My Old Neighborhood Remembered Read online

  MY OLD NEIGHBORHOOD REMEMBERED

  * * *

  ALSO BY AVERY CORMAN

  * * *

  Oh, God!

  The Bust-Out King

  Kramer vs. Kramer

  The Old Neighborhood

  50

  Prized Possessions

  The Big Hype

  A Perfect Divorce

  The Boyfriend from Hell

  MY OLD NEIGHBORHOOD REMEMBERED

  A Memoir

  * * *

  AVERY CORMAN

  * * *

  BARRICADE BOOKS

  FORT LEE, NEW JERSEY

  Published by Barricade Books Inc.

  2037 Lemoine Ave.

  Fort Lee, NJ 07024

  www.barricadebooks.com

  Copyright © 2014 Avery Corman, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Corman, Avery.

  My old neighborhood remembered : a memoir / Avery Corman.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-56980-518-3

  1. Bronx (New York, N.Y.)--Social life and customs--20th century. 2. Corman, Avery)—Childhood and youth. 3. Neighborhoods--New York (State)—New York)— History)—20th century. 4. City and town life)—New York (State))—New York)— History)—20th century. 5. Bronx (New York, N.Y.))—Biography. 6. New York (N.Y.))—Biography. 7. New York (N.Y.)--Social life and customs--20th century. 8. Authors, American)—Biography. I. Title.

  F128.68.B8C78 2014

  974.7’275043)—dc23

  2014007506

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  For my mother,

  my sister, Jackie,

  my Aunt Anne and Uncle Moses,

  my cousins, Leo, Selma, Renee,

  and the boyfriends who became husbands,

  Norm, Cy, Lenny

  * * *

  PHOTO CREDITS

  * * *

  1. The Loew’s Paradise Theater on the Grand Concourse south of 188th Street. New York City Municipal Archives.

  2. The intersection of the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road. Courtesy of The Bronx County Historical Society, New York City.

  3. Alexander’s Department Store on the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road. Courtesy of The Bronx County Historical Society, New York City.

  4. A World War II war bond drive on the Grand Concourse in 1942. Photo copyright SofTech Consulting, Chappaqua, NY, USA and reproduced by agreement. All rights reserved.

  5. An eastbound trolley at the intersection of Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse. Courtesy ouroldneighborhood.com .

  6. 175 Field Place, the building where the author lived, at the Grand Concourse between 183rd and 184th Streets. New York City Municipal Archives.

  7. Newspaper photo of the Memorial Day Parade of 1946. One of the people looking out the window is the author. © Daily News, L.P. (New York). Used with permission.

  8. The luxury area of the Grand Concourse. 930 Grand Concourse near 163rd Street. The Museum of the City of New York/Art Resource, NY.

  9. The Concourse Plaza Hotel on the Grand Concourse at 161st Street. Courtesy of The Bronx County Historical Society, New York City.

  10. P.S. 33 Elementary School on Jerome Avenue south of Fordham Road. The Museum of the City of New York/Art Resource, NY.

  11. DeWitt Clinton High School on Mosholu Parkway. Courtesy of The Bronx County Historical Society, New York City.

  12. Joseph Vitolo, Jr., the nine year old boy who claimed to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary, praying before the crowd assembled in a vacant lot in 1945. © Bettman/Corbis.

  13. The Ascot Theater and a partial view of the Concourse Center of Israel on the right on the Grand Concourse north of 183rd Street. New York City Municipal Archives.

  14. J. S. Krum’s on the Grand Concourse north of 188th Street. New York City Municipal Archives.

  15. The uncaged lions behind a moat in the African Plains exhibit of the Bronx Zoo. The Museum of the City of New York/Art Resource, NY.

