Paradise bronx, p.29
Paradise Bronx, page 29
The landlords vetted their prospective Black tenants and hung signs inviting “worthy” Blacks to apply. The rumor was that light-skinned Blacks with steady employment were preferred. Avis Hanson, who would be a high school teacher, went with her mother on a search for good schools in the Bronx in 1930, when Avis was six years old. Her mother was from Antigua and her father from Jamaica. They sought out Jewish neighborhoods because, like other ambitious Black parents, they knew that where there were Jews there would be good schools. Her mother liked the look of PS 23, in Morrisania. Then the family searched for an apartment in the school district and found one in a building owned by two sisters named Jacobs, at 815 East 166th Street. After the Hansons had reached an agreement with the sisters and rented the apartment, Avis came outside and noticed a sign on the building. Her mother had taught her to read by holding her on her lap and going over the funny papers with her. The sign said, “We accept select colored tenants.” Avis asked her father, “Are we select colored tenants?” Her father said, “My child, we are select people.”
Like many Blacks who relocated to the Bronx, the Hansons had previously lived in Harlem. Besides that neighborhood, Manhattan’s other Black areas were the Tenderloin, a residential and nightlife district between Fifth and Seventh Avenues and Twenty-third and Forty-second Streets; and San Juan Hill, a community where the Lincoln Center complex is now. In 1900, a race riot occurred in the Tenderloin—back when the term race riot meant white people coming to neighborhoods where Blacks lived and attacking them and burning their buildings. A hundred or more Blacks were injured, and millions of dollars of property destroyed. None of the white rioters or the police who helped them were punished. Another race riot hit San Juan Hill in 1905. The Tenderloin all but disappeared after 1910, when the Pennsylvania Railroad bought up its buildings and evicted the residents and tore down a lot of those blocks to build Penn Station.
Some of the burned-out and evicted tenants moved to Harlem, which already had its stylish reputation. By 1930, there were 200,000 Blacks living in Harlem, often in conditions as crowded as on the Lower East Side. Families doubled up, in apartments subdivided into smaller rooms, and the rents were high. But you could get to the Bronx just by walking over the Madison Avenue Bridge, at 135th Street, or the Macombs Dam Bridge, at 155th. Some Harlem renters began to look for cheaper places across the river.
Among Black would-be tenants, post office employees and Pullman porters had an advantage. Landlords were known to favor family men who held those jobs. Entire buildings in the Bronx took on the character of postal employee enclaves. In parts of Morrisania, the evenings brought crowds of men walking home from the el stations in their blue-gray postal uniforms. News got out about the low rents, good apartments, and unhateful neighbors; the Pullman porters, who traveled nationally, told other Pullman porters. A third category of Black tenants whom landlords wanted was building supers. Families who became their buildings’ first Black tenants often took the basement apartment assigned to the super. Sometimes a Black super would also hold down a day job at the post office.
New arrivals kept coming, by way of Harlem or directly from the South. A young woman named Bessie Jackson left a farm near Calera, Alabama, for the North in 1946, when she was nineteen. One morning she found herself in the Bronx, knowing nobody, brought there by a want ad. She was walking on Intervale Avenue when a man asked her if she would come into his house and light his stove. It was Saturday and the man was wearing a tall black hat. Later she explained, “I didn’t know anything about Jews, I only knew white and colored.” She asked the man why he couldn’t light his own stove. He told her that he could, but it was a sin for him to light it on Saturday. He offered to pay her to do it. She asked him, “It is a sin for you but not for me, you’re afraid of going to hell, but I can go to hell?” She felt insulted: “You don’t ask anybody else to do what you believe to be a sin.”
Welvin Goodwin grew up in Timpson, Texas, a town in the eastern part of the state, near Louisiana. The town is small; only about twelve hundred people live there today. He came to the Bronx in 1946 or 1947, when he was in his thirties. Welvin Goodwin said he could pick three hundred pounds of cotton in a day. After traveling the country as a pitcher in the Negro Leagues, he settled in the Bronx rather than stay in Texas, because he didn’t like how he was treated in the South. “Anytime you’d whistle at a white woman or looked at her, or her dress blew up and you looking, they could kill you for that,” he told an interviewer in 2005. In New York, he supported himself by shining shoes. For someone from Texas to relocate to New York City did not fit the more usual pattern. People of the Great Migration who began in the western part of the South—in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas—tended to end up in St. Louis or Chicago or Detroit. People from the eastern South were more likely to choose Philadelphia or New York. The Bronx drew a big part of its southern Blacks from the Carolinas.
