"Tenements?" says Mrs. Silverman. "Listen, I lived in tenements. These were not tenements at all." If the apartments' plumbing was not modern, neither—happily—was the size of their rooms, large—huge by postwar standards—and high-ceilinged. They had foyers—real foyers, L-shaped some of them—as big as rooms themselves. "I served dinner for eighteen in my foyer, that's how big it was," Mrs. Silverman says. They had dining rooms, not dining areas. The apartment houses might not have had elevators, but
they had—almost all of them—courtyards, and there were enough small frame houses interspersed among them to let sunlight in. "Those apartments were light and airy and cheerful," Mrs. Roberts says. Sunken living rooms were not uncommon, the sills on the windows were broad and wood, the walls were not postwar plasterboard but thick and solid, the lines where walls met ceiling were softened with ornamental moldings. "I had what they called four rooms," says Mrs. Silverman. "Besides that big foyer, we had a kitchen with a dining area, two bedrooms—of course, they each had a bathroom, what else?—and a living room; I don't know how big the living room was, but it was a real nice size. When my girlfriend's daughter was engaged, I served dinner for sixty in the living room and foyer, and it wasn't even crowded, that's how big it was. We all loved our apartments."
They loved them—and they could afford them. If the water pressure was low, so was the rent, scaled originally to their ability to pay by landlords who could afford to do so because they had bought land in East Tremont for as little as two dollars per square foot, and kept at that scale by city-instituted rent control. Mrs. Silverman was paying $100 per month for her four rooms, and that was high. Lillian Roberts was paying $62 for her four rooms. Cele Sherman had a six-room apartment—three bedrooms, a living room, kitchen with large dining area, and a foyer with a recess large enough to be a full-scale dining room—and for that apartment Mrs. Sherman was paying $69.
The rents had to be reasonable for these people to afford them. Weekly take-home pay in the garment industry—the pay on which most of these people lived—averaged well under a hundred dollars. And while the generally accepted rule of thumb held that a family could afford to pay a monthly rent equal to about a week's income, this was not a rule accepted by the families of East Tremont, who had their own rule of thumb: that when you had children, you sent them to college, no matter how much scrimping and saving you had to do. The rents they were paying—low as they were—were, in all too many cases, the absolute maximum they could afford. They lived—many of them—on the thin edge of disaster. "Clara Wertel—her husband got sick so they had to move out," recalls Mrs. Sherman. "And Mrs. Aronofsky—her husband died. Same thing. One thing could do it, and so fast. Boom, and you were gone. Your friends never saw you again."
Happy therefore to have those apartments, the people of East Tremont were made desperate to keep them by the harsh realities of New York's housing crisis. Finding an apartment at any price was difficult in a city whose postwar vacancy rate was an habitual 1 percent. Finding an apartment at a rent they could afford to pay, in a neighborhood they felt they could live in, was all but impossible. They knew how difficult it was to obtain an apartment in East Tremont; one could wait for years even after one had promised a "schmear" to any super who let you know about an upcoming vacancy. Similar "middle-class" Jewish neighborhoods with low rents in which they would be comfortable—Washington Heights, for example—were rented up just as solidly. Public housing, overwhelmingly inhabited by Negroes and Puerto Ricans, was unthinkable even for those relatively few East Tremont
families whose income was low enough to qualify; no one, moreover, wanted "the stigma" involved in having everyone know you qualified. Huge as was the low-income housing program, moreover, the waiting list was huger still. They had no hope of ever being able to afford the apartments in the new buildings being built in the Jewish neighborhoods around Pelham Parkway, where a "two-bedroom" might rent for $350 per month. As for living in one's own home on Long Island or in Westchester, that was a dream reserved for the children they were sending to college. The apartments generally available in New York for the $75 or $80 per month they could afford were apartments in the black or Puerto Rican slums—or back on the Lower East Side.