  16. Joe DiMaggio at bat in Yankee Stadium in 1941. © Bettman/Corbis.

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  175 FIELD PLACE

  ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

  THE HOME FRONT

  MY AUNT AND UNCLE

  A TWILIGHT ZONE TYPE OF OCCURRENCE

  THE TALKING DOG

  OTHER DOGS

  READING

  STREET GAMES

  CANDY AND THINGS

  GOING TO THE MOVIES

  SUMMERS

  THE BRONX HOME NEWS

  ALEXANDER’S DEPARTMENT STORE

  ROOTING FOR BASEBALL TEAMS

  JOE DIMAGGIO’S GLOVE

  PLAYING BASEBALL

  EDGAR ALLAN POE

  “HAVE YOU GOT ANY INFORMATION?”

  RELIGIOUS OBSERVANCE

  BARBER SHOPS

  GROCERIES, DELIS, BAKERIES, APPETIZING STORES

  ICE CREAM PARLORS

  THE TRUTH ABOUT MY FATHER

  TELEVISION

  SCHOOLYARD BASKETBALL

  JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

  THE BRONX ZOO

  THE 1951 CITY COLLEGE BASKETBALL SCANDAL

  EMIL VERBAN

  HIGH SCHOOL

  THE PARADISE PIZZERIA

  GETTING TO ARTHUR AVENUE

  CHINESE RESTAURANTS

  THE CONCOURSE PLAZA HOTEL

  JACK MOLINAS

  LAUREL & HARDY GO ICE SKATING

  ABSENCE OF A MANILA ENVELOPE

  THE TAN JACKET

  COLLEGE

  THE REALITY

  VOTING

  FULFILLING YOUR MILITARY OBLIGATION

  ONCE MORE

  LEAVING

  This is about the Bronx of the 1940s and 1950s, my growing up years. I left the Bronx in February 1960. I was 24 and uncomfortable about still living at home at that age, although people still did so then. I was working in Manhattan and had been waiting to cobble together enough money to rent my own place downtown.

  Her face and name are lost to time, but she offered me a catalytic moment. The young woman was from out of town and in my never-ending pursuit of low budget things to do on a date I managed to sell the idea that it was interesting to wander through the Central Park Zoo at night and see if any animals were out and about in their cages. We stopped in front of the polar bears and after watching them, we began to neck and then she said to me, “If you had your own apartment we could go there now.” I was gone from the Bronx almost instantly.

  I did not see her again. She went back to wherever she came from and I moved into an apartment in Manhattan. Much has been written about the changes in the Bronx from the 1960s on. When I left, the changes had not yet occurred in the part of the Bronx where I lived. I was among those who left simply because the aspiration of our parents’ generation, to live in the Bronx, was not our aspiration.

  Bronx neighborhood life in the 1940s and 1950s was similar to neighborhood life in Brooklyn, with similar demographics and similar iconic symbols of that life. The major differences I can discern related to size, in that Brooklyn being larger than the Bronx had more of everything, population, schools, private houses, and also more neighborhoods that were distinct in their characteristics from
other Brooklyn neighborhoods. In the Bronx economic differences did exist between parts of the east Bronx and the west Bronx, still it seems to me more homogeneity existed among neighborhoods across the Bronx than was the case in Brooklyn, that growing up in one neighborhood in the Bronx was very much like growing up in another. But then I didn’t come from Brooklyn and Brooklyn people might argue the point. Meaning no disrespect to Brooklyn or anywhere else, or anyone else’s experience of the Bronx, this is what I remember.

  * * *

  175 FIELD PLACE

  * * *

  The building was a scruffy walkup with stores on the street level. Our family’s move there was traditional. We followed the post-immigrant housing route which contributed to the development of the Bronx of the 1940s — from low income parts of the city like the lower east side to better housing in the east Bronx and, for some, to better housing in the west Bronx. We had come from a tenement building on Tiffany Street in the east Bronx to this west Bronx three-bedroom apartment on Field Place between 183rd and 184th Street, an apartment with two rooms facing the Grand Concourse. The ultimate in the Bronx was to live in a white brick, art deco elevator building on the Grand Concourse. This was not such a building.

