Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  Paolucci’s, on Mulberry between Grand and Hester Streets—still my favorite Italian restaurant—is also run by the third generation. I like these generations. How did I discover it? Same way. Walked by and smelled a lot of garlic coming from up a stoop. It’s a rustic, beat-up place. But the food . . . They made the best chicken cacciatore in New York City—wine and mushrooms, little bits of ham, green pepper. I used to love the house salad: anchovies, Genoa salami, roasted peppers, pimientos, lots of fresh tomatoes chopped up, lettuce of course. They’ve named the salad after me.

  Some people say there was no food in New York before Henri Soulé. But the knockwurst was here, the herrings were here, the knishes were here. The cuisine Soulé brought to New York was for the Lutèce crowd, the moneyed crowd. But people without money could eat well too. At McGinniss on 48th and Broadway, you could get a roast beef sandwich that doesn’t exist today on rye bread with seeds. Ratner’s was great for its stuffed onion rolls. Better than the chopped vegetarian liver and the chopped eggs and onions, the vegetable soup, the lima bean soup, and the potato soup were the onion rolls. Their waiters were unique. Their Yiddish accents, their seriousness, their sense of humor, and their style: “Joe, hurry up, bring it over.” It was New York.

  As a kid, I’d go to the Automat, dropping nickels into the machine. The vegetables were five cents when I first went there, then it became ten, then twenty-five. The bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich on a nice goyisha white bread—I loved it. As I got older, the baked beans became a huge favorite of mine. And the mashed potatoes. You couldn’t find them like that anywhere else. And the spaghetti—it wasn’t Italian; it was a different quality. For my three vegetables, I’d have spaghetti, mashed potatoes, and baked beans and let the juices mix with each other.

  I have this dream of opening up my own restaurant, Sid’s Place. I’d serve Dave’s original egg cream—I have the recipe—McGinniss’s roast beef, which was on a spit, the mashed potatoes and baked beans from the Automat, and my favorite Italian dishes. It would be a funky place where people could hang out and listen to music. We’d play Judy Garland and Beatles records, and Jacques Brel, whom I love, Sinatra, and Nat King Cole, and Tony Bennett. . . .

  Part One

  1

  On the Sidewalks of New York

  MICKEY ALPERT: Whenever I met kids who grew up in Manhattan, it was as if I came from Toledo, Ohio, or someplace in Iowa instead of the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. They seemed so much more sophisticated and more worldly than me. Their exposure was so much greater. They went to museums on a regular basis; I would only go to museums on school trips. They went skating in Central Park, to the movies “downtown.” Even though geographically we were maybe ten miles apart, we were from different worlds.

  JOHN TAURANAC: When I was a kid, my father was always being asked by proper suburbanites how he could think of raising my sister and me in New York City. My mother died when I was nine, and my father was a single parent before the phrase was even coined. He worked very hard to keep everything together. “Raising them in the city is paradise,” he would tell his questioners. “It’s home. It’s where people should be.”

  JANE BEVANS: I was born in 1940, the youngest of three kids. I lived with my mother and father, my sister and brother, my mother’s father and my father’s mother, and a maid to take care of all these people in a four-bedroom apartment at 310 West 79th Street. We had a postman who delivered the mail three times a day, walking up the street with a big letter case on his back. We had a German couple, Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman, living underneath us in apartment 5E. They were very rigid, and they scared me. Of course we were a bunch of kids jumping on their heads, which is why they were always screaming at us. Aside from them though, I wasn’t aware of an influx of immigrants, even though many of my friends’ parents and grandparents must have come from Europe.

  Mayor Robert F. Wagner buying a pumpkin from a young street vendor, 1958.

  I thought all the kids in the neighborhood were Jewish. Although there was Patsy, who was a year ahead of me. She was black. And there was Parvis Nafasion, who came from Persia. I had to teach him English. He lived on the eleventh floor of our building, and his apartment smelled so bizarre. We used to race home from school together. If he got there first, he’d get in the elevator, push the eleventh floor, and then all the floors on the way down. I had to wait a long time.

