Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  I was able to do the work, but I found it boring. Then I discovered the school newspaper and began doing interviews with people like Peggy Lee, who was just beginning her career. Before long, my interviews were front-page stories. Eventually one of the kids on the newspaper said to me, “Are you going to this school?”

  I said, “Of course.”

  He said, “We don’t see you in any of our classes.”

  “I’m in airplane mechanics.”

  “What are you doing that for?”

  “I’m Puerto Rican.”

  “You don’t understand,” he told me, “you’re taking a vocational course. You’re obviously very bright, and you can write. You should be taking the academic courses so you can go to college.”

  I said, “I don’t have any money for college.”

  “That’s okay. You can go to City College, which is free.”

  I began attending the academic courses in Haaren High School, where the students were predominantly Jewish and Italian. I really shone. And everyone treated me very well.

  That student changed my life. When I graduated from high school, my aunt wondered what I was going to do. I said, “Oh, I didn’t tell you, but I’ve been admitted to City College.”

  ALVIN REED: We came from Eastover, a little town in South Carolina. My father wasn’t an educated man, only went to third grade. Like everybody else, he farmed, didn’t make any money He heard from a friend there were jobs on the railroad in Richmond, Virginia. He went up, and my mother, sister, and older brothers followed. Sometime after I and my younger brother were born, they heard there were better jobs up in New York. So my father came here, and two years later we all followed. That was 1945, when I was seven years old.

  Once my father got to Harlem, a lot of his drive and ambition fell off. Back home, he didn’t do anything but work and go home. The bright lights, the party life, the street life—that didn’t exist down South. He got up here, he was chasing women, gambling, going to the pool halls.

  Since he was a longshoreman and worked on the railroad, any time we applied for assistance they said, “No way, not with the money he makes.” But he was a man who didn’t bring his money home. So our mother, who had a college education, had to work as a maid. We were mostly on our own. We were poor, we didn’t have any money. So we climbed up fire escapes, stole the empty bottles and cashed them in. We sold rags to the ragman, sold newspapers, shined shoes.

  Still, Harlem was such a nice community when I was growing up. The supers used to hose down the sidewalk every morning. They had a block guy, Mr. Bridges, who’d turn the fire hydrant on; everybody would sweep the debris into the street, and Sanitation would pick it up at the end. We had PAL teams. Mrs. Bouton, a lady on our block, organized games, had a basketball hoop put up. In the summer, she had the streets closed off so we could play.

  At Easter, we all got new outfits. It was beautiful, everybody coming out, sharp, walking to church. On Mother’s Day, you’d wear a carnation in your lapel. A white one meant your mother’s deceased, a pink one meant she’s not feeling too good, a red one meant she’s alive and healthy.

  My mother went to Walker Memorial, the Baptist church on 116th Street. My brothers and I left the house like we were going to church, but most times we got lost on the way. The ladies of the church would come looking for us. Then we joined the Boy Scouts in the church and got a little more active.

  We went to the Polo Grounds often, but we never paid. I mean, we were good. We’d climb the rocks outside and just wait. On the other side was a ramp the people walked across after they paid their admission. We’d wait till the coast was clear, hop over onto the ramp, and just start walking like everybody else. We’d go to the Colonial Pool—sometimes we paid, most times we didn’t. We weren’t bad kids, we didn’t fight nobody. We were just trying to survive.

  We knew all the cops. Johnny Jenkins was a famous black cop; everybody knew him, tough, no nonsense. He wasn’t big, barely five feet eight, but he was big reputation-wise. Another tough, tough guy was Bumpy Johnson. We used to see him on 133rd Street every day, checking numbers and running his exterminating company, Palmetto Chemical. Bumpy was not a handsome guy. He was short with a short neck, bumps all over his face, a bald head. He was quiet, didn’t talk a lot. But he was the sharpest dresser and the friendliest, most generous man. When he walked around, he’d smile at people. He gave out a lot of money.