Migrants came from little places like Moonville, Orangeburg, Rockhill, and Bishopville, in South Carolina; and from Edenton, High Point, Goldsboro, and Delmar, in North Carolina. They also came from Apalachicola, Florida, and Siloam, Georgia; from Farmville, Virginia, or Bowie, Maryland. Some came from cities—Fayetteville, Charleston, Lynchburg, Savannah. The founding parishioners of Thessalonia Baptist Church, today one of the largest Baptist churches in the Bronx, were from Fluvanna County, Virginia—near Charlottesville—and their arrival preceded the Great Migration. The church began in 1893 but did not have enough of a congregation to expand from a storefront until 1942, when it bought a brick-and-stone synagogue whose original membership had dwindled. The church still occupies the same building, whose façade incorporates a Star of David and a menorah.
By the 1940s, the criteria for Black renters had been expanded or dropped, and Morrisania’s Black population grew. Thessalonia Baptist was one of three important churches that anchored the area. It had a dynamic and beloved minister, the Reverend James A. Polite—his last name is pronounced like the adjective—who led Thessalonia Baptist from 1939 to 1980. The church members still speak of him in saintlike terms.
At the corner of East 165th Street and Prospect Avenue, St. Augustine’s Presbyterian Church, another community pillar, amassed a congregation of a thousand members. Along with a full schedule of services it offered youth activities, from gospel groups to sports teams; the church’s pastor, the Reverend Edler G. Hawkins, had been a top-ranked sprinter. He got involved in the civil rights movement, knew the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and brought both King and Malcolm X to speak at St. Augustine’s.
Rev. Hawkins is remembered for closing the Bronx “slave markets.” Those were places where Black women would stand, or sit on crates they brought, and wait for white housewives to look them over. Then the prospective employers would bargain with the women for what they would be paid and hire them for a day of housework. (Ad hoc hiring venues like that still exist all over, mostly for workers who are male and Spanish-speaking, but I don’t know of any in the Bronx.) He could hardly avoid seeing the slave markets on Prospect Avenue and under the elevated tracks, near his church. Through his activism and shaming of city officials he got employment agencies set up where the women could wait out of the weather, and where wages could be negotiated fairly. Rev. Hawkins served St. Augustine’s for thirty-three years before leaving for a position as a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Catholics, of which there were some among the Black emigrants, could attend a Catholic church also called (confusingly) St. Augustine’s, which has since been subsumed in a church merger. Another prominent Catholic church, St. Anthony of Padua, remains one of the main churches in the neighborhood. It had a school that went from grades one through eight. The nuns of the Maryknoll Mission ran the school, which is now no more, though the convent still exists. Its residents can sometimes be seen in their long gray-and-white habits walking on Rev. James A. Polite Avenue. In the 1950s, one of the Maryknoll nuns, Sister Richard Marie, the director of the St. Anthony’s choir, entered pop music history when she coached the choir members Arlene Smith, Jacqueline Landry, Renee Minors, and Melissa Goring with their harmonizing. In high school the girls teamed up and called themselves the Chantels. Their doo-wop hit, “Maybe,” was the first song by a female vocal group to sell one million records. (I will have more to say about doo-wop later.)
Thessalonia Baptist Church still thrives. In September 2022, it held a big street celebration of its 130th birthday. St. Augustine’s Presbyterian, on the other hand, has faded. The redbrick Gothic church building, with its darker red roof and clerestory windows bordered in Statue of Liberty green, is double-fenced part of the way around. Some of its stained glass is broken. An abandoned lot on one side of the church has been fixed up with plantings and benches, and several feeding stations of cat-food cans. On another side, the house that was the rectory once stood empty, broken-windowed and damaged by fire. Workmen recently tore it down. Today St. Augustine’s lacks a regular pastor.
