by Arlene Alda
I had no idea until I started working at the Department of Education, years later, that I had grown up in the lowest-performing district in the whole city. You know how that saying goes, “You don’t know you’re poor until you’ve seen rich,” right? I had no idea. No idea.
I’m looking out the window in my Harlem apartment again. When I think about home and I think about the Bronx, it means so much to me to meet other people who grew up in the Bronx. We have this affinity. I appreciate it.
AMAR RAMASAR
Principal dancer, New York City Ballet
(1981– )
When I was twelve, my uncle Danny showed me tapes of ballet dancers and asked if I’d like to do ballet. When I watched the tapes I saw them handling the women and I was like, Huh? You get to touch them there? It was quite a shocker. My uncle took me on the subway to the American Ballet School for an audition. They literally put me at the barre, lifted up my leg, played some music, told me to step in time to the music, and they accepted me. When I got in, I was extremely surprised because I had never done a ballet step before that audition. In class, I found out that it wasn’t easy. I really struggled, but that struggle fueled my love for dance because I took it on as a challenge.
After starting ballet, I felt different than the other boys on my block and so I actually kept it a secret for a while. When I’d come home and play baseball outside with the kids they’d ask, “Where’ve you been for the past four hours?” “I’ve been in Manhattan doing this and that.” When I finally told them I was doin’ ballet, oh what I got from those guys. They were like, “What? You’re wearin’ tutus and all that stuff?” “You don’t understand. It’s the opposite. I get to dance with these women and hold them and touch them and lift them.” When I danced in an eighth-grade talent show then they were like, Wow. The immediate respect I got was incredible.
Before my lessons, I was just a Bronx kid having a great time enjoying my childhood, an ordinary kid going to P.S. 67, playing on the baseball team and having block parties with everybody. In school, I loved science and was also the citywide champion of the storytelling contest.
I first competed in those contests when I was in fifth grade. I had to memorize a story of not more than three hundred words from any children’s book or story that had a message. I won the boroughwide the first year, lost the citywide, but wound up winning the all-citywide in my third year, which was seventh grade. I won with Why the Sky Is Far Away. It was a good story with a great message about not being wasteful. That was the beginning of performing for me, to have an audience intrigued with a story by how you communicate. I had no idea it would be so important in my current life.
In our neighborhood there was a definite ethnic mix. There were a lot of Puerto Ricans, a lot of Spanish influences, and a lot of Jamaicans. My mother is Puerto Rican and my father is Indian from Tobago. Our neighborhood was multicultural. The minorities were the majority and I got along with everyone. I always felt at home because I had an even bigger family. My nickname was Kool-Aid, because I was always smiling. I had the Kool-Aid smile, like in the ads. Hey, Kool-Aid.
My parents divorced when I was around twelve or thirteen. My mother was supportive of whatever I wanted to do but my father, on the other hand … It was quite difficult for him to accept my choices, because he was a marine, and he himself was brought up in a strict way. I think the crucial issue was that when I applied for high school, my ballet was just starting its fire. I was accepted into Bronx High School of Science and also LaGuardia School for Performing Arts. When I chose LaGuardia, it was a big blow to my father. What are you doing? He didn’t realize what I could achieve with ballet and he didn’t realize how important the arts were either. He backed himself out of my life for a while. There were years when I didn’t speak to him, not even on holidays. I basically created my own life without him for several years, working hard on my own without his influence.
While I was dancing as a principal in the New York City Ballet, my father and I got together again and now we can talk as gentlemen. He explained that he was so brokenhearted with the decision about ballet and school that I made, but realized that his actions didn’t help in any way.
My mom is so fantastic. Without having any knowledge of the arts at all she just allowed me to follow my path. When I got into the ballet, I called my mother and said, “Mom, I got my contract for the New York City Ballet corps.” She said, “Baby, that’s fantastic. What does that mean?” She had no idea what it all meant.
There are so few people of color dancing. The roles I’ve danced, I would never have guessed that I would ever have danced. It may be because I’ve taken my race out of it. I approached it as an artist, totally believing that a boy from the Bronx could play a prince in the Nutcracker—could do the Cavalier and be a classical ballet dancer. That’s what I focused on. My background was a plus when I played Bernardo in West Side Story with the mambo and salsa, because that’s what I grew up with. Okay! It was like being in the living room with my momma. I also did Fancy Free by Jerome Robbins. It takes place in 1945 in New York City but who would’ve seen an Indian sailor walking down the street at that time? The New York City Ballet allowed that to happen. You have the style and the character, and you portray him the way you see, from the inside.
I guess I had a lot of confidence growing up. I had great teachers. Great family. I had support. The world was my oyster. I didn’t realize that, but I lived it. I felt like I could do anything. Anything and everything.
When I was at the School of American Ballet, though, from the ages of twelve to nineteen, I had a lot of growing up to do. You’re given a lot of responsibility on the one hand, but you’re given a lot of freedom on the other. They treat you as an adult. So I broke rules by going out and drinking and being with a lot of ladies. Living a free young college life at the age of sixteen. But I learned that if you play hard, you have to work hard. I got married two years ago and I’ve settled down now.