  The people who did the movie Hoodlum, which is about Bumpy, wanted me to tell them his history. They didn’t keep histories of black hoodlums, I told them, especially one as tough as Bumpy. But what I do know is that a French-speaking lady named Queenie had started the numbers game right here in Harlem in the twenties. Everybody played it. The Mafia downtown, they wanted a piece of anything, but when they heard about it, they said, “Aw, penny game, penny-ante game.” They didn’t want any part of it. Until it got out she was making millions of dollars off this popular penny. Now they wanted to come up and get a piece. That’s when Bumpy Johnson came in. He protected Queenie from the Mafia.

  They didn’t know what to do with this guy. When they came uptown and tried to bully people, they couldn’t do it, not with Bumpy around. They’d come into a club, and everybody would get up to let them sit at the bar. Bumpy would come along and say, “Uh-uh. Wait a minute. You, get the hell out of that seat and let the lady sit there.”

  To us in Harlem, he was Robin Hood. For Christmas, at home I’d get either a pair of skates or a cap gun, and that was it. I couldn’t wait to run over to Bumpy’s fish and chips restaurant on our block where he kept all this stuff for the kids of the neighborhood: toys and pants and shirts and jackets. We would go in and take. When I graduated from elementary school and couldn’t afford a jacket, I got one from Bumpy.

  But there was a time when I was about nine years old when I actually ran from him. What happened was some kids on the other side of the street threw a stick with dog doo on it. I picked it up, threw it back diagonally, and Bumpy got it on the leg of his blue striped suit. He turned around, he looked, and I took off.

  You know kids always have a little escape route. I lived at 121 West 133rd Street. But there was a way you could go into 123, go out the back through a little door, come around and get into my building. When we had little fights with the gang, I’d never run into my building. They knew where I lived. I’d run into that other building to get back home.

  That’s what I did now. I don’t know how long I stayed in the house. When I came out, I went through the backyard onto the next block, afraid that Bumpy might see me. I did that for some time but never mentioned it to my father. I was afraid he would be hurt.

  You see, I had heard that on top of his being nice, he was a guy you can’t mess with, that you better stay out of his way. Later on when I talked about it, people said, “Oh, he wouldn’t have hurt you. You were a child.” That tough reputation—it wasn’t for the children and the locals. But I didn’t know.

  Bumpy died three months after Martin Luther King’s assassination eating a steak in Well’s Restaurant on Seventh Avenue and 133rd Street. The headline in the Amsterdam News said BUMPY’S DEATH MARKS END OF AN ERA. The police lined Seventh Avenue because they heard the Mafia was going to come in there to take his body out and tear it to shreds. The Mafia probably didn’t want him to die like that. It was so amazing—he, of all people, died of a heart attack.

  Even though he was a gangster, Bumpy was a folk hero. But we also had a lot of good role models in those years. There were doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers who lived in Harlem. When Jackie Robinson came up in 1947, were we happy. It was like when Joe Louis won. Every time we had a black figure do something, Harlem would jump.

  And we needed those role models because it was rough. We got slapped around a lot; we got beaten. Once when I was around thirteen, fourteen, we were in a candy store, playing the jukebox. It was crowded, and I guess the owner felt we weren’t spending money. He called the police.

  A black cop came in a
nd said, “Everybody out.” I was all the way in the back drinking a soda. The people in the front were moving real slow, and I couldn’t move any faster than they allowed me. “Move!” he said to me.

  “I can’t,” I told him.

  Well he kicked me square up my behind. There was blood. Then he shoved around some more guys. We talked about it outside and said let’s go and make a complaint. So we go to the precinct; I had witnesses and everything. I told the lieutenant what happened. He said, “Okay,” and he called the detectives.

  They came over, they took us in a room. They smacked us around. And then they brought us out back to the desk. The lieutenant asked, “Do you want to make a complaint?”