  A lifetime later I attended an alumni event of my high school, DeWitt Clinton. I was a published author by then and my name was announced as scheduled to attend. Several people whom I had known in high school, who had remained friendly with one another, decided to come. One of them asked me, “Where did you live exactly?” “Field Place and the Concourse.” “Oh, the Concourse,” was his response. “You must have been rich.” “He wasn’t,” a classmate of mine dating back to elementary school said. “He lived in an apartment with his aunt and his uncle and a little brown dog.” I placed my hand to my heart. I was married with children. Nobody in my new family held that as a reference to me, my aunt and my uncle and my childhood dog.

  My aunt and uncle were deaf-mutes. They were the heads of household. One or another of my aunt and uncle’s children also lived there from time to time. My mother, my older sister, and I lived as boarders in the apartment. My father had disappeared into another life before I was five and I was never to see him again. The move to the building from the east Bronx to the west Bronx was traditional. Nothing else about our family was.

  In 1941, we moved into the building on Field Place. I can recall some shadowy images from the previous apartment on Tiffany Street. Other people also lived there. My sister, Jackie, older by six years, later told me they were boarders themselves. And I have fleeting shadows of memories of another apartment and perhaps the presence of someone who must have been my father, but I cannot say I really remember him or anything about him.

  My mother, who was in all respects heroic, out of what was likely shame — it couldn’t have been easy to have the only divorce in the neighborhood in those days, maybe one of the few in the Bronx — never got her story straight with me about my father until I was about twelve. Their divorce was made official by my father who filed papers in 1944, I eventually learned. The situation was similar to — as the writer, Lois Gould, once described — “a Jewish divorce.” Defeated by The Depression, she said, some Jewish men, feeling disgraced for not being able to provide for their families, simply disappeared. Our situation was similar to that, but not exactly. My father apparently lost his job in the economic hard times, tried to operate a retail store and couldn’t succeed, and having begun to pile up debts, fled New York. He stopped in the South and called my mother and asked her to come there with my sister and with me. My mother later explained she decided that if she joined him she would be always running and she declined. Her uncle, a successful small businessman, intervened. My aunt and uncle were asked to take us in, hence, the tenement building on Tiffany Street, and then Field Place.

  When I was 26, I received a phone call from my father, the first time I had heard from him since he left. I was angry and the call went nowhere. Several years later, when I had become a father myself, I hired a private detective to find him. I wanted to get that phone call back. I thought now that I was a father we might have had something in common. I was told by an aunt who lived in Los Angeles and who once had known my father, that he was last seen somewhere in the Los Angeles area. With the help of the private detective, I learned he had worked as a bartender, had been living with a woman in El Monte in Los Angeles County, had used several aliases in his life, did not have any other children, and had died six years earlier.

  People aware that I wrote the novel, Kramer vs. Kramer, and who assumed I must have been writing with emotion because of my own divorce were making the wrong assumption. I was never divorced. My sensitivity to the material was because my parents were divorced and I grew up never knowing my father.

  * * *

  ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

  * * *

  I attended elementary school P.S. 33 on Jerome Avenue near Fordham Road. When I think about the place it seems to have had its own underscoring, “Do you know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man, do you know the muffin man that lives in Drury Lane?” which we sang and skipped to while a teacher played piano.

  The school building was classic collegiate gothic, a slanted green roof with a courtyard, the design replicated in schools throughout the city. “Who do you think you’ll get?” was the anxious question preceding each school year, the teachers running true to form, the same teachers there year after year, the strict ones, the nice ones, the mean ones, and as their reputations preceded them, so did they behave with few surprises.

  We were at least thirty to a class, dutiful children. We carried fear along with our books. I can nearly summon that old knot in my stomach worrying I might be called on, worried I might be caught for doing something bad, and be told I was, heaven forbid, suspended.

