Paradise bronx, p.37
Paradise Bronx, page 37
The abandonment of large parts of the Bronx by fortune, city government, and maybe even God extended to this supposed refuge. It was open season for plunder in the Bronx during the time of Senator Moynihan’s “benign neglect.” Estimates of the total cost of building Co-op City rose from $293 million to $340 million to $450 million. Nor could the thieves be caught. Two years after the project ended, no company that had worked on the project remained in business.
To pay for the overrun, Co-op City’s management told residents that their maintenance fees would have to go up. First would come a 25 percent increase over two years, followed by a 57 percent increase over three years. Many of the residents (“‘Cooperators!’ Ha!” they cried) were retirees on fixed incomes. Hoping to be modestly and comfortably set for the rest of their lives, they had fallen suddenly into housing insecurity, that chronic illness of American life. Now fear sneaked up and grabbed them by the throat. In response, the residents first formed a committee that sued Co-op City’s management for fraud. The fifteen thousand families paid ten dollars apiece to hire Louis Nizer, a short, famous attorney who sat on a raised throne in his office, to represent them. Then they formed another committee, which turned to that old semireliable tactic, the rent strike.
The strike was led by a young Co-op City cooperator named Charlie Rosen. Only thirty-two, he had grown up in a Communist family, and he worked as a typographer on the production floor of the New York Post. His mother, who had fled pogroms in her home city of Kamenets-Podolski, in Ukraine, remained a Stalinist even after the 1939 Hitler pact. She was a passementerie worker—a maker of tassels and fringe—and belonged to the passementerie workers’ union. Rosen’s father, who had immigrated from Warsaw, set up knitting machines in the Garment District and served as president of the Knit Goods Workers’ Union. Coming from such a background, the skinny, intense, chain-smoking Rosen leaped to the fight as one to the struggle born.
For complicated reasons, New York State, which held the mortgage, had taken over as Co-op City’s management. It set out to crush the strikers, deploying middle-class terrors—freezing the leaders’ bank accounts, threatening the thousands of strikers with immediate eviction, taping eviction notices to everybody’s door, publishing thousands of copies of a registry containing every striker’s name. Eighty-some percent of Co-op City’s residents joined the strike. Rosen kept them focused on their goals and told them not to be scared, repeating over and over that they would win.
About 12,500 of the strikers were retirees. Individually, they may have felt spasms of quiet or noisy desperation, but Rosen knew that as a group they were unevictable. No agency or government could put 12,500 elderly people out on the street. He kept saying that, but privately he feared that if the state evicted only a few the rest would panic and cave in. For unknown reasons the state did not use that tactic, and in the end the strikers prevailed. In 1976, with the help of Mario Cuomo, New York’s secretary of state at the time, an agreement was reached. The residents took over management of Co-Op City from the state, which agreed to provide a hundred million dollars for repairs. None of the strike leaders had to pay the fines that had been mounting against them every day. A moratorium let the residents go without paying the increased maintenance for six months, but in a good-news, bad-news twist, the new management decided the increases would be necessary, after all.
Many Co-op City residents cheered Rosen as a genius and a hero. He could have gone into politics, but instead he moved with his wife and two children into a better apartment in the complex, quit the Post, and eventually took over as the head of the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club, a local organization that provides services to hundreds of children and seniors locally and has a multimillion-dollar budget. In 2006, I interviewed him for an article I was writing about Co-op City. By then he had matured into a filled-out, dramatically gesturing man with senatorial white hair. He drove us to lunch (for which I paid) in a brand-new bright red Porsche. A few months later, he pled guilty to embezzling from the Boys and Girls Club. The charges against him specified the Porsche as one of the things he had bought with the stolen money. The judge gave him no jail time, but at a later hearing many of Rosen’s angry neighbors showed up to insist that he go to jail. They were unsuccessful; Rosen did not go to jail.