Just up Prospect Avenue from that church, a service at St. Anthony of Padua was letting out on a recent Sunday morning. A young priest with black-rimmed glasses and close-cropped hair gave blessings and said goodbye to the attendees as they came blinking into the sunlight. Everything about St. Anthony of Padua looks solid. Big, new, full-color canvas banners on the front proclaimed various faith-enhancing sentiments. When all the congregants had left, the priest looked up and greeted me. I asked him a few questions, and he told me that Mother Teresa had once lived in the convent. He added, “And did you know that the Chantels used to sing in our choir?”
* * *
In the Bronx of the thirties, forties, and fifties—a place much whiter than it is now—being Black could be a hazard. Poor white kids sometimes chanted rhymes at you, like, “We might be stinkies, but we’re not inkies!” A girl and her little brother had to walk by a white school on the way to and from their own school every day, and the kids would yell at them and chase them. One time a boy came running at them and the girl stopped and said to her brother, “Why are you running? That boy came to school in a stroller.” Movie theaters made Blacks sit in roped-off sections, or in the balcony. Some restaurants would not allow Blacks to eat in them; Howard Johnson’s and White Castle let Blacks pick up takeout orders but not sit down in the restaurant. It took years, and protests, before the places changed their policy. (Something to bear in mind if you happen to walk by the White Castle at the place where the Americans repulsed the British in the Revolutionary War.)
Most labor unions refused membership to non-whites. Men who had been carpenters or masons before coming north could not get into the carpenters’ or masons’ unions and had to find lower-wage jobs. The Sears department store at East 149th Street and Third Avenue—the Bronx’s biggest shopping district, known as the Hub—would admit Black shoppers but not hire Blacks as salespeople. The same was true of other Hub stores. Between 1938 and 1942, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company built a twelve-thousand-unit housing complex called Parkchester, near Westchester Square on the number 6 line. The largest planned community in the United States at that time, Parkchester barred Blacks; “Negroes and whites don’t mix,” said Frederick Ecker, the chairman of Metropolitan Life. Black people also could not go to white swim clubs, or to certain churches. The Fordham Baldies, a white gang, was known for attacking Blacks. Black kids remembered the shock, when they strayed into Italian areas, of seeing not only kids their own age screaming and throwing things at them, but the local adults joining in.
School offered its own small and large affronts—white students not wanting to hold hands in games during class or recess, white teachers telling Blacks they would never go to college. At some point public educators across the country adopted a tracking system for junior high classes and above, by which, for example, the seventh graders judged to be the smartest would be put in the 7–1 class, the second smartest in the 7–2s, the third smartest in the 7–3s, and so on, sometimes all the way to the 7–13s, 7–14s, 7–15s, or above. Sometimes the numbers went from high to low, or they were assigned randomly. The classes with the higher numbers had mostly Blacks. Kids at all testing levels who had been together through the untracked grades of elementary school were separated when they reached junior high. In the slower classes the teachers tended to be demoralized and demoralizing.
* * *
And yet, for a while, it worked. People who were there agree about that. For a few decades, from the mid-thirties to the mid-sixties, the Bronx’s multiracial neighborhoods existed peaceably, and the residents mostly got along. Morris High School, at the heart of Morrisania, was said to be the most integrated high school in the country. Blacks and whites who grew up in integrated Bronx places remembered their childhoods with affection, even as the best time of their lives. In many ways, memories of this paradise Bronx are alike: the doors and windows that were open, the neighbors sitting on the steps in the evening, the friends across the hall who would watch your children when you had to go out, the kids playing games in the street. The more mixed areas developed qualities that were specially theirs.
Certain streets had their own foods, characters, and music; their residents wore sharper clothes. On many blocks, people played the numbers—gambled on numbers they thought would come up lucky—and gave their dimes and nickels to the numbers runner. He was said to be a mathematical genius because of his ability to hold everybody’s bets in his head. Usually the runner did not write anything down, so as not to be carrying evidence against himself; playing the numbers was illegal. A runner might wear a snap-brim hat, two-tone wingtip shoes, and a custom-tailored suit, with trousers cut in what was called an English Drape—twenty-three inches at the knee and eighteen inches at the cuff, the style worn by the Prince of Wales. The runner’s pockets jingled with coins. He would drive up in his fancy car, double-park, get out, take everybody’s bets, memorize them, and drive off. And occasionally somebody’s number would hit, the runner would pay up, and the lucky person would take the three or four thousand dollars and buy a Morrisania brownstone.