If it was desperately important for the people who lived in East Tremont that their neighborhood be saved, it was also desperately important for the city of which that neighborhood was a part. For a hundred years, East Tremont had been performing a vital function for New York, as an "urbanizing" area, a place in which families from European farms or small villages could become accustomed to living in a city, where a common consciousness began to evolve, a man from County Cork learning that the families next door from County Mayo weren't really such a bad sort, a housewife from a Latvian shtetl learning that the woman she met at the market who came from the Kiev ghetto was someone she could talk with—a consciousness that translated itself into a feeling of belonging in the city, and (more quickly in the case of the Irish and Italians than the Jews, who were always arguing among themselves) into political organizations that gave them a share of power in the city. It had been a "staging area," a place where newcomers who had lived previously in America only in slums, successful at last in their struggle to find a decent place to live, could regroup, and begin to devote their energies to consolidating their small gains and giving their children the education that would enable them to move onward and upward —to better, more "fashionable" areas. In 1848, it was Rhineland farmers fleeing revolutionary chaos; during the 1870's, it was the Irish, fleeing famine or the Lower East Side. Just after the turn of the century, with the more prosperous among the Irish moving on to Fordham or University Heights or Riverdale, it was the Italians, many of them just off the boat, who followed the new IRT subway to what was then the end of the line and seeped westward to fill up all of the "Belmont" area north of 182nd Street. Then it was the Jews, filling up the area between Belmont and Crotona Park. And East Tremont—with the exception of Belmont, which the Italians held for their own—had been an integrated urbanizing and staging area. All the Germans didn't move out when the Irish arrived, all the Irish didn't move out when the Jews arrived—in 1950, there may have been 44,000 Jews in the area south of Belmont, but there were also about 5,000 Irishmen and about 5,000 Germans and Slavs.
There was ample proof in 1950 that East Tremont was serving just as
efficiently as an urbanizing and staging area—an integrated urbanizing staging area—for the city's newest immigrants.
In some other areas of the city, the approach of Negroes and Puerto Ricans—part of the great wave of dark-skinned immigrants who had begun flooding into the city just before World War II, a flood that had mounted every year since—had meant flight. But not in East Tremont.
Morrisania, just on the other—south—side of Crotona Park, had become a predominantly Negro slum about 1930. But the people of East Tremont had not fled.
Since about 1940, the less desirable tenements in the shadow of the noisy El along Third Avenue—right on the neighborhood's western edge— had been filled with Negroes. But the neighborhood had held.
The same spur that had roweled the Jews into East Tremont—the hope of a better life for their children—had roweled Negroes there, right into the neighborhood itself. The first was Charles Smith, traffic manager for a fabric company, whose wife, a white Jewish girl who kept a strictly kosher home in Harlem, said to him in 1929, when their son turned six: "Over my dead body my son is going to the 135th Street School." "Negroes in '30 or '31 who came up to the Bronx, they stopped at Prospect [in Morrisania]," Smith recalls. "We didn't want no Prospect. We came all the way up to Tremont." For a while, Smith's son was the only Negro child in PS 44 (then an elementary school), but soon more Negroes—doctors, lawyers, working men whose wives also worked to help make their families a better life—were following them into the neighborhood, some purchasing private homes, some moving into apartments. By 1933, there were seven Negro families in Elsmere Gardens, one of
the neighborhood's "best" buildings. There were quite a few along Crotona Park North, the avenue facing the park that was considered East Tremont's most desirable location. But East Tremont took into its bosom the newcomers with black faces as it had taken in newcomers with white faces.
"People here were good with us," Smith says. And they were good with the pioneers who followed Smith. There were Negro women on the executive committee of neighborhood organizations. "My daughter used to walk to school with two Negro boys," says Cele Cohen. "We used to have Negro children over for dinner, and they used to have my daughter over. To tell the truth, we didn't think that way—you know, the way it is now—then."
