Just Kids From the Bronx

by Arlene Alda

  The second introduction to the world at large was when I went to Bronx High School of Science. One of my best friends there was Jack Friedman, who lived in Riverdale. A three-bedroom apartment, a housekeeper, and a father who was a stockbroker. I couldn’t get over the wealth. I had never seen this before. A maid, a remote control on the TV—his father had the remote—and three bedrooms.

  It was lucky that I went to Science, because everyone there was expected to go on to college. I didn’t get that from my home, as I’ve said. If you were affluent, then you could afford to go to a private school. At home, there wasn’t even a discussion about which college to go to. When it came up, it was automatic. City College or State University.

  There was a hunger that I had growing up in the Bronx. It wasn’t financial. It was an emotional hunger. I was lucky that I had aunts in the neighborhood who balanced out what I didn’t get at home. But I had this added hunger to go out into the world. It was an achievement hunger. It was a pass to get out and the training was the Bronx.

  When I worked in San Francisco, I was out of my natural habitat for eighteen years. There’s something about this town, New York. You feel it. You see it. It has the highest level of intensity, of humor, of creativity. And none of that gets separated from where we grew up.

  As you grow older, you can grow in any environment because you have exposure and the possibilities of learning every day. And I’m still learning. The way I grew up turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.

  ANDY ROSENZWEIG

  Retired policeman, detective, chief investigator for the Manhattan district attorney

  (1944– )

  I guess somewhat to my detriment and certainly not to my benefit I was mesmerized by basketball. Playing it. Watching it. I wasn’t a very good player. A mediocre player in retrospect, but at the time I thought I was terrific. Basketball was everything to me. I even got to play with some very accomplished, very good players from time to time.

  I played in my backyard, Bronx Park. Sam Borod and my friend Stan Golden, who passed on a few years ago, we’d be on the courts shoveling the snow off with a few others. It didn’t matter how much it snowed. It didn’t matter how cold it was. We’d even get brooms to clean off the courts, along with the shovels, and play there all weekend. Be there early morning until dark. We also played with Stanley and Leon Myers, a couple of young black men, African Americans, or we would have called them “Negro boys” back then. Stanley and Leon played ball in the park with us all the time. We never thought anything much of it, that they were black, I mean. I guess we had our social boundaries, but I wasn’t too aware of those things at the time.

  Even though I went to Bronx High School of Science, I didn’t go to college right after graduation. I had thoughts about my future, but they weren’t very clear. When I was seventeen, before I graduated, I told my mother that I’d like to join the Marine Corps. Her response was very clear. Over my dead body! I did eventually join the marines, but not until I was twenty. The Jewish family tradition was definitely not to go into the marines. It was a struggle to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. It took a while. Eventually, after the marines, I became a policeman and then a detective.

  All the things that happened in the ensuing years, like the turmoil of the civil rights movement, were foreign to me. I mean, it didn’t make sense to me because I had direct contact with African Americans and it never occurred to me that there was discrimination against them. I was in my late teens or early twenties when I started to get it, but it took a while. I was inured—not inured—Iwas blind to how badly other people could behave.

  The Myers brothers, from my basketball days, we didn’t stay close friends, but probably in 1967 or ’68, which was, of course, in the throes of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam protests, I was on the police force. I was walking the foot post on a street called Wilkins Avenue near Boston Road. I had one or two years in the department, and who do I see walking down the road? It’s Leon Myers. And I hadn’t seen him in several years, not since we were younger fellas. I was really happy to see him. Leon was a distinctive guy. He was very tall and had thick eyeglasses. He probably would’ve been more accomplished in basketball if he didn’t have such bad vision. I think he went on to work in the post office.

  So I’m in uniform. I’m alone at the time because in those days you had a beat by yourself. I saw him and said, “Leon, it’s Andy.” And he says, “Oh God, they’re taking anyone in the police department now, huh?” He had a good sense of humor. We laughed and chatted for a few minutes, and then he said, “Well, I gotta be going because this doesn’t look so good for me to be talking to you in this neighborhood.”

  I kinda felt bad about that. I felt that way then, and I even feel that way now, so many years later. I’ve thought about it a lot through the years, and actually it was that racial divide that got to me. At the time, there was no thought of my being on any side, other than the one that I was on, which was being a policeman. But I look back on that sometimes with regret and I say to myself that maybe I was on the wrong side. I missed an opportunity in history. If I had it to do over again, I don’t know. Maybe I would’ve been a freedom marcher.

  KENNETH S. DAVIDSON

  Hedge fund manager, investment adviser

  (1945– )

  There was an empty lot next door to our building on Bronx Park East. The park right across the street had a playground and a lot of grass space where kids could run and play, but the lot was our place of choice. The land there was hilly and rocky with thick weeds and snakelike paths. There, we were away from supervision, away from the people in the park. That’s what I liked about it. It was our own place where we were able to light fires.