  We were the most integrated Jewish people ever to exist on the West Side. We had a Christmas tree. The first time I was in Temple was when Carol Dvorkin was bat mitzvahed in ’52. For Passover we had a seder. We ate matzoh and matzoh ball soup and gefilte fish. But we also ate bread.

  My father’s mother’s family came here somewhere between 1845 and 1860. My mother’s father was Romanian. He had an accent and sat at the head of the table. I sat next to him. If I put my elbows on the table, he’d knock them off with his knife. My grandmother was the world’s worst Jewish cook. She could cook a liver within an inch of its life; the tongue of your shoe didn’t begin to describe it. Her apple pie was black on the bottom.

  Every Sunday morning Grandma would send me to Zabar’s, which was a tiny grocery store back then, to buy “stomach salmon” (we weren’t allowed to say “belly lox”—that was too vulgar). On one side was the great smoked fish counter and on the other side was a counter where Mr. Zabar would put your purchase in a paper bag and total up the prices on it with a pencil. “Vadaya vant, honey?” he’d say to me. “Oh, you’re Mrs. Apt’s granddaughter. I recognize your voice; I recognize the ‘stomach salmon.’ Anything-gelse?”

  I remember when Grandma took my sister and me to see President Roosevelt. We were both dressed in the very same watch-plaid coats with hats to match, and standing on a stoop we waved our little American flags when we saw him ride by in an open car that went up Riverside Drive and onto the highway. It was very exciting. But I have no memories of when Roosevelt died. It wasn’t a big event in our house because my father was a Republican.

  He was a CPA and when I asked him what that meant, he said he was a bookkeeper. For years, I had an image that he dusted books, and I didn’t understand why he would go to the office every day and dust books. My mother also worked. She was in the fashion industry, and since she was the dominant one in the family, we lived in a house that was filled with fashion. Everything had to be beautiful. She was beautiful, five feet seven with brown wavy hair and green eyes like saucers. She always wore gorgeous clothes, the kind you would expect Katherine Hepburn to wear in the movies. I can picture her walking down the very long hall in our apartment in one of her creations, with stockings that had seams running up the back, four-inch high-heeled shoes, and a green straw pinwheel hat with cherries around it that practically filled the hallway. People were always staring at her. They’d stop and ask me, “Is your mother Bette Davis?”

  She loved to dress my sister and me. We were the first Barbie dolls. For my sixth-grade graduation, she designed my outfit and had it made at her factory. It was a red gingham blouse with elastic through the top so it went off the shoulders, and a three-tier red gingham skirt. For my sister’s graduation, she made me a dress of pink polished cotton with colored polka dots.

  When we were little, she bought our clothes at Best & Company on Fifth and 56th. I remember the feel of the place more than the way it looked. It was quiet; I had the feeling it was carpeted. Shopping at Best & Company was a solemn occasion for me, the closest thing I could imagine to going to a cathedral.

  Our building was filled with children, and we played out on the street. I learned to ride a bike on the street; I scraped my knees roller skating on the street. We played Chinese American, which is a form of handball, against the wall of the building on the corner. We played hopscotch, ringalevio, capture the flag. We were on the street all day.

  Or we were in Riverside Park. From 79th Street, the park goes south to 72nd Street and north beyond Grant’s Tomb at 122nd Street. But my world stopped at 84th Street. There’s a roadway in the park tha
t goes down a big hill and up a big hill where we went sleighing, or bike riding, seeing how far you could get up the hill before you had to start moving your legs again.

  The 79th Street entrance to the Henry Hudson Parkway from Riverside Park was my Cinderella castle. There were two staircases with wide stairs that led down to the harbor. At the bottom was this big rotunda that the cars went around, and out of the center was a fountain with water coming out. Under the roadbed were the railroad tracks where the Pennsylvania Railroad traveled. You could look in these grated windows to where the trains ran underneath. And then you came out in the park and there was the Hudson River, which was clean and pristine. On the other side there was nothing but the Spry sign. During that funny eleven-, twelve-, thirteen-year-old time when I wanted to be alone, Riverside Park was my garden. I would lie on the grass by myself for hours.