After the war, the influx of Negroes into East Tremont increased. An influx of Puerto Ricans began. But the influx stayed slow and no whites left because of it. By 1950, there were approximately 11,000 nonwhites in East Tremont, 18 percent of the neighborhood's 60,000 population. And the neighborhood was still holding just fine. Standing astride its whole southern border, Crotona Park provided East Tremont with a natural shield, a comfortably wide—and, at that time, heavily policed—dike against the decay flooding up from the south. Its brunt broken on the park's slopes, the decay oozed around its sides, searching for an opening into the clean streets beyond, but against it the park flung upward, at both its northern
corners, extensions that were protecting arms. And there were social, perhaps even moral, reasons as well as physical for the neighborhood to hold. The Jews of East Tremont—liberals, utopianists, socialists, fiery radical labor unionists, men and women who had held on to their ideals even under the lash and the knout, and the children of those men and women—said they believed in the equality of men, including those with darker skins than they. One could argue about how deep that belief really ran, but in 1952 they certainly acted as if they meant it. The neighborhood was still the neighborhood. No one felt the need to move out of it just because a few more Negroes were moving in.
But the strongest reasons were economic. Even if they had wanted to move out, the people of East Tremont couldn't afford to. In the I970's, it would become a cliche to say that a neighborhood like East Tremont couldn't hold. But that cliche ignored the reality of rents that people could afford, and their inability to find such rents anywhere else. The influx of impoverished Negroes and Puerto Ricans might have been steadily increasing in 1952. The pressures on the neighborhood might have been growing stronger and stronger. But so were the economic realities that had kept it solid. Decent housing at affordable rents was becoming steadily scarcer. The income of East Tremont's older residents, now beginning to retire on inadequate pensions and social security, was falling.
In 1951, with the nonwhite population of East Tremont already substantial and clearly going to increase further, the Association of Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Associations of New York—considering building a new Y to replace the Clinton Avenue building—had decided to determine whether or not the investment would be worthwhile, and had conducted the most detailed survey of East Tremont residents ever made. Its conclusions were clear. Negroes might come. The Jews would stay. For more than twenty years, the pressure of urban decay and blight had been pressing on the neighborhood, but for twenty years, the neighborhood had held.
Leave it alone, and it would continue to hold.
By 1952 there were 775,516 Negroes and nonwhite Spanish-speaking people—a full 10 percent of New York's residents—in the city. And, as the Irish had done a century before and the Italians and Eastern European Jews half a century before, these immigrants from the South and from the Caribbean were continuing to pour into the city by the thousands and tens of thousands. For its own sake as well as theirs—if the city was to prosper or if it was even to endure as a place in which people, white or nonwhite, would want to live—it would have to offer the newcomers the same chance it had offered their forerunners: would have to absorb them by providing neighborhoods in which they could learn to cope with urban life, in which they could consolidate the gains that had enabled them to move out of the real slums in the first place and prepare for an assault on even better places to live, neighborhoods which would serve as urbanizing and staging areas. And it would have to provide urbanizing and staging areas that were integrated. If it did not, if these newcomers to New York were forced to live in ghettos, compounded with their resentment at their inability
to provide a decent place for their children to live would be an alienation from the society which had isolated them. These people—who were making up more and more of the city—would be an alienated, hostile, hating force within it.
If the city was going to endure, neighborhoods like East Tremont were going to have to endure.
And if it was left alone, this neighborhood would.
The letters came on December 4, 1952.
For years, East Tremont had been vaguely aware that one of Robert Moses' highways was going to run through the neighborhood, that part of it was already under construction over in the East Bronx somewhere. But there had been no hard facts available, and, as Mrs. Lillian Edelstein says, "it had gone on so long, and you keep hearing and hearing and nothing happens, and after a while it doesn't mean anything to you." When they thought about it—if they thought about it—they were sure it would run along the edge of Crotona Park; "I mean, it was so obvious—you just figured it was going to go there," Mrs. Edelstein says. "It was in the wind for a long time that he was going to come through the apartment houses. But we just didn't believe it."
But on December 4, a Tuesday, the letters were there—in hundreds of mailboxes, letters signed by "Robert Moses, City Construction Coordinator," informing each recipient that the building in which he or she lived was in the right-of-way of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, that it would be condemned by the city and torn down—and that they had ninety days to move.