It makes me feel great to have these memories. Manhattan wasn’t home until recently, when I moved there. It was always associated with work and studying, but the Bronx is different. It was, and I think always will be, home, comfort, love.
GABRIELLE SALVATTO
Principal dancer, Dance Theatre of Harlem
(1989– )
I danced in my first Nutcracker at the Bronx Dance Theatre when I was around six. I was cast as a Brat. The Brats were the two little girls and one boy in the house who basically tried to wreck the Nutcracker by throwing things around. It was a good fit for me since in my own family I was the younger child who wanted the things that my sister had. As a Brat, I could be onstage and turn that into something beautiful.
Since the Nutcracker was something done in the holiday season, I associated dancing with beauty and magic.
At that same dancing school we also had a teacher with curly hair and a thick accent from the Islands. I thought she was like my secret mom because I thought we looked alike. We did this wild dance with masks on and our hair standing out. It was crazy! I loved the intensity of it—that freedom of movement while running around.
I went to school in Riverdale but our home was near Arthur Avenue in Little Italy of the Bronx. My mother was a teacher in Tarrytown, so I think she found out where the best school district was in the Bronx and that’s where my sister and I went.
I got to be part of Eliot Feld’s Ballet Tech program from third grade to fifth grade. They would pick up two children from public schools in each borough and bus them to downtown Manhattan. That was the beginning of my formal training, so the dynamic of academic work and going to dance after school—of going into the city from Riverdale—was always very exciting to me. That started the dedication and the serious training for me.
My mother encouraged me to be independent by teaching me how to use the subway. She took me once, showed me where to get off, and said, “You got it.” I was just about eleven. She instilled that independence in me but was also cautious. “Stand in the fi
rst car. Don’t wear your nice headphones on. Don’t talk to strangers. Come right home.” I was very excited because no one else I knew took the train alone. And then the devastation of 9/11 happened.
It seems so long ago now. I had no fear until then. I was at the Professional Performing Arts School where I had started middle school, on West Forty-Eighth Street in Manhattan. My sister was at Hunter College, which is on East Sixty-Eighth Street. I didn’t have a cell phone, but my mother paged me on my beeper to tell me what had happened and what to do. I called my mom from a pay phone and she told me that Tiana, my older sister, would pick me up. There was no way for my parents to get me since they were both working outside the city. My mother insisted that we not go to a subway, not only because most of the trains weren’t running but also because she had a fear that the subways might be blown up. So my sister and I started walking home to the Bronx. We walked for about five hours, stopping for food at a Spanish restaurant somewhere in the Nineties, but by the time we got to 125th Street we took the A train to 207th Street and then the bus from there to Fordham Road. I sat on the floor of the bus, because I was exhausted, not only from the walking but also from all the textbooks I had with me since it was the beginning of the school year.
There’s a terrible stereotype that the Bronx is not safe. I felt more unsafe in the Lincoln Center area where I went to LaGuardia High School than I did when I went home to the Bronx. Right across the street from our school was the Martin Luther King School, where they had to install metal detectors at the entrance. At LaGuardia there were kids from all the boroughs, kids with pink hair and kids in general who may have looked different. We weren’t allowed out for lunch because the school officials thought that the Martin Luther King kids would beat us up.
I also never felt totally at home in Manhattan because there was a contrast of wealth that I wasn’t aware of in the Bronx. You would have a beautiful brownstone and then a public housing project. And in the Lincoln Center neighborhood, west of the theaters, it wasn’t particularly residential. I was not aware of a sense of community. I went back home to the Bronx on the train and I always felt safe going home.
From the ages of ten to eighteen, I trained at the School of American Ballet, which was a classical ballet company, but not very diverse at all. At the time I think I was the only ethnic dancer in the program. It didn’t really affect me particularly until I went to college when people questioned me about how it felt being the only African American there. During that time, I had no idea that being a role model was important because I thought of myself as just a dancer, like everyone else. But later on, going back and forth to the Dance Theatre of Harlem, where I trained in the summer, I met a lot of African American kids. There’s a lot more diversity in contemporary dance than there is in ballet. It was then I began realizing that there were very few female African American dancers in ballet and that these dancers didn’t have serious role models.
Dance is a great activity and a fun thing for kids to do, but to go further with it you have to be very serious and you have to have someone to look up to. Someone similar to you so that you can see yourself achieving like they have. Aesha Ash was an African American dancer in the New York City Ballet and was the only African American dancer there. She is so beautiful, both physically and mentally, so she was a huge role model for me.
The battle I had between wanting to continue to dance or study academics more seriously was something that I dealt with my whole life, it seems. I honestly wasn’t sure if I had the stomach to try to be a professional dancer, so I went to Juilliard, which I thought was the best combination of academics and dance. I continued to dance at Juilliard and proved to myself that I could do it.
