Paradise bronx, p.31
Paradise Bronx, page 31
After the Miners’ victory, dependable American racism swelled like a bubo. Coach Haskins received forty thousand pieces of hate mail. Baron Rupp disparaged the Texas Western players as “crooks” and said he was above recruiting such disreputable types. Not long after the game, the NCAA outlawed dunking, a rule aimed at Black athletes and the New York playground style. (Eventually the NCAA had to lift the ban because of fan pressure.) All the former Falcons on the championship team got educations, as promised, and went on to have solid professional lives. The four years after the Kentucky–Texas Western championship game saw the biggest increase in integration in the history of college sports. Coaches at southern schools, and elsewhere, had no choice but to recruit Black players if they wanted to be competitive. More Blacks at the college level of course led to more Blacks in pro basketball.
Much of that change can be traced to this half acre named for Hilton White. He died in 1990, at the age of fifty-seven, and the city renamed the playground after him in 2009. About thirty members of his extended family attended the ceremony. There are still people in the neighborhood who knew him. Duane Johnson, proprietor and principal cook at Johnson’s Barbecue, the family-run takeout place (founded 1954) on East 163rd Street, remembers White attending the all-day, all-week checkers games on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. “Hilton White knew me before I knew him, when I was four and five years old,” Johnson says. “I knew him all my life. If you saw him, you had to respect him. If you were doing something wrong, like smoking weed or drinking, you would hide it, like, ‘Hi, Mr. White.’ He was a mild-tempered man. He was a giver. The whole Bronx knew who he was.”
The Hilton White Playground lost its basketball backboards fifteen or more years ago. Across the Bronx, the population has shifted to a Spanish-speaking majority, and Spanish-speaking people tend not to play basketball. Old-timers say you never used to see a basketball court without a game going on a nice day. Kids used to line up and wait. Now the sound of a basketball bouncing on a summer day in the Bronx is rare enough that I generally stop and check it out.
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For years it was as if Black and brown people didn’t exist, officially, in the Bronx; they were barely a presence in its politics. As in the rest of the city, Democrats outnumbered Republicans, and men mostly of Irish backgrounds ran the Democratic Party. In the 1950s, political power belonged to Edward J. Flynn, the leader of the Bronx County Democrats, who controlled the borough for thirty years. The candidates Flynn chose won—thus the (supposed) origin of the phrase “In like Flynn.” He could always deliver a solid bloc of votes in national elections, an ability that caused Franklin Roosevelt to pay court to him and make him an ally and advisor. Flynn pushed for Harry Truman to be FDR’s running mate in 1944; no local pol in the United States had more national power than Ed Flynn. In 1933, he nominated the party regular James J. Lyons to run for Bronx borough president, and Lyons held that office until he retired in 1960.
Borough President James J. Lyons smiles in photo after photo from that time, whether he’s introducing a fleet of new public buses or speaking at the opening of Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein School of Medicine or dedicating a bridge or welcoming Harry Truman to the Concourse Plaza Hotel. You must look closely, though, to pick Lyons out, because the people in the photos resemble one another. They’re all white men in fedoras, suits, and ties; sometimes they wear identical dark topcoats. None of them are Black or Puerto Rican. A photo from a Bronx County Democratic dinner in the mid-1950s shows Lyons in a group that includes the governor, Averell Harriman; the mayor, Robert Wagner, Jr.; and the newish Bronx Democratic Party chairman, Charles Buckley. All the men in the photo are dressed in evening wear. Edward Lynch, a vice president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, is the only one who has no position with the government or the Democratic Party, but he belongs in the group, because the banks will have a lot to say about the borough’s survival.
After Lyons’s retirement, the Republican Party, many of whose members were Italians, finally won the Bronx borough presidency, and James J. Periconi took over. A split had occurred among the Bronx County Democrats, with the previously overlooked Blacks and Puerto Ricans gravitating to the Jackson Club, a group of more progressive Dems. In 1954, Walter H. Gladwin, a candidate backed by the Jackson Club, won his campaign for state assemblyman, thereby becoming the first Black elected official in the Bronx. In 1965, James Periconi was ousted as borough president by Herman Badillo, a Puerto Rico–born attorney. Bronx politics had finally caught up with its new ethnic population. Of the nine borough presidents of the Bronx since then, seven have been Black or Latino.