"It was like the floor opened up underneath your feet," Mrs. Edelstein says. "There was no warning. We just got it in the mail. Everybody on the street got it the same day. A notice. We had ninety days to get out. I remember it was a nice day, too, for that time of year. We all stood outside —'Did you get the letter?' 'Did you get the letter?' And 'What does it mean?' Three months to get out! Some people had gone out early and hadn't heard. We told them. And then we all waited for our husbands to come home. And my husband said, 'You can't do anything.'"
The ninety-day figure was meaningless, of course. At the time Moses sent out his letter the money to build the East Tremont stretch of the expressway was nowhere in sight; months, if not years, would be required to obtain it. The city had not even acquired title to the property yet, and there were months of procedures necessary before it could do so—and before demolition could begin. Privately, Moses was figuring not on three but eighteen months to clear the area. The use of the ninety-day figure was a scare tactic—"to shake 'em up a little and get 'em moving," a Moses aide explains.
The tactic accomplished its purpose. As the full implication of their position began to dawn on the tenants, they became very scared indeed.
"The first thing you do, naturally, you look to see what else is available," says Mrs. Roberts. "My husband and I looked in the papers and asked
around. And when we first found out the type of rents!" Says another East Tremont housewife: "We had been thinking before—for years—about moving to Pelham Parkway—you know, not really seriously, but just talking about it from time to time. Pelham Parkway was a very, very nice area. But now we went over there. My God! On Pelham Parkway they wanted a hundred dollars a room."
Priced out of other "decent" neighborhoods, they turned to a task they knew before they started was almost hopeless: finding a new apartment in their own. The Y was inundated with requests for information about local vacancies. "Occasionally we'd hear about one," says Y director Barney Lambert. "But this was fifteen hundred families that needed them."
A subsequent notice from Moses said that "tenant relocation operations" were already planned, and promised that "we shal
l cooperate in every possible way so as to avoid hardships and inconveniences." On the "completed," easterly "Section 3" of the expressway, he stated, tenant relocation had "proceeded in an orderly manner."
This notice proclaimed that its purpose was reassurance: "We are issuing this . . . honest schedule for acquisition," because "most Americans prefer to be told just what is in store for them. They dislike uncertainty." Its result was panic. For East Tremont had formed a tenants' committee and, heading over to Section 3, it found out what "orderly tenant relocation operations" meant when carried out under the direction of Robert Moses.
The expressway had been completed over part of Section 3. A great swath of concrete, 225 feet wide, grayish white, unmarked by the treads of a single car, had been laid neatly to within about two and a half miles of East Tremont. But those two and a half miles were a scene of desolation and destruction such as the committee members had never seen. Some of the right-of-way had been cleared: where once apartment buildings or private homes had stood were now hills of rubble, decorated with ripped-open bags of rotting garbage that had been flung atop them. Some of the right-of-way was being cleared; giant wreckers' balls thudded into walls; mammoth cranes snarled and grumbled over the ruins, picking out their insides. Huge bulldozers and earth-moving machines rumbled over the rubble; a small army of grime-covered demolition workers pounded and pried and shoveled. A thick layer of gritty soot made the very air feel dirty. ("I took out a handkerchief and wiped my forehead, and it came away black—absolutely black," Mrs. Edelstein says.) Over the rumble of the bulldozers came the staccato, machine-gun-like banging of jackhammers and, occasionally, the dull concussion of an exploding dynamite charge. And in the midst of this landscape of destruction, a handful of apartment buildings still stood. From the outside, the East Tremont committee saw that most of their windows were boarded up. Going inside, they found the lobbies littered with shards of broken glass that once had been big ornamental mirrors and with the stuffings from the armchairs and sofas that had once been their decoration, and smeared with excrement not only animal but human, from winos and junkies who slept in them at night. Stumbling upstairs, the committee found the doors to many apartments ajar; through them, they could see empty rooms,
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 132