  There were eight of us in our gang, all from our same building. There were, maybe, three years separating the oldest from the youngest. Matty and Jimmy were the oldest, Mitch, Peter, and Steve were next, followed by Andy, Henry, and me. Age, overall toughness, and courage established ranking in the gang. When it came to courage, none of us could beat Mitch. He was slightly built and unafraid of any confrontation with anyone of any age. From the age of eight he lived with his grandparents because he’d been orphaned. His grandfather was a distinguished-looking German immigrant who always wore a cardigan sweater while he listened to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast on Saturday afternoons. I don’t think he was the kind of role model that Mitch responded to. Mitch was described by the building tenants as a troublemaker, although some just called him “troubled.”

  Mitch was fascinated by fire and was never without matches in his pocket. He had book matches or those white-tipped Diamond brand matches that came in their own boxes. At age nine he could light a white-tip with one hand and a flick of his thumbnail, which he probably learned from the George Raft or Hopalong Cassidy movies we used to see.

  We helped ourselves to the discarded newspapers in the basement of our building to help start the fires in the lot. As soon as the super, Mr. Hartmann, caught us gathering papers and junk, he knew what we were going to do, and he’d put a stop to it. Sometimes we’d be lucky enough to get a fire started before the super could stop us and put it out. To us, fire meant defiance and excitement, especially since I was expressly told not to fool with it. “You could burn your eyes out,” was my mother’s warning.

  Our kitchen faced the lot and I can still see my mother leaning out of the window when she’d smell the smoke and see the flames rising. She’d whistle a two-tone birdcall that stopped me dead in my tracks. Then with her loud, shrill voice she’d blast my name until it echoed through the lot. Ken-neth! It was Pavlovian. I would stop whatever I was doing and head home to my apartment. At other times when she smelled the smoke on my clothes she’d say, “There was a fire. Who had the matches?” It was usually Mitch so I never had to lie.

  Years later I got in touch with Andy, who had been my best friend in the days of the lots and the fires. When I asked if he knew w
hat had become of Mitch he said, “I think he became a social worker somewhere in New Jersey.” A social worker? If you had told me that he was running a numbers racket somewhere I would’ve believed it, but a social worker?

  DANIEL LIBESKIND

  Architect, founder of Studio Daniel Libeskind

  (1946– )

  We came to America from Israel on the SS Constitution on a voyage that was very long and very rough. After maybe fourteen days on the ship, my sister and I were awakened at five in the morning by my mother. “Get up. You’re going to see the Statue of Liberty!” It was very powerful and moving. And then we were looking at the skyline of Manhattan. To see the cluster of skyscrapers—I was thirteen years old and had never seen these buildings before—was like a fata morgana. It was not just the massiveness of the buildings, but that people made them. It was like something out of a dream. That stuck with me. It was unbelievable in every sense.

  As we got off the boat, what struck us was how friendly people were to us. Why were people so nice to us? When we went to Israel from Poland, Israel was only eight years old. It wasn’t like it is now. It wasn’t so easy to live there. Even jobs were hard to get.

  We were probably some of the last immigrants to arrive in New York by the Statue of Liberty like that iconic picture of the immigrants on a ship. And then we went straight to the Bronx. We went to the Bronx and that was it! We went straight from the boat, literally. We didn’t speak English. None of us. Not a word.

  Before the war my mother was an anarchist. She didn’t believe in government. She knew the founders of the cooperative apartment buildings in the Bronx, the Amalgamated. Some of them were old anarchists from Emma Goldman’s time, but there were also Socialists, and Social Democrats, and so just through the grapevine our name, through my mother, was why we were able to get an apartment there. In the beginning, we lived in the Sholem Aleichem houses. In Israel, at that time, Yiddish was neglected and not very well tolerated. Hebrew was and still is the official language. They didn’t even want to talk about Yiddish. Can you imagine what it meant to us that there were buildings named after Sholem Aleichem, the beloved Yiddish writer? Then we moved to Building Number 1, the first residential cooperative building in the Amalgamated Houses, the oldest middle-income co-op in America.

  Mr. and Mrs. Straus, very elderly Jews who were our friends, lived in a small apartment there, but in it they had the complete works of Goethe, Schiller, the music of Bach. They were highly intellectual people even though they were working class. The people in the Amalgamated all worked in factories, but when I look back they had more books and literature than any Harvard professor would have today. The love of learning of music and art—how lucky we were. There was a cultural program every week, a small performance, or a poetry reading. There were gatherings. There were places where painters could paint. We adapted easily because we could speak Yiddish and Polish with all the people around us. We thought that we had come to Utopia.

  My mother would say to me, Never worry about what other people tell you. Don’t ever buckle to authority. Don’t think that if you’re getting good grades that means you’re doing well. Don’t be under the illusion that everything that is being fed to you is the truth. My father was also very strong. He was very mild, very quiet, but he was very principled. We were not practicing Jews, even though my mother came from a very prestigious Hasidic dynasty, the Gerrer Rabbis. They were like the popes of Poland. People used to fall on the ground to kiss the ground, literally. My cousins are all in Mea Shearim, the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Israel, with their fur hats and their payes. My cousins—first cousins—have sixteen kids each. My parents rejected this. My father was completely unreligious. Even to his dying day, when religious people came to his hospital room to speak to him or to say prayers, he’d say, Don’t come in. And yet when he died he saw Hebrew letters. He saw aleph, gimel. He was a Yiddishist.