The perpetual smile on Borough President Lyons’s face could represent the benevolent mood of power in that era. With an open hand, the city spent money on its kids. Not only did playgrounds employ rec directors, some NYCHA buildings did, too. Schools offered extracurricular classes, such as art and dance, and after-school programs in the classroom buildings, which remained open from two to five o’clock in the afternoons and from seven to nine in the evenings, weekends included. One old-time resident remembered that Christmas was the only day on which his school building closed. School music programs provided instruments for the band or the orchestra, and students could take the instruments home to practice. Teachers paid special notice to talented students, and sometimes gave them extra tutoring for performances outside of class. Playgrounds stocked up on bats and balls to loan out.
Adults who grew up in the Bronx in the postwar years remember the familiar elements of a 1950s and ’60s American childhood. They wore Davy Crockett raccoon skin caps, argued about whether Hopalong Cassidy was better than Roy Rogers was better than Gene Autry, played Whiffle Ball (which had captured some of the market from the Spaldeen), improved their reading skills by the SRA method (Study, Read, and Answer), asked for Lionel electric trains and Erector Sets for Christmas, built model airplanes, watched Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse and Captain Kangaroo on TV, joined the Cub Scouts, collected pennies in little orange cardboard boxes for UNICEF on Halloween, and carried lunchboxes with pictures of planets and spaceships on them.
All the same, things are going to fall apart—soon, and seriously. When they do, the smiling men in their fedoras and ties and tuxedos and topcoats will have moved on. Instead, there will be President Jimmy Carter standing in the middle of devastation on all sides, and not smiling. Ed Flynn and James J. Lyons and their cohort get points for contributing to the happy circumstances of their time. The borough’s politicians oversaw a lighter-hearted Bronx; but as signposts for the future, the smiles deceived.
25
EVERY BOROUGH IN NEW YORK CITY has an official historian. (Every county in the state has one, and every borough is a county.) For twenty-seven years, the Bronx County historian was a professor named Lloyd Ultan. He jokes that the official historian receives a six-figure salary, “and every one of those six figures is zero!” Ultan was born in the Bronx in 1938 and has lived there all his life. His last name is also the name of a village in Iran on the border of Azerbaijan. In the late nineteenth century, Jews who lived in what was then Persia moved north, into a part of Russia that is now Belarus. He knows that his Ultan forebears came to New York in 1902 from that part of Russia, and he surmises, though he has no hard evidence, that the family originally came from the Persian/Iranian village of Ultan and later adopted its name.
He seems to have been a historian from the cradle. As a boy, he was always asking his parents and aunts and uncles what happened before he was born. His father sold women’s shoes and rose to the job of distributor for A. S. Beck, which is now National Shoes. His mother was a housewife. Ultan had one sibling, a younger brother, who was an architect. The family lived first in a walk-up on East 165th Street at the corner of Walton Avenue, and then moved to a six-story elevator building on the Grand Concourse near East 158th Street. He went to PS 114, Middle School 22, and William Howard Taft High School, one of the biggest high school buildings in the city, on a rise just east of the Concourse. Four thousand students attended Taft when he was there. Afterward, at Hunter College of the Bronx (now Herbert H. Lehman College), he majored in history and minored in political science. The only time he left the borough for his education was when he won a Rockefeller-sponsored fellowship and used it to study history at Columbia for two years. Today he teaches the subject at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, New Jersey, just on the other side of the George Washington Bridge.