* * *
On Lyman Place, in the path of the fires, Hetty Fox kept an eye on the neighborhood like a one-woman fire-safety inspector combined with a teacher, camp counselor, band leader, and African-dance choreographer. She wanted there to be eyes on the street and beneficial activity for as much of every day as possible. When the city threatened to take over vacant buildings on the block, she made one of them into a recreation center for neighborhood kids where she provided games, arts and crafts materials, and books. She taught the kids African dances (while she continued to perform professionally), had them memorize Swahili words and the names of 186 African tribes, and kept the center open until ten thirty six nights a week. In her many interactions with city officials, she learned that certain streets that don’t have parking meters are eligible to be turned into “play streets”—streets temporarily closed off to traffic, for outdoor activities like block parties, double-Dutch jump rope contests, and musical performances. She closed off Lyman Place for a part of almost every good-weather day.
To her the children of the neighborhood were (as she said later) “little geniuses” and “little kings and queens,” whom the public schools did not appreciate. She let the kids know how highly she thought of them. Encouraging them to dream of bigger horizons while not automatically linking that to a goal of leaving the Bronx proved a challenge. She tried to instill the idea that they could stay and make things better right here; but she also said that if they left, Lyman Place would be a home they could remember with love and come back to. Every year, she put on a Christmas party for about a hundred kids. The city, it seemed, could not have cared less. When Ed Koch became mayor, he established a system of Neighborhood Preservation Offices to help poor neighborhoods. Fox wanted him to open one near her, but Koch vetoed the idea. He said that her part of the Bronx was already too far gone.
She continued her mission practically all alone. To walk in her former neighborhood today is to see what the old-time housing stock of the South Bronx looked like. In other parts, the new buildings occupying block after block show where the devastation occurred. On the former Lyman Place and around it, brownstones, frame houses, and apartment buildings from the time before the fires still stand. The fiery angel of death that Hetty Fox saw creeping up from Vyse Avenue stopped at Stebbins (today, James A. Polite) Avenue. That her childhood home and scores of other buildings in a wide radius did not burn was thanks mainly to her. Hetty Fox fought for the defense of a Bronx neighborhood before almost anybody.
* * *
Vivian Vázquez graduated from high school and went to the State University of New York at Albany (SUNY Albany). By that time—1980—the plague of fires had abated, but the citizens had not recovered emotionally. She had never been any place like upstate or met people so different from herself. What she had witnessed in her neighborhood—the building across from hers going up in flames, the disappearance of friends overnight after their apartments burned, the sirens screaming—didn’t coincide with the experiences of most SUNY students. She felt lost. Her courses were difficult, and she worried that she would have to drop out. Her roommate told her she would not make it. Soon she found a small group of students like herself, all of them from the city, and they spent time together and lifted one another’s morale.
She was grieving, ashamed, and confused. Why had such a disaster happened to the place she loved, the place where she grew up? The huge burning-glass in the sky had been invisible, and at that moment the Senator Moynihan explanation prevailed: “People in the South Bronx don’t want housing or they wouldn’t burn it down.” In the absence of other obvious reasons, she half accepted that one. Nobody she knew well had participated in the disaster other than as observers or victims or both, but she feared that somehow, the South Bronx must have deserved its fate; as she said later, the logic went, “This was what you got for being poor.” Collectively the residents internalized the criticism and accepted the guilt. The disaster must have been their fault, though they knew that didn’t make sense and couldn’t be true. Vázquez didn’t understand what had happened, but one day she would try to find out.
30
WALKING IN THE BRONX with my friend Alex Melamid on a summer afternoon; we met at Edgar Allan Poe Park, in Kingsbridge, then headed northwest to Fieldston. Alex was originally a Russian artist and is now an American artist. In his youth he belonged to the Soviet Artists Union, but it kicked him out, along with his then-partner, Vitaly Komar, because the two painted a satirical portrait of Laika, the first dog to be sent into space. Alex left the Soviet Union for Israel and burned his Russian suitcases on a pyre in the desert. Then he came to New York, and he has lived there or in New Jersey for forty-six years. The first time I traveled to Siberia, back in 1993, I went with him and his wife, Katya Arnold, who’s an artist and a teacher.