  We said, “No.” We didn’t tell our parents; they would think we did something wrong. We didn’t do anything about it. That kind of stuff was typical.

  At the time of the Harlem riots, 1961, ’62, 1 was a little rambunctious. I wanted to do some damage. I threw some bottles. There were some stores broken in. Yeah, I went in and took some things. I actually stood on the barricades talking to a black cop. “Man, you’re on the wrong side of the fence,” I said to him.

  A lot of people don’t understand black rage, all these little incidents that were done to you all these years, that were done to your mother, that were done to your father. Then when you get about eighteen, nineteen, twenty and things are not opening up, you remember them.

  My mother thought a lot of white people, and she brought that into our lives. “You say hi to them and speak to them, be polite to them,” she’d tell us. In my growing-up time, there were about three white ladies on our block, mixed marriages. We’d see white people at Count Basie’s, Small’s Paradise, and the other clubs. There were white merchants, and I had mostly white teachers. Still my view of white people was that they were rolling with money.

  Then when I went to high school at Charles Evans Hughes, it was the first time I was out of Harlem, and the first time I was in the minority. The population was sixty-five percent white and thirty-five percent black. What was it like? Shock. I went into a shell, went to the back of the class. I didn’t know how to study. “How do these kids do it?” I asked myself. I thought if you read something once, you’re supposed to know it. No one ever told me you got to read things over and over.

  The white kids at Charles Evan Hughes dressed nice. To keep up with them, we wore ties, shirts, sports jackets, creases in our pants, shoes shined. I had three shirts, and I had to iron every night. My mother gave me thirty-two cents lunch money every day, but I ate milk and cake so I could put the money away to buy some shirts.

  I was on the swim team and track team, but baseball was a sport the black kids weren’t allowed to get into at Charles Evans Hughes. It was like, “We’re going to keep that one.” I played with some of the kids in Central Park, and the kids said to the coach, “This guy is good. We need him; he’s better than most of the guys on the team.” I still couldn’t even get a tryout.

  Still, I have to say it was a nice mix at that school; there were no big problems. And what it did was inspire the black kids to do much better. We saw that the white kids were a little more educated than we were. They presented a challenge that made us very ambitious.

  BARBARA PRINGLE: There was no way a black child growing up in New York City during that time could not be aware of race. I knew my mother, who worked as a seamstress in the garment district, considered herself lucky. The only black women they hired were West Indians. After my parents divorced, my father married a woman who had a math degree from Hunter College but was a civil service worker because she couldn’t get a decent job in the private sector. And we knew black lawyers who had to work in the post office.

  Yet, my family didn’t have the rage of slavery. Both my parents came from Jamaica, and the people we associated with were middle-class families, professionals or businesspeople. It wasn’t unusual for me to know blacks could be successful.

  Throughout my childhood, every year I went to the circus at the old Madison Square Garden and to Radio City Music Hall for Christmas and Easter. Every Sunday my father took me to one of the museums. We went by bus, just the two of us. Sometimes we had something to eat at the Automat, where you could have a good meal and there was no racial thing. My father sent me for tennis lessons at the only private place blacks could play tennis in New York—a closed-in park that took up a square block on 148th Street and Convent Avenue near City College, I saw Althea Gibson play there.

  Once a year my father, my aunts, and cousin—six or seven of us—would get all dressed up and take a big Checker taxi to a restaurant called Frank’s on 125th Street. It was Greek-owned and didn’t have a single black waiter. That was where I learned to eat lobster. Then we’d go downtown to see a Broadway musical, sitting right up in front. And after that we went to a club. I saw all the black entertainers there: Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, and, my favorite, Nat King Cole.

  My father was one of the first managers of records for Hanover Trust on Canal Street. He was also a salesman at Klein’s. Every day of his working life, he wore a suit, white shirt, and tie. He did not have a college degree, but he raised my sisters and me with the idea that education was the key to moving up in the world and worked two, sometimes three jobs to send us to private schools.