Ultan is white-haired, cheerful, and an information fount on the Bronx, which he loves to talk about. He sometimes wears a brown glen plaid jacket, a light pink shirt, a brown tie, and a gray V-neck cable sweater. His eyebrows are pure white, and they spring out above his lively dark eyes like spray in front of a speeding boat. He adores puns. When I suggested over the phone that it would be okay for us to talk in person, because we both had been vaccinated, he said, “Well, I guess that means we’re both a couple of ‘stuck-up’ guys!” After he makes a pun, he pulls a droll face, with his lips pressed together and his mouth in a long line. As historian, he was technically a county official. The borough president swore him in at the beginning of his term. (“I was sworn in, now I’m sworn at,” he used to say.) The duties of the job include collecting historical records, encouraging private concerns such as businesses and civic groups to collect their own, making presentations at schools, and giving lectures and tours. Sometimes he appeared in his role as historian in various celebrations and parades; one year he accompanied the dignitaries marching at the head of the Bronx’s Dominican Day Parade.
His view of Bronx history is prelapsarian—so much so that, from his point of view, the Bronx never had a real fall to recover from. Local boosters have told him that by staying positive and talking up the borough, he helped save the Bronx. I have no doubt that’s true. I believe that historians can heal a place. I once saw a documentary about a shaman-midwife who brought women through difficult childbirth by telling them tales made up on the spot about the journey of the baby. Historians do something similar, birthing the present from the past; ideally, the stories they tell possess the mystery that comes from being true.
By this point, the reader will have understood that the 1970s were a hard time. The fact that, in 1979, Ultan published a book (written in collaboration with the Bronx Historical Society) whose title was The Beautiful Bronx: 1920–1950 tells a lot about him. It’s a book of black-and-white photos with captions by Ultan. A follow-up book of photos, The Bronx: It Was Only Yesterday, 1935–1965 (co-authored by Gary Hermalyn) came out in 1995. Ultan’s comprehensive historical survey, The Northern Borough: A History of the Bronx (published 2005), covers the place’s past from its glaciated early origins up to the late 1980s. He has never lost his love for the Bronx or given up on the Bronx.
Ultan doesn’t talk much about himself, but his childhood must have been happy, from the way he describes the place he knew. When writing captions in the photo books, he points out details with a care that gives them the luminosity of objects in a child’s drawing. I had never appreciated the old Bronx trolley cars until I read his paean to them in The Beautiful Bronx. Trolleys followed major thoroughfares like Tremont Avenue, and afforded a good view of the passing scene, especially in the summer, when the cars’ sides were removed and replaced with a metal net so the cross-breezes could cool the passengers. At the end of the line, a trolley car didn’t need to turn around, because the motorman could drive it from either end. First, he had to adjust the poles that attached the car to the overhead wires:
The car came to its final stop, and the pole arising from the rear of the car connecting it to the power source of the overhead wire was hauled down by a rope attached at its end. After the pole had been made to lie parallel to the top of the car, the rope was securely tied to prevent it from rising of its own volition. Then the pole in the front of the car, which had been tied in the same position, was released, and the spring at its base would cause it to fly up to the overhead wire, tamed only by the man guiding it with the attached rope.
The motorman then walked through the car flipping the seats to face what was now the front. Ultan writes, “To children’s eyes, it seemed that miraculously the trolley car had turned around without changing its position.”
He chronicles his subjects unsentimentally, as a historian should; so he adds that the trolley cars were replaced with buses in 1948. The city tore up the steel rails from the streets and paved the streets over—and gone forever were the trolley cars.
That the Bronx enjoyed decades of successful integration is a fact he often mentions. As a fan of diversity and a devout multiculturalist, he can list Bronx ethnicities in detail: Africans of a dozen-plus nationalities, Albanians, Russians who came after the fall of the Soviet Union, Dominicans (now the most numerous Spanish-speakers in the borough), Garifuna (Honduran descendants of runaway enslaved people and Caribbean Native Americans), Serbs, Croats, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Afghans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Koreans, Yemenis, Peruvians, Kurds … He says the Bronx has welcomed everybody: “We have residents from every continent, if you include the penguins in the zoo.” In apparent contradiction of reality, he maintains that the Bronx never experienced “white flight.” The widespread moving-out of white families in the sixties and seventies is a change he ascribes to the usual cycles of upward mobility, in which Bronx residents of all types participated.