In the spirit of the Cold War, the time of our youth, I first led Alex to the house where John F. Kennedy lived as a boy. I stop by it occasionally and see how it is doing. For a few years, there was a Ford sedan with flat tires in the turnaround driveway. On the car’s rear dash, beneath the back window, a rolled-up black umbrella lay in the exact same position, year after year. The window had a Brown University decal. The car remained in the Google Earth satellite photo as the view was updated periodically. If you focused in close enough you could even make out the umbrella, although not the Brown decal. Now Alex and I wandered around the property, looking in the windows. Katya had once showed me Khrushchev’s grave, in Novodevichy Cemetery, in Moscow. The Kennedy house has caught the decay that affects certain Cold War relics in both countries—old missile installations and bomb shelters and whatnot. We found that the umbrella and its flat-tire ride were still there. On the house’s back patio sat an exercise machine partly covered in moss. A guy appeared out of the side entrance of the house next door and asked us what we were doing. He identified himself as the caretaker. We said we were just looking around, and left.
In the northwest Bronx, the Russian government maintains a weird mission compound. An immense high-rise, by far the tallest structure in the area, towers at its center; maps identify this as the Russian Mission School, but the building is about twenty stories high—a lot of school. One of the most impressive fences in the entire borough surrounds it. Along and above the sidewalk, a barricade of close-set gray steel palings rises ten or twelve feet high, curving outward at the top; and behind that fence, a lesser fence of chain link woven with green strips keeps you from seeing through. Eyeball-shaped security cameras watch from various heights and angles. There are guard booths with windows of one-way glass, and a double-gated entry for vehicles, and no signage of any kind. Alex stood back and looked at the fortifications and said, “Does Italy have a mission like this? Does Switzerland?”
A woman walked through the outer gate as it slid open on its overhead girder, and Alex greeted her in Russian. He asked if there was anyplace nearby where we could get lunch, and she said she would show us. She said she taught in the school. I asked her why a school needed a twenty-story building. She said there are many immigrants from the former Soviet republics—Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Uzbekistan—who want to send their children to a Russian-speaking school. (The subject of Ukraine did not come up; this was before the invasion.) She allowed as how a lot of the building was also offices. Her pale, Russian-Russian face had a friendly expression, without guile.
A few blocks from the mission she stopped in front of a barbecue restaurant and said she recommended it. We thanked her for her help. Before she walked on, she asked Alex where he was from. He said, “Manhattan.” She said that she had meant, from where in Russia. Alex said, “From Moscow—I am a Moscow Jew.” She stared at him benignly and intently. “Yes,” she said, “you look like one.”
* * *
Bill MCClelland, my friend going back to freshman year in high school, lives not far from me in New Jersey. Sometimes we drive over the bridge and have lunch at Liebman’s Delicatessen in Riverdale and combine that with a Bronx walk. Bill is a composer and pianist, so we visit the graves of musical greats in Woodlawn Cemetery. King Oliver, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Ornette Coleman, W. C. Handy, and Billy Bang all rest in Woodlawn, under monuments of varying sizes. King Oliver shares his grave with another person; his wife lacked money to bury him, and a generous family allowed her to put him in their plot. Lionel Hampton, “the king of the vibes,” and Duke Ellington are buried across a cemetery lane from each other, and the grave of Miles Davis is across from Ellington’s, on the other side. Davis’s large, polished white marble stone says, in script, “Sir Miles Davis,” although he was seldom called that in life. He received the title, by way of the French Legion of Honor, just before he died. Maybe he or a relative thought he needed a noble prefix in this company.