  We went to P.S. 9, a Dutch-looking building with gables on 82nd and West End Avenue. There were three rooms on each side of the hallway, and on the day that we had assembly the walls of the rooms slid back all the way to the end of the whole floor. So you stayed in your seats in your room and you were in the auditorium. I can still hear the sound of the walls as they moved. I remember my father coming to assembly when I was playing the part of an Indian in a play about Columbus coming to America. My father never came to anything so I was so excited he was there. I kept looking at him. He waved to me, and I waved to him, and I forgot my one line.

  From the time I was seven, my sister Lee and I walked to school alone. It was a three-block walk along West End Avenue from 79th to 82nd Street. And after school we walked over one block to Broadway, our Main Street, to Benny’s Candy Store, which was between 82nd and 81st on the west side of the street. Then we continued on Broadway to 79th, where we turned down the block and came home.

  Benny’s was a true candy store. It was very, very tiny with comic books on the right, candy on the left, and a soda counter in the back. We went there every day after school to get candy. Then we would stop to say hello to Grandma and Aunt Sadie, who sat on the benches in the median along Broadway at 79th Street. All the old Jewish people would sit there. Every day Aunt Sadie would say “Ooh—you scared me!” and “Ah, you’ve grown so, I didn’t recognize you.” I used to wonder how much you could change or grow in a day.

  Schraft’s restaurant was on Broadway, a little farther uptown. I loved to go there; it was a very big deal. Ellen Cohen, a girl in my class at P.S. 9, used to go to Schraft’s for lunch every day. Her parents were divorced, and, I gather, her mother didn’t have time to make her lunch. One day she asked me to go with her.

  When the waitress asked me what I wanted, I said, “It’s all right. I have my lunch.” She was very sweet. She obviously knew Ellen, and she brought me a milk to have with my lunch even though I had no money.

  Afterward we raced back to school but were late. Our teacher, Mrs. Bow, asked Ellen why she was late. Ellen said, “The waitress was slow,” and that was fine. The teacher asked me why I was late. I said, “Well, I went to lunch with Ellen.”

  “What did you eat?”

  “I had my sandwich with me.”

  She lambasted me. “That woman has to earn a living. How can you bring a sandwich to a restaurant?”

  She was so mean. I was humiliated in front of the class. I had no idea I had done something wrong.

  But I got even with her. In those days, the teacher had a locker in the back of the classroom where she kept her coat and pocketbook and a little mirror. At the end of the day when she dismissed us, she’d open up her locker and put on her coat. I told everyone that when Mrs. Bow put her hat on I saw her wig slide off.

  On Saturdays we went to the movies at either the RKO 81st Street or the Loews 83rd Street on Broadway. It cost twenty-five cents. We went in at 12:30 and were out at 5:30. The kids sat in the balcony with their matron, a woman in a white uniform who carried a flashlight. I can almost remember the music from the newsreels and the crisscross of the floodlights—the beauty pageant went this way, and the war went that way. Then came the cartoons and then the serials. And finally the double feature.

  The Museum of Natural History was our museum. Every time we had to be occupied for the day, we were sent there. Grandma would say, “I’m not going to be home today. Take the girls to the museum.”

  “Do we have to go?” my sister and I would cry.

  “Yes.”

  I thought it was the most boring place in the world with those stuffed animals in glass cases, the moles under the ground, the big bear over the ground, all the Indian exhibits. It was grimy and dark like so many of the buildings were in those days because they were heated by coal. One of the great sounds of my childhood was the coal going down the chute. But it made the city filthy. We were dirty. When we came in and were told, “Wash your hands for dinner,” there was a good reason. You could see the coal dust.

  Our world was circumscribed; there were places we were allowed to go and places we were not allowed to go. Broadway was the frontier. We never walked on Columbus Avenue; it was dangerous. My grandmother told me that. We had the sense the city was changing, heard that “those people” were coming in.