When the city opened the Patterson Houses, the first New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) housing project in the Bronx, the locals cheered. Its apartments were spacious and up-to-date, with lawns so green and well-cared-for that you weren’t even allowed to walk on them. The NYCHA communities offered rec rooms, laundry rooms, playgrounds; some of the buildings had doormen. As more NYCHA projects opened, people vied to get into the new buildings. Again, the process of choosing residents was selective. A tenant family had to consist of two parents, married to each other, with the father steadily employed. The lobbies of the high-rises shone, and smelled like the pine-scented cleaner used on the floors. Sunlight came in every window and the rooms didn’t face air shafts. NYCHA even assembled its own symphony orchestra, in which tenants and building employees performed. Other housing projects followed Patterson’s model in the Bronx and won similar raves.
Back then, if you were a kid and did something wrong (or right), and a grown-up saw, word got back to your parents. Regardless of color or ethnicity, people emphasized this fact in their later memories. Glenn Ligon, the artist, who grew up in the Bronx’s Forest Houses, recalled, “When we [he and his brother] were going to school, there were people that I didn’t know but who knew us. And so when we would come home, my mother said, ‘Oh, you know, I heard you did a very nice thing at the bus stop today with Mrs. So and So.’ I was like, ‘How do you know that?’ ‘Well, I have spies everywhere’ … And so there was this … old-fashioned sense of community in the projects and I think that started to change by the early ’70s.”
NYCHA built dozens of other projects in the Bronx. The Patterson Houses and the Forest Houses, among the earliest ones, pioneered the new kind of living. Then came the Claremont Houses—a complex that included the Gouverneur Morris Houses and the Butler Houses—then the Betances Houses and the Castle Hill Houses and the Melrose Projects. Moving into the projects was considered a step up from a regular apartment. In the projects you no longer had a landlord to worry about; NYCHA, the city, was your landlord. Later, when the bad times came, too many of the Bronx’s landlords would be undependable, to put it kindly. The projects would be like a fire wall.
24
EVERYBODY WHO LIVES out in the country in America should move to a city and live there, at least for a while. People from towns or smaller cities should try moving to a bigger city—New York, Los Angeles—just to see what it’s like. The experience will knock the rust off you and rearrange your mind. Now imagine tens of thousands of migrants from the rural, highly segregated South, and from far-off, tropical Puerto Rico and the West Indies, suddenly finding themselves in the twentieth-century Bronx. No better method for creating instant Modernism could be conceived of. The subway train is going by on the elevated tracks overhead, sending off rattling, scraping, screeching sounds. A jackhammer is racketing here, a tugboat horn on the Bronx River is blasting there, a rooster is crowing somewhere. (Even today, you hear roosters in the Bronx.) Something momentous is going to happen to minds that get shaken up like this, and in certain parts of the city, especially the Bronx, it did.
Sometimes I take the number 2 or 5 to the Prospect Avenue station. Outbound from Manhattan, the train gets to Prospect Avenue two stops after it climbs from underground onto the el tracks. I always enjoy that feeling of lift and opening out. You’re up in the trees, pigeons are flying next to the train windows, and it’s a descent of forty worn steel steps from the station down to the sidewalk. When I arrive one spring morning, very early, I go down to the street and then look back. The rising sun is on the red metal roof of the station; the decoration on the peak of the roof, like a rococo exclamation point from an unknown language, catches the light. The sky is extremely blue. All over the four-street intersection (Prospect Avenue, East 160th, Westchester Avenue, and Longwood Avenue) beneath the el tracks, trash of various sorts seems to have settled overnight. Much of it is small squares of white paper, possibly coupons or flyers. The white squares are everywhere, as if dropped by the bushel from a propaganda airplane. In front of the McDonald’s restaurant at the intersection, a man with a leaf blower is blowing the pieces of paper off his sidewalk and into the street.