  The first school he sent me to was the Modern School at 154th Street, which was a feeder for white private schools. Ethel Waters’s daughter, W.E.B. Du Bois’s granddaughter, a whole number of children who came from black professional families went there.

  When I was thirteen years old, my father sent me to the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village, where I stayed until the eleventh grade. It had only two black students, but I never felt strange. I made great friends. It was a very progressive environment; the kids were mostly from leftist families, and they talked a lot about the relationship between blacks and whites.

  At that time I was living on 141st Street with my father and stepmother. It was a schlep for me to go down on the subway, but it was great to go to school in Greenwich Village. There was such a sense of freedom. A lot of the students lived there, but many lived in the area from West 72nd to West 96th Street. This section was different from the West Side where I lived; it was white and wealthy. Uptown was comfortable and middle class, but it didn’t compare to the buildings like the Beresford or the Dakota on Central Park West.

  They all had separate elevators for passengers and service. The domestics, who were usually black, rode in the service elevator. When I was coming over, my friends had to tell their parents to let the elevator operators know I was to ride in the passenger elevator. Once I went to someone’s house and they had a new elevator man. He said, “I think you have to go to that one.” I said, Not me, dear.”

  I had plenty of awareness of black and white issues but very little personal experience. I had as many white as black friends. But one blatant racist incident I will never forget occurred at the Barbizon Hotel. A bunch of us from Little Red planned to go swimming in their indoor pool. When we went up to pay, I was told, “You can’t swim here.” My friends and I were very upset, but we never spoke about it. I never even told my father.

  Two of my friends at Little Red used to go to Florida for the winter break and invited me to come along. “You must be kidding,” I told them. I wouldn’t go farther than Philadelphia. I was terrified of the South. I knew about the white and black restrooms and drinking fountains. I was sure if I went there, I would be lynched.

  On the other hand, when I was a freshman in college, I got a job around Christmastime at Lerner’s on 125th Street and found it was the biggest racist store. They wouldn’t let me touch the money. It infuriated me no end, and I got sick from being positioned right in the doorway in the wintertime.

  JOHN TAURANAC: Both my parents were British and had originally come here as illegal immigrants through Canada. When I was born in 1939, they were living in Yorkville—a working-class neighborhood on
the East Side that spread from 73rd up to the 90s. My mother was half Jewish, and when she saw the brown shirts goose-stepping up and down 86th Street, the heart of the neighborhood, she said, “We’re getting out of here.” So we moved to Montreal.

  As soon as the war in Europe ended, we returned to a Yorkville that had greatly changed. All things Teutonic had been Swissified. Ultimately the German presence reappeared but it never became as strong as it had been. Other groups—Hungarians, Irish—had moved in.

  My parents found an apartment on 79th Street and East End Avenue in the City and Suburban Houses, one of a group of model tenement houses that was put up at the turn of the last century. The rooms were tiny; there was a bathtub in the kitchen.

  A company called Glauber was directly across the street from us. They were a pipe distributor for developers and made a tremendous clatter when the trucks were being loaded. But they also had the ideal wall with ridges for playing stoop-ball. You could hit the ball on the edge and have it go sailing in the air. Because 79th Street is one of the main crosstown streets, it is one hundred feet wide and great for street games like stoopball.

  It was a generally idyllic life except for the fear we had of the 81st Street Boys. When we heard they were coming, we ran home with our tails between our legs. They were just kids like everyone else, probably no worse than the 80th Street Boys or the 82nd Street Boys, but we had this awe about them and were convinced we would be on the losing side of any encounter.

  Public market, First Avenue and 73rd Street, 1948.

  In 1948, Babe Ruth died at Sloan-Kettering, which was, in essence, right down the block. I felt the propinquity of his death was so great. That’s when I became a Yankee fan, even though I didn’t know much about baseball. But I came to my senses quickly and became a Dodger fan because of Jackie Robinson, who had played for the Montreal Royals in 1946 when we had lived in that city.