the world, “a Bronx” has come to mean a dangerous urban area or slum. The 2020 U.S. census found about 1.4 million Bronx residents. If you ride the subways in the borough during the morning commute, you see people wearing uniform shirts or jackets bearing the logos of companies—Icon Parking Systems, Best Buy, Moishe’s Movers, Elite Amenity Management, Best Guy Movers, Bess Electricians, Einstein Electric, FedEx Delivery, Godfather’s Pizza, Universal Services (“Everything You Need in a Cleaning Service”), and more.
Men and women in security-guard uniforms carry their police-style hats in plastic bags, construction workers strap their yellow hard hats to their belts or backpacks, and guys in T-shirts printed with the names of messenger services hold their e-bikes pointing toward the ceiling to take up less room. Groups of sinewy men in knee guards and paint-spattered canvas trousers talk together in Spanish; women in beauty-salon smocks and transit employees in their gray-and-blue MTA uniforms check their iPhones. Nurses in loose-fitting V-neck scrubs of light blue, turquoise, light purple, pale green, and other soothing colors get on at seemingly every stop; their ID cards, clipped to shirt hems or pockets, have been turned photo side in, maybe to preserve travel-time privacy. Judging by appearances, health-care worker is the most common profession among the riders.
All these people going to work early in the morning live in the Bronx. How does that square with it being a terrible place?
Terrible things do happen in the Bronx. The same is true in the other boroughs, but when violence occurs here, it sometimes registers as worse—I’m not sure why. I came across few historic markers as I walked in the Bronx, but memorials for recent victims of violence are too common. One day when I was in the West Farms neighborhood checking out the old stomping grounds of James DeLancey and imagining bygone times near the waterfall that once powered DeLancey’s Mills, I saw a “Wanted” poster on a light pole. It said that a seventeen-year-old girl, Vlana Roberts, had been shot and killed in front of 966 East 181st Street at 9:05 p.m. on June 2, 2018. The police were offering a $2,500 reward for information leading to an arrest and indictment.
The shooting had occurred just two nights before, about three blocks from the waterfall. Vlana Roberts had lived in a nearby apartment building, at the corner of Boston Road and East 180th Street; now a memorial almost filled the walkway leading to the building’s entry. Hundreds of candles, many of them lit, in tall, narrow glass holders with pictures of Jesus on them, clustered together like a mourning crowd. Against a wall, more candles had been lined up to spell “VLONE.” People had added mylar balloons, stuffed animals, bouquets of flowers, and small cartons of Tropicana orange juice. One balloon had a picture of a sad-eyed puppy on it, and the words “I’m So Sorry.”
Boys in hoodies were standing by the memorial with their arms crossed, stony-faced. One of them said, almost inaudibly, “I loved her. She was like my sister.” At the curb by the shooting site, two police vans idled with their flashers going. Police vehicles often park at murder sites for days afterward, just to be a presence. A cop sitting in the passenger seat of one of the vans rolled down his window—a breath of air-conditioned air came out—and told me that the killer had not been caught, but there was video of him on YouTube.
The video showed a boy with a ponytail running around a corner holding something under his shirt against his waist. Later, the sixteen-year-old suspect was arrested and charged with Vlana Roberts’s murder. In photos in a video tribute to her online, she appears to be flashing gang symbols, which doesn’t make her death any less sad. When I returned to her memorial display two weeks after I first saw it, nothing remained except her name written in colored wax in a couple of places on the pavement. A man sweeping up said this was a New York City Housing Authority building, and NYCHA rules require that all memorials be removed after two weeks.
If a worse killing could be possible, it happened eighteen days after Vlana Roberts’s, and about a mile away. In a case of mistaken identity, young men from a Dominican gang called the Trinitarios spotted a fifteen-year-old, Lesandro Feliz-Guzman, known as Junior, on the street in the Belmont neighborhood. They chased him into a bodega at the corner of East 183rd and Bathgate and pulled him out as he begged the employees to help him. Then the attackers swarmed on him and stabbed him repeatedly and cut him with a machete. Security cameras recorded the attack. The boy was able to stagger to the emergency entrance of St. Barnabas Hospital, about a block away, where he bled to death.