  In Poland, where I was born, I started playing music on the accordion, very early on. My parents were afraid to bring in a piano because of the neighbors and their anti-Semitism. Even though it was after the war, my parents were afraid of bringing attention to themselves. The accordion is like a piano, but it’s portable. I wound up playing that strange instrument and I wound up playing in classical venues because I played only classical music, which I transcribed myself. Mostly baroque music, Bach and so on. Even though I was very short I had this very large accordion with four octaves.

  When we were in Israel, I won a competition sponsored by the American Israeli Foundation, which brought me to America with my family. Itzhak Perlman won that same year. I remember that Isaac Stern was the head of the jury. Stern said to me, “Why are you playing this small piano?” But, you know, it’s strange, when you play vertically, like on the accordion, it’s hard to play horizontally, like on the piano. Then my interests drifted, because I loved art. I loved painting.

  One of the first people I met in America was an Italian American, Tony Roccanova. I met him in junior high school. I didn’t speak a word of English. He was sitting next to me, so I’d pick up something. What is this? It’s a pencil. What is this? It’s a bottle. What is this? A cup. So I had a list of all these words, and that’s how I learned English. What do you call this? I had this list, which I memorized. We became friends and he became an architect as well. I’m still friends with him.

  I found that people were not fake in the Bronx. I never met anybody with pretentions there. I never met anyone who was phony. People were very down to earth whether they were Jewish or Irish or Italian or African American.

  If you’re born here, you take what you have here for granted. My father was a Holocaust survivor. Until the day he died, and he was ninety when he died, he said, “If Americans knew what they had here, they would kiss the ground.”

  My father was very talented in art, but he never had a chance to explore it. He never had any education. When I was in the Bronx High School of Science, there were a lot of bright kids, doing experiments in genetics and physics. You had to bring in a project that you were working on. This was the height of the Cold War, so I decided to build a perfect model of an ideal nuclear shelter. I don’t know why I thought that would be a great project. My father was a brilliant miniaturist and he built these exact replicas of cans of soups, which he painted and which I then used to stack the shelves. I also had a miniature mother, a father, and their two kids in the shelter.

  Our apartment in the Bronx was small, and when I went to Cooper Union we had to make models and drawings often using a T-square. In our kitchen, there was one Formica table, with large rounded corners. I never knew if my T-square was on the right angle or if it was on the curve of that table. Those rounded edges began to play a big role in my thinking about architecture. Everyone always talks about the straight edge. Why are other angles so neglected?

  I loved the Bronx. Maybe once I went on a trip to Brooklyn. That was like going to a place as far away as Africa. Even Manhattan seemed to be a distant country, but of course the subways were very cheap and the city offered so many ways to educate yourself. Museums were free. You could go to lectures. You could go to concerts. My education was in this cultural arena. Before that explosion of culture in the city, I remember being in the Museum of Modern Art virtually alone. I was also in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in these huge rooms, where I would sketch. I loved the building itself. I thought I was in Rome.

  My upbringing was totally influenced by the fact that my parents were Holocaust survivors. Totally. I grew up in the void. I was born in Poland after the war. There had been millions of Jews before the war and there was no one left. I was walking with my father when I was a little boy in Poland. We would meet somebody who he didn’t know and he would say in Polish, “Are you Amhu?” using the Hebrew word for Jewish. If they were, they’d immediately break into Yiddish. It was like a password. A secret code to find out if the person was a Jew.

  We’re now finishing a building in Warsaw. The tallest residential tower on th
e site of a former Stalin-era Palace of Culture building. It’s right next to where my mother was born. It was an old Hasidic neighborhood and of course it was all bombed out. My new building is right across the street.

  When we used to go to Warsaw, that Palace of Culture was the dominating symbol of the city and it was such an oppressive symbol, because it was built by Stalin to oppress the Polish people. And now my building is a totally different form. It has nothing to do with what was there. It’s something free. And right near there is a memorial to my mother’s family, a memorial to Rabbi Alter of that Gerrer Hasidic dynasty. It’s a significant memorial. It means a lot to me to be able to come full circle.

  Architecture isn’t about stones and concrete. It’s more about storytelling. Everybody has a story. Architecture beyond its being a science, an art, is a storytelling profession. Every building that’s meaningful tells you a story. Only late in my life I discovered from my father that his father was an itinerant storyteller. He went from village to village telling stories. That was his job. He walked from shtetl to shtetl sitting in the market, telling stories.

  I’ve had four lifetimes. There was a lifetime when I was a musician.

  And there was a lifetime when I was a student and theoretician.

  The third lifetime was when I was in Berlin for the Jewish Museum.

  And the fourth lifetime was when I won the competition to oversee Ground Zero. Four lifetimes.

  It’s not a fake idea, America, New York, the Bronx. It’s not some myth. It’s a reality.