I’m biracial, but I was brought up Italian. I loved the food—and the bread. My grandma always made her own sauce. She’d probably not be happy if she were still alive and knew that we’ve started using jar sauce. I grew up with the importance of cooking and of having meals together. A lot of kids my age at that time didn’t eat with their families, but we ate together every night, no matter what. We had home-cooked meals. A lot of pasta. Sausage. The best. Amazing that I didn’t get fat.
My grandmother was one of six girls in her family and grew up very Italian, even though she was brought up in America. She both understood Italian and cursed in Italian. She instilled in me a sense of pride because growing up she herself had little but worked very hard her whole life and was proud of that.
My mother’s and grandmother’s work ethic influenced my sister and me a lot. As soon as we were sixteen both my sister and I were told to get jobs. And we did. My sister worked at the Bronx Zoo and I worked at Darryl’s, a clothing boutique on the Upper West Side. Darryl is still a great friend of mine.
I have a strong sense of my Italian heritage, extending even to the Italians not liking the Albanians. In the early 2000s, when my grandmother was still alive, the Albanians started owning and staffing some of the shops in our neighborhood. There was DeLillo’s Italian bakery and Palumbo’s bakery across the street, which began hiring Albanians as staff. She’d say, “I don’t think the pastries are as good. Very Albanian. Go get me a cannoli. Don’t go to Palumbo’s.”
The whole of it, even with the conflict involved, was still very comforting to me. I knew the food. I knew the shops. We had our own public library. Everything I needed was basically in one place and I felt safe. It’s also so much cheaper than the city.
I’m in the same private house I grew up in, but now I’ve taken over the second floor and my mom lives on the first floor. Living there is affordable, even though our neighborhood is changing a little because of Fordham University, which means the cost of housing is going up. Down the block from my house Fordham has taken an entire complex and turned it into dorms. We now have, like, smoothie shops in our neighborhood. We never had smoothie shops in the Bronx. You know, frozen yogurt. Parts of the borough are becoming more trendy—and maybe that’s a good thing.
ERIK ZEIDLER
Naturalist, businessman
(1991– )
When I was in middle school I was seen as a bit of a troublemaker, doing things against the rules, like finding ways to go outside to look for snakes, and talking when I shouldn’t have been. Maybe teachers picked on me a little because of that. My father worked for the Parks Department and there was one teacher who he helped out when a tree fell on her house in a storm. From that point on, things in school changed for me, for the better. I could see that someone was looking out for me. Someone was there smiling, saying, “Hey…” There was a changed attitude. That teacher would tell others, “Oh, that’s Erik. He’s okay. You can leave him alone.” My father’s job not only helped me out in school, it also sparked my early interests.
From the time I was three or four years old, I was interested in snakes and animals and nature in general, so I read books and watched as many movies on those subjects as I could. I was very passionate about them. I didn’t have friends that shared my interests but I had friends I’d kind of bring along when I looked for things like giant snakes or snapping turtles or lizards. When I was nine years old, I started going to Pelham Bay Park, which is a surprisingly good place to look for things in the wild. My father would take me there because his coworkers told him about snakes in the area. It’s not easy finding them. Where are the nooks and crannies where snakes would hide? It’s never a dull moment and always gets your brain going. When there are woods and fields, they’re usually teeming with animals if you know how to look for them. My biggest awakening was seeing that a very urban community still had these possibilities.
A few times, my father had mentioned that there were snapping turtles in the Bronx River. I had heard a lot of stories, like, Oh, we saw a six-foot snake down the street and this and that, so I was skeptical but I had to go look for myself. In Bronx Park, in the river, I’d go in the water, sometimes wading up to my chest or going under entirely. But I actually did find these snapping turtles. I’m talking about fifty pounds. Th
ree feet from head to tail. Turtles you might find in Africa and South America. What also amazed me about the Bronx River was that it was crystal clear. Unless it had just recently rained, which would muddy it up, it was crystal clear. So beautiful. It was like a secret I had discovered. The whole experience there was like opening presents when you’re not sure what the present will be, whether it’s going to be something you really want or nothing. Seeing and finding these giant turtles in the river is a present I’ll never forget.
When I was at Bronx Science, I did a research project about the turtles, so during that time I actually caught about three hundred and twenty-five individual snapping turtles. I was able to trap each turtle where it lived and give every turtle a number on its shell. I measured them and weighed them and I discovered that there were about seven hundred snapping turtles living in the Bronx. Some discoveries I made were very surprising. The turtles in the Bronx grow larger than the ones upstate. Usually when a pond gets too crowded, turtles leave and go find another pond. Here, in the river, they can’t do that. After decades of being in that situation, only the biggest survive. I’d commonly find turtles that were just a few inches shy of the world record. I found some of the densest populations of snapping turtles that were ever recorded anywhere in the world—in the Bronx. I also found that there was a disease that they were getting, that hadn’t been recorded anywhere else. Part of their faces were being eaten away by bacteria or very serious diseases. Some of the snapping turtles were able to live to between thirty and fifty years old, which shows how tough these animals are.