I saw the memorial for Junior while walking in that neighborhood on another hot summer day. At the corner of East 183rd and Bathgate, all around the now-shuttered bodega that hadn’t helped him, the candles on the sidewalk were lined up—not merely by the hundreds, but by the thousands. Balloons, flowers, stuffed animals, posterboard testimonials, Yankees hats, and other sympathy gifts mounted up almost to the store’s awning. Police cars, vans, and a command vehicle like a motor home had their flashers going in the blocked-off intersection. Murals with seven-foot-high portraits of Junior covered several walls. Junior had been a member of an organization for teenagers who want to become police officers. Here the cops weren’t sitting in their air-conditioned vehicles but standing silently in the street in their dark uniforms, their faces shiny with sweat.
Whenever I come across memorials, I try to remember the names. On Andrews Avenue in Morris Heights, twenty-three-year-old Joel Rivera was shot and killed in front of his building. I saw ladies in church clothes and hats carrying casserole dishes covered with aluminum foil into the entry on the day of his funeral. The display, on one side of the doorway, featured a photo of a handsome, smiling young man holding a baby.
Near the corner of Sheridan Avenue and East 167th Street, a gunman who was only a boy shot and killed fourteen-year-old Christopher Duran one morning as he walked to school. As he died, he cried, “Mommy! Mommy!” the Daily News said. When I went by, several smaller, two-man police vehicles were monitoring the shooting site, their flashers going. On the sidewalk in front of the victim’s building someone had written, “R.I.P. Joppy I love you bro” and “Joppy World.” The fact that the boy had posted a picture of a Smith & Wesson automatic handgun on his Facebook page doesn’t make his death any less desolating.
On Hall Place, just up the East 165th Street “stair street” from Horseshoe Playground, someone shot Jamarr Vestal, who was thirty-one. He died on a park bench across the street from a children’s day care. In the photo of him on the police poster offering a $2,500 reward for information about his killing, he looks mournful. Three men shot and killed Darin Capehart, twenty-five, in the lobby of 730 East l66th Street, in NYCHA’s Forest Houses. At the playground next to the building, just two years before, a stray bullet had killed Lloyd Morgan, Jr., who was four years old. The memorials to both had long been removed, but their names were faintly visible, written on the sidewalk. Tyana Johnson, who was nineteen, died after being shot at an outdoor graduation party in Shoelace Park near the intersection of East 226th Street and Bronx Boulevard. Two kids with guns jumped out of a silver BMW and opened fire on the partygoers. Tyana Johnson’s memorial, next to a pathway in the park, included small bottles of cocktails, with names like Mango Madness, that she had invented and hoped to sell. She had planned to get a college degree in business.
On Barnes Avenue near Lydig Avenue, not far from the Morris Park subway station, I stopped at a sidewalk memorial for Allan “Ai” Benn, who had been shot and killed at that spot two days before. This memorial was still being set up. A small crowd of people had gathered around it; a woman with a tattoo on the small of her back bent down to put another candle among the growing accumulation. I took off my cap and looked at the posterboard tributes. Allan “Ai” Benn was thirty-six—still young from my point of view. A woman in an orange sweatshirt with pictures of running shoes on it who was standing next to me asked, “Did you know him?” I said I didn’t. She said, “He was my son.”
“I’m so sorry.” After a moment I asked her name.
“Vanessa.”
“I will think of you, and pray for you every night,” I said.
“Thank you.”
A man with a short, scraggly beard was talking. “There was people standing all around, and nobody saw nothin’? How was it that nobody saw nothin’? This place is over. Ai didn’t have no beef with nobody. When Benny fired off a whole clip two weeks ago and nothin’ happened, I knew this place was finished. This place is over.”
I said “God bless you” and goodbye to Vanessa, and walked on.
* * *
The names and stories of young people who’ve been murdered in the Bronx could fill too many books. Grief pulses through the borough, more in some years than in others, but unremittingly. Some of the hardworking men and women riding the rush-hour trains in the morning are the relatives or friends or acquaintances of the victims. History in the Bronx collapses into the more immediate and painful past, as the memorials come into existence, disappear, and reappear, with different names on other sidewalks—sometimes even the same sidewalks—while older names fade away.
On and near Beekman Avenue, a two-block-long street on what used to be the grounds of Gouverneur Morris’s manor house, ten young men died by violence between 1991 and 1992. Those were some of the worst years of the crack epidemic, when (according to The New York Times) a war broke out over discount crack—three dollars a vial versus five dollars a vial. Today no memorials remain on Beekman Avenue’s sidewalks. A bleak peace seems to prevail; but this will never be a happy street.