He models himself on Dr. Theodore Kazimiroff, the dentist and amateur historian who co-saved Split Rock from Robert Moses, and who co-founded the Bronx County Historical Society. All the Bronx historians are respected by Ultan as peers and colleagues, though he deplores Stephen Jenkins’s occasional prejudice against the Irish. Ultan says that it was he, Ultan, who persuaded John McNamara to assemble his list of the origins of Bronx place-names into the invaluable History in Asphalt. Without that book, appreciators of the Bronx today would find themselves lost when trying to figure out which streets used to be which, amid all the recent renaming.
He might not agree with my opinion that James Fenimore Cooper qualifies as the Bronx’s earliest historian, for want of any other. Cooper’s novel, whose plot I have described, is set in the Neutral Ground, a subject no other writer seems to have wanted to touch during Cooper’s lifetime. The neighbor-versus-neighbor cruelties, the ambushes, and the plundering make for an uncomfortable reality. As I’ve also noted, a lawyer named John M. McDonald traveled around Westchester County in the years 1844 to 1850 recording the stories that the by-then-elderly survivors from the Neutral Ground and other residents remembered from the war. A time that Cooper had transformed and made bearable through fiction reassembled itself into fact by way of McDonald’s interviews.
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Current historians have compiled a collection of oral accounts much like the McDonald Papers, but from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since 2002, the Department of African American Studies at Fordham University has been interviewing longtime Bronx residents, most of them Black. The McDonald Papers focus on a seven-year period of war. The Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP), as Fordham calls this oral history collection, covers a longer span, and includes the years of fires and devastation that made large sections of the place look as if they had been in a war. The McDonald Papers consist of accounts told to McDonald and written down in good cursive handwriting. The photocopy of a copy of that original document, available to scholars who visit the Westchester County Historical Society Library, in Elmsford, New York, runs to about eleven hundred pages. Aided by two assistants, McDonald conducted 407 interviews with 241 people.
Fordham’s interviewers, by comparison, have conducted about 300 interviews, some with only one interviewee and some with two or three or more. McDonald and his helpers in the 1840s spent six years collecting histories; the staff and volunteers of the BAAHP have been working on their task for more than twenty years so far. You don’t have to travel to Fordham to study the BAAHP archive, because the interviews are online. Some take up more than a hundred pages. The average length is probably about sixty pages. That is, the total for all the 300-some interviews in the BAAHP runs to perhaps eighteen thousand pages. Aside from total length, the two collections are similar, separated as they are by more than a century and a half. Both tell what happened in an eventful, difficult time, and bear witness to it. With these two collections, history and the recording of history repeat themselves.
Both McDonald and the BAAHP worked against a popular fantasy. For McDonald, it was the romanticism of The Spy. For the BAHHP, the obstacle was and is the popular misimpressions of the Bronx that thrive in the media. One example: In Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities (later made into a movie), all the main character needs to do to bring about his downfall is to leave the safe world of the elevated highways and exit by mistake into the street-level Bronx, where the first humans he sees try to do him harm. Other movies have been even more sensationalist. Fort Apache, the Bronx showed the place as a kind of behavioral sink redeemed only by the movie’s hero police officers, played by Paul Newman and Ed Asner. Not that the Bronx wasn’t (or isn’t) sometimes dangerous; but the locals who picketed the filming of Fort Apache objected to the portrayal of borough residents like themselves and their friends and families as just a bunch of criminals.
The BAAHP came about because Dr. Peter Derrick, the archivist of the Bronx County Historical Society, was getting requests from people looking for firsthand accounts of Black history in the borough. Robert Gumbs, a publisher and graphic designer who grew up in the Bronx, told Dr. Derrick there was a chance that what Black people had contributed would be lost and forgotten, as happens a lot. Derrick and Gumbs passed the question along to Dr. Mark D. Naison, professor of African American history at Fordham, and asked if the university could create a database of local Black history. Naison liked the idea. He knew that this history had been overlooked; he recalled that in a recent book about Blacks in New York City put out by Harlem’s Schomburg Library, the Bronx received just three pages. Naison also remembered the interviews that historians employed by the Works Progress Administration did back in the thirties with southern Blacks, many of whom had been enslaved. He knew how valuable those accounts have been to historians.