  The classrooms were hot and steamy in winter, the heat rattling through the radiators. As summer approached they were still hot, but clammy. You were obliged to bring a handkerchief and buy or make book covers for your books. The worry was your family would be quarantined if you got chicken pox, and you did get chicken pox, and they weren’t quarantined.

  At one point I was pulled out to attend a special class for stutterers, about six of us in the group who were told to read aloud to get our stuttering under control, an affliction that came as a surprise to me when I was told I was so afflicted. I might have stuttered, I can’t remember. More likely I had too much to say in too much of a hurry. Or maybe not. After a while, I had done well enough to be excused from attending the class.

  The school assemblies featured sturdy little children carrying flags in those days of heightened patriotism. Good George Washington was in full view in the auditorium in the ubiquitous reproduction of a Gilbert Stuart portrait.

  Music appreciation was taught in groups in the auditorium as the phonograph played and we memorized, “This is the symphony that Schubert wrote and never finished . . . ” We gathered leaves in the fall and they were labeled and placed on colored oak tag and taped to the class windows, the leaves gathered mainly from St. James Park, a fair-sized park located north of P.S. 33. I wrote a novel, The Old Neighborhood, and placed much of the action in that Kingsbridge Road neighborhood rather than my own because it fit the needs of the story. A woman, confusing fiction and nonfiction, wrote a letter to me and said she liked the book, but that she knew all the boys from the neighborhood and I must have changed my name for professional purposes.

  We bought model airplane kits in a hobby shop near P.S. 33 owned by a Mr. Bess, American fighting planes, enemy planes. Some of the models required paper and thin sticks glued together and were rather elaborate, the balsa wood models easier for me. I was dreadful at this, even my balsa wood models were a mess, looking even worse when painted.

  “Now write the numbers that you hear in the second column. Thur--ee, four.” We were fearful of the hearing tests as we looked around the room when we could no longer hear numbers to see if anybody else was still writing.
/>   Betty Suhr, will you forgive me? When I was sitting behind you, I stuck your pigtail in my inkwell.

  Before ballpoint pens, the desks had inkwells and we dipped our wooden pens with metal pen points into the ink-wells to write. We went through elementary school with ink stains on our fingers.

  Oak tag, mucilage, deportment, fractions. Someone who was to always struggle with math in school, I am not thrilled to remember there came a day in elementary school when we started to learn fractions.

  We were taught “tolerance” as to the beliefs or the nature of others. “Tolerance” was better than “intolerance,” still, something short of “acceptance.” To drive the point home we were shown repeatedly, The House I Live In, a short film with a message song starring Frank Sinatra. That would be the boyish bobby-soxers’ Frank Sinatra, not the rakish Nelson Riddle Frank Sinatra.

  Occasionally, my mother would arrange her lunch hour and take me to lunch at Thompson’s Cafeteria near P.S. 33. This was a treat, to be taken out to eat lunch in a restaurant.

  To the boys, the girls were not alien, they were like us with the same school experiences, the same fears, except they were girls. We played tag with them in the yard. They were our elementary school classmates, friends. Like Cecelia Klein who, when we were grownups, sent me a photocopy of the page I inscribed in her 6th grade graduation souvenir book, “Good luck ya dumb cluck.” Then many of us went to all-boy and all-girl junior high and high schools and we were separated from a manageable social arrangement to a place of distance. I still haven’t recovered.

  I was in 3rd grade on June 6, 1944. We were released early from school to go to our respective houses of worship where D-Day services were being held to pray for the safe return of our fighting men in the invasion of Allied forces at Normandy. I went to a service at the Jacob H. Schiff Center near Fordham Road and joined with the other solemn children and adults in collective apprehension and hope. We 3rd graders didn’t get adults to accompany us to those houses of worship. We just went by ourselves directly from school. These were our neighborhoods. We moved about them freely.