153rd Street between 3rd Ave and Melrose Avenue in the Bronx: 1955-1963
Living on the top floor in a 5th floor walk-up. The apartment was very hot in the summer as it was right under the roof which consisted of asphalt sheets sealed down with black tar.
On many summer days, Mom would take us kids up to "Tar Beach". We would play among the clotheslines while Mom sat on a blanket.
The small bedroom I shared with two of my siblings. My parents managed to squeeze in bunk-beds, a crib and large toilet paper boxes which held our toys. One solitary window on the outside wall with a clothesline attached outside of it (no window safety guards back then). Or else there were clotheslines on the roof we could use.
The living room at the end of the long hallway. During the holidays, a Christmas, the tree was in the corner of the room where you could see it as soon as you walked in the apartment door. There were french doors that led to my parents bedroom and the fire-escape.
The kitchen so small the refrigerator sat in the hallway. Next to the refrigerator was the dumbwaiter. Hearing the buzzer sound, we kids always raced to help load our trash on board while our next door neighbors did the same task at the same time. Being able to see into someone elses apartment while loading the brown paper bags into the tiny compartment seemed normal to us.
The bathroom was not very big with tub, pedestal sink and pull chain toilet with the water tank over your head.
At each landing, there was on open window between floors. At times you could feel a cool breeze or due to draft pulling air from each floor you could smell the variety of dinners being prepared for all the families residing on the various apartments.
My whole world was on 153rd Street, one solitary block from Melrose Ave to Third Ave. Cement sidewalks and surprising as it sounds, cobblestone streets. Apartment building after apartment building from one corner to the next with a few two family houses squeezed in between.. The only trees were in the few backyards of those smaller houses.
Yankee Stadium was just a few blocks away.
My world expanded when I went to kindergarten at PS 3 at 157th Street and Melrose. It was the same school my Dad attended when he was young. In fact, my teacher, Mrs. Mackie, had taught my Dad years earlier. Dad would walk me to school and Mom would pick me up after school.
The next year my world expanded in the other direction, all the way to 149th Street. For the next two years, my brother, George, and I would cross Melrose Ave and walk to 4 blocks to school together. He was 8 and I was 6. Two little kids walking alone to school.
By 1963, Dad and Mom decided it was time to move on to another section of the Bronx.
Years later, this neighborhood along with so many parts of the Bronx were burned to the ground.
From the New York Post in October 1977:
It was game two of the 1977 World Series, a chilly, blustery October night in the South Bronx. The Yanks were already down 2-0 in the bottom of the first inning when ABC’s aerial camera panned a few blocks over from Yankee Stadium to give the world its first live glimpse of a real Bronx Cookout. “There it is, ladies and gentlemen,” Howard Cosell intoned. “The Bronx is burning.”
Sometime in 1978, we were heading into the Bronx to see a Yankee game. Dad asked if we wanted to go by the old house. "Yes!", we all responded. Driving through block after block of vacant burned out buildings was extremely sad.
Dad pulled up to any empty lot. A pile of bricks laying where out Bronx apartment building once stood.
It was sad as I thought of the days of Trick or Treating from one floor to the next, bringing our report cards to the neighbors whose children were grown and being rewarded with 25 or 50 cents, carrying our Christmas Tree up all of those flights of stairs, trying to get a piece of coal from the coal chute during the deliveries used to heat our building and memories of standing on the sidewalk watching one of our neighbors daughters dressed a bride heading off to their new lives.
When people from outside of the New York area hear about my youth, they give me a look such as "how could you live like that?" or "wasn't it scary?".
It was my life as I knew it. I never thought of it as being deprived or scared or anything other than normal. I thought the whole world lived as we did.
Although today's Bronx has been rebuilt which makes me happy.
Those memories of that vacant lot with all of it's rubble are still with me after all of these years.
See you next week.