  I led a very proscribed small-town life until I went to Joan of Arc Junior High School on 93rd Street. It drew from P.S. 9, which was west of Broadway, but also from P.S. 87, which was east of Broadway and picked up more of the Puerto Rican kids. Joan of Arc was a very integrated junior high school and a very rough place, like something out of West Side Story. There were kids who didn’t speak English. The boys seemed much older and much more sexual than us. They dressed in black pants and white shirts and carried knives in their socks. There was a lot of pushing. You stayed out of the way. You went to and from school with your friends, traveled in packs.

  But I was so happy there. I was twelve and on my own. My class was the first to graduate from P.S. 9 after the sixth grade, while my sister’s class was the last to graduate after the eighth grade. Since we were a year apart, she stayed at PS. 9 for the seventh and eighth grades, while I went on to Joan of Arc. So I was finally able to get away from my sister. I also had a bigger allowance than she did because I had to buy my lunch and take the bus to school. I was very little, but those were the two biggest years of my life.

  Nevertheless, I knew I didn’t want to go on to Julia Richman High School. Word was out: you didn’t want to go there. I decided to apply to the High School of Music and Art. I had done my first oil paint at the Albert Pels Art School on 71st Street and Broadway, where we used to go for art lesson on Friday evenings. When I was twelve and Lee thirteen, we transferred to the Art Career School in the Flatiron Building on 23rd Street. The best part was going up to the very top of the building, where you could go outside and touch both walls at once. I learned to draw a loafer there, which was kind of boring, but I also put my portfolio together for Music and Art High School.

  They used to call Music and Art the Castle on the Hill because it looked like a Gothic castle up on 135th Street and St. Nicholas Terrace right next to City College. In addition to all the academics, students at Music and Art took three periods of art or music a day. There was a semiannual performance and a semiannual art show. There were orchestras, chamber music groups. You went to the fifth floor and it was as if you plowed into all these instruments from the harp to the cello, from the bassoon to the kettle drum. You walked past the art rooms and the smell of oil paint, pastels, clay would fill the hall.

  Everyone at Music and Art was talented. It was a sexy group of kids, an artsy group. Kids came from all over the city, learned to go all over. The subway was the lifeline. I submitted my portfolio to Music and Art, and I got in. I was on my way.

  HERMAN BADILLO: I came to New York as a young boy in 1941 on a boat called the Marine Tiger. It was very early on in the Puerto Rican migration but one of the last by boat. When I passed the Statue of Liberty, I cried like everybody else.

  The town I came from in Puerto Rico had been decimated in a tuber
culosis epidemic. My father died when I was a year old, my mother when I was five years old. What I remember most of all from that time is walking to the cemetery and going to funerals. When I arrived in New York, my aunt who brought me here was unable to take care of me because she didn’t have a job. So she sent me to an uncle in Chicago. He couldn’t take care of me either so he sent me to an uncle in California. I stayed there for about a year and a half. By then, my aunt had gotten a job and an apartment, and so I came to live with her on 103rd Street in East Harlem. I started school not knowing how to speak English, and my teacher didn’t speak Spanish.

  Then we moved to the West Side. My aunt was a very gregarious woman. She’d walk down the streets, find some new immigrant and rent him a room in her large apartment. At any given time, we had six or seven tenants living in different rooms. I had learned to speak English fairly well by this time so I would give them orientation, look up in the Spanish newspapers where there were jobs. They would go out, get jobs, move into their own apartments, and my aunt would rent the room to somebody else. During the course of a year, dozens of people moved in and out. It got so that I felt I was personally witnessing the massive Puerto Rican immigration of the postwar years passing through my apartment.

  It was a dangerous existence living on the West Side and going to junior high school on 127th Street and Broadway. The Puerto Rican kids had problems with the black kids. There were a lot of fights. Our school was one of the junior highs in West Harlem that fed into Haaren High School, a mixed school that drew from many neighborhoods. All the black and Puerto Rican boys went into the airplane mechanics program, where they learned how to make model airplanes, take apart internal combustion engines, do blueprints and mechanical drawings.