* * *
To make another two-hundred-year jump in time: When Lewis Morris told Congress that Morrisania would be a good site for the national capital because a slave rebellion couldn’t happen here, he may also have had the French colony of Saint-Dominique in mind. In the early 1790s, the modern world’s only successful revolution by enslaved people began in the place now called Haiti, and it continued through different phases until 1804. The Haitian Revolution produced hundreds of thousands of deaths from violence and yellow fever, and it thoroughly frightened American slave owners.
Gouverneur Morris, Lewis’s half brother, had been the most vocal antislavery delegate at the Constitutional Convention. In the case of the Saint-Dominiquins’ demands for liberty, however, Gouverneur Morris switched to a brutally pro-slavery view. He believed that the Haitian Revolution posed a serious threat to the United States because it could inspire this nation’s hundreds of thousands of enslaved people to rise up. To forestall that possibility, he urged a full-scale military suppression of the revolution in Saint-Dominique. As its violence went on, he exhorted the slave owners of the American South to aid in crushing “the slave insurrection in Ste. Dominique.” In a speech to the U.S. Senate in 1803, he said:
That event [the defeat of the Haitian revolutionaries] will give to your slaves the conviction that it is impossible for them to become free. Men in their unhappy condition must be impelled by fear, and discouraged by despair. Yes—the impulsion of fear must be strengthened by the hand of despair!
If we’re wondering why the place that was the home of the man who wrote the Preamble of the Constitution became a killing ground for young people of color, we need look no further than these words. The better angels of our nature require patient exhortation before they appear, but the worst, evilest demons will show up in a blink, if you summon them, and they will be reluctant to leave. They will spread out across the country, and two-hundred-some years later, memorials to young lives cut short will mourn on the sidewalks of the places named after you. People all over will think that the Bronx, where hundreds of thousands of hardworking American families live and raise their children, is a terrible place—which, despite all the efforts of your minions, Fear and Despair, it is not.
15
A MONTH AFTER his return from Europe, Morris tore down the manor house and began to rebuild it from the foundations up. The architect he hired followed the general model of a French chateau. When finished, the house had nine rooms, a balcony over the front porch, and a wide-open vista in its east-facing windows. Theodore Roosevelt, who presumably had seen the house as it appeared in the later 1800s, described it as “not in the least showy, but solid, comfortable, and in perfect taste.” He called the house’s view of the Sound “superb … with its jagged coast and capes and islands.” Morris wrote to a correspondent that on his roof terrace he enjoyed taking in the view and “breathing the most salubrious air in the world.” He said that here his wanderings would end.
Friends described him as living like a European aristocrat. In his great room hung a tapestry showing Telemachus resisting the wiles of Circe; in bookcases with glass fronts he kept a library said to be one of the finest in America. After the American Revolution, his land lost its status as a manor, and Morris stopped being the lord of it. The change seems to have been mostly semantic. He still owned a wide expanse that included farm fields, pasture, woods, brooks, and shoreline. To keep his chef supplied with game and superintend the foxhunts, he employed a huntsman. As I’ve said, the estate extended northeast, possibly to an important oak tree mentioned in deeds marking boundaries between family holdings. The geographic marker is remembered today in the name of Oak Tree Place, which is near the entrance to the parking garage for St. Barnabas Hospital. The foreman of Morris’s estate was a Scotsman named Bathgate, whose family later had a farm near where Bathgate Avenue is today. Lesandro “Junior” Feliz-Guzman, murdered by the Trinitarios, was attacked on Bathgate Avenue, and he died near Oak Tree Place.
Washington must have missed socializing with Morris while he was in Europe. He wrote to him inviting him not just to visit Virginia, but to move there: “I shall be very happy to see you in this seat of my retirement.” On December 9, 1799, hearing that Washington had decided to leave public service, Morris wrote him a letter urging him not to, and saying how important he was to the country. Washington never read the letter. On December 12, he came in from riding, did not change out of his wet clothes, and caught a respiratory illness. Over-bled by his doctors, he died two days later. Morris delivered the oration at his memorial service in New York City and afterward expressed his dissatisfaction with it. One attendee noted that the eulogy did not draw a tear, which isn’t a surprise, given Morris’s lawyerly incisiveness and lack of sentiment. The loss of Washington had major consequences for Morris’s later actions on the political scene, when his sense of national purpose deserted him. The older man had been his idol, father figure, and lodestar, and Morris never could replace him.