I think the grave of Celia Cruz, the Salsa Queen, is the most beautiful in this cemetery, or maybe anywhere. It’s a simple mausoleum of white marble, for her and Pedro Knight, her husband and manager. Plantings of night-blue butterfly bush, bright red hibiscus, pink hydrangea, and black-eyed Susans grow around the tomb. Fans bring more flowers in big or small bouquets and leave them on the steps or on the two white marble benches.
Not many cemeteries are quiet, with the various lawn-care machineries they generally have going, but Woodlawn often is. You might hear only an airplane passing overhead, and then in the silence afterward imagine the music of each artist you’re remembering. After some searching, with the cemetery map we found the graves of Irving Berlin, his wife, Ellin, and their son, Irving Jr., who died in infancy. Berlin, whose earliest memory was of watching Cossacks burn his village, lived to be 101.
When he was thirty-six, he met Ellin Mackay, a twenty-one-year-old debutante, at a dinner party. Her grandfather, John W. Mackay, had made one of the great strikes of silver and copper in the Comstock Lode, in Virginia City, Nevada. The family maneuvered high society in Manhattan into accepting them because of their social successes in Paris and London, where they were simply very rich Americans, not (as Manhattan had previously rated them) nouveau-riche nobodies from out west. Returning from overseas triumphs—they had hosted the former president U. S. Grant at a grand ball at their Paris mansion, when he was on his world tour—Ellin’s grandparents had established themselves on the Upper East Side. Ellin’s father, Clarence H. Mackay, son of the Comstock miner, looked like the millionaire in the Monopoly game. He added to the family fortune with a telegraph company that his father founded. More than a thousand guests attended Ellin’s coming-out party at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. When the Prince of Wales visited America in 1924, Clarence Mackay held a ball for him at his estate on Long Island. Ellin danced with the prince and noticed how calloused his hands were from all the polo he had been playing. Unlike the other young women (and their mothers) in attendance, she had no interest in him. The prince found her indifference charming and refreshing.
She sneaked away from the ball to telephone Irving Berlin, with whom she had fallen in love. Berlin had already made his fortune from his shows performed in his own Broadway theater, and from the sheet music of his many hit songs. When she and Berlin eloped in 1926, no member of her family attended the City Hall ceremony, and her father disowned her. Only when the couple’s baby son died, in 1928, did the family begin to break the silence they had put up against her. The loneliness of that time still seems to hang over the three graves. I was reminded of the cemetery in Ohio where my parents are buried next to my brother Fritz, who died at fifteen. Ellin’s family, including her father, accepted Berlin, and warmed to him eventually.
Some people say that Irving Berlin was the greatest American songwriter of all time. I remarked on that to Bill, and he didn’t disagree. But he had just produced a CD of William Appling, the pianist and conductor, playing all the sixty-four rags written by Scott Joplin, and so he added an asterisk. “Joplin thought Irving Berlin stole ragtime, and never gave him any credit,” Bill said. It’s true that “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” Berlin’s first big international hit, takes a lot from Joplin. The song introduced the modern world’s first brand-new beat. Ragtime’s syncopation rewired the global nervous system and kept it several steps ahead of the rhythms of commerce, where it should always be. Joplin and other Black musicians discovered and created the infectious ragtime rhythm; Berlin heard it and came down with it like a cold.
Then we went to look for the marker for Felix Pappalardi, bassist in the pre-heavy-metal group Mountain. (He’s also remembered as the producer of other bands, such as Cream.) Much of Woodlawn is long rows of small markers so close to one another that from a distance they resemble curbstones. Pappalardi’s marker is in one of those rows. We looked and looked. Finally, Bill found it. Pappalardi was shot and killed by his wife and is buried next to his mother.
The last marker we checked out was Robert Moses’s, in its columbarium. I stop by it when I’m in Woodlawn and take note of the traffic at the intersection of Jerome Avenue and East 233rd Street, nearby. A long time ago, in Morocco, I saw the tomb of a king—Hassan I, maybe—over whose coffin a hafiz chants the Qur’an all day and all night. The sounds of traffic at that intersection are Moses’s 24/7 Qur’an.
