Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  All the other kids on the block remained Yankee fans. They were also Irish. Come St. Patrick’s Day, everybody wore our green. One St. Patrick’s Day I determined, as a good English Episcopalian, that I would wear a bright orange tie. My father dissuaded me, “No, that would not be a wise thing to do.”

  One day, a dispatcher at the 79th Street crosstown bus terminal on the corner decided we ought to have a baseball team. I don’t know how it happened, but he managed to get us baseball caps with “AA” on them for “All American.” Here we were, a bunch of immigrant kids, suddenly “All American.” He’d get us on the bus for nothing—all the drivers would wink and we would go over to Central Park and play baseball games that he arranged against other teams. Central Park was our backyard, a crosstown bus ride away.

  On Sundays after church, we would stroll with our father along the most exclusive streets, because what was the point otherwise? Frequently we’d go into Central Park around 67th Street, visit the statue of Balto, the dog who got the serum through to Nome, and continue the promenade to our typical Sunday afternoon destination: the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Sometimes for Sunday outings we took the Third Avenue El all the way down to South Ferry, where we got on the Staten Island Ferry to Staten Island. Then we would turn around and come back. One of the virtues of riding on the elevated train was that it encouraged voyeurism; you were twenty feet away from people’s windows. As a kid you always sat on your knees looking out the window. But when you were standing at the station and the train came in, the platform would shift. I was never confident the thing wouldn’t collapse.

  Third Avenue was still “Toid Avenue” then, a shadowy street under the El. In the movie Lost Weekend, Ray Milland searches for a pawnshop and a bar under the Third Avenue El. It was an understandable place for someone who was dispossessed and alienated to hide out. I remember visiting people who lived in the tenement apartments that lined Third Avenue. When the El went by, you could hear the china shaking in the cupboard. All conversation had to stop.

  I had started school at P.S. 158 on York Avenue between 77th and 78th. Carved into the side of the building is “Avenue A,” which is what the street was before they named it for Sergeant York following World War I. But after my mother died, my father decided to send us to private schools because he felt our home life was tenuous at best. I went to Grace Church School on 10th Street and Fourth Avenue and my sister went to the Academy of Mt. St. Ursula in the Bronx, where she was probably the only Protestant in the school; my mother had attended an Ursuline school in Belgium when she was a girl and had liked the Ursuline nuns.

  I began going to Grace Church School in the fifth grade, when they started teaching French. My very first day the teacher asked the class what “garçon” meant. I threw up my hand, proudly. “‘Garçon’ means waiter,” I said. “No,” she said, “it means boy.”

  The summer of 1951 I went up to Grace Church Camp in Bear Mountain State Park for the month of July. August second was my birthday. That night I got sick. My father thought I had eaten too much ice cream and cake, but the next morning he called the doctor. It was polio. I was shipped to the Willard Parker Hospital on 26th Street, where all contagious cases were taken. It was a terrifying place. Across the hallway were kids in iron lungs. Fortunately, I had a very mild case. After a week or ten days, I was able to go home.

  By the time school started in September, I was well enough to go back to school. We were assigned a paper on how we spent our summer vacation. I called mine “Look, I Can Run.” It described what happened about a week after I was sent home: My sister and I were crossing York Avenue, and I was walking very slowly across the street. Suddenly the light changed. I had to either run or get run over. I ran. I reached the curb safely, turned to my sister, and cried, “Look, I can run!”

  The paper came back with a bad grade. “I told you to write on something that had happened to you this summer,” the teacher said.

  In 1952 and ’53, I was made “Optimus” at Grace Church. That meant you’re in the honor room and your name is carved into the wall. I became an acolyte. And then when I was about fifteen, I learned that the minister did not know my name. Immediately, I became an apostate and turned my back on the whole thing. I felt they didn’t think I was important enough.

  My next school was Trinity on 91st between Columbus and Amsterdam. As a white middle-class kid, I had already learned to be street smart. If you ventured to 92nd Street, you were on enemy territory, somebody else’s turf. I always wondered if the fear we had of the 81st Street Boys wasn’t the same as the fear we had of the kids on 92nd Street.

  Upscale hardly begins to describe Trinity. I remember going to a friend’s apartment on Madison Avenue and 82nd after school. I assumed the nicely dressed man who answered the door was his father. It was the butler. And there I was, living on the top floor of a model tenement walkup.

  I lost my scholarship to Trinity when I failed Latin and geometry, and my father then sent me to McBurney, a school on 63rd Street that was down the block from where Lincoln Center is today. J. D. Salinger went to McBurney. When Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye leaves the foils on the subway, he was on his way to a fencing match at McBurney. So McBurney lives on in fiction still. For me, it was much more haimish than Trinity, which was founded in 1709 and had this mantle of venerability.

  While I was at McBurney, they were already starting to empty out the apartment houses that became the site for Lincoln Center. One day a place that had great hero sandwiches was gone. It was the death knell of the neighborhood.

  FATHER PETER COLAPIETRO: Even though Manhattan was only a fifteen-cent train ride away from where I lived in the Bronx, it was a whole new world. I felt I had to dress up to go down there. I couldn’t wear jeans and a polo shirt.

  I was an eleven- or twelve-year-old, I knew what Playboy magazine was, but when I went into some of these stores on 42nd Street—wow! Ten or twelve of us used to come down to Herman’s Flea Circus. It had an arcade with pinball machines, magic shows, and the famous Flea Circus. We would go to Rockefeller Center and see as many television shows as we could get in getting there early to be first on line for shows like The Price Is Right, The Match Game, and Truth or Consequences. A warm-up person like Johnny Olson would ask the audience, “Anybody out there celebrating a birthday? anniversary? parole?” We got to know the routine. Once my kid brother and I got a pair of handcuffs. When Johnny Olson got to “Anybody celebrating parole?” we raised our hands handcuffed to each other.

  I took a girl from Southport, North Carolina, to Radio City Music Hall. I was kind of smug. “She’s never seen anything like this,” I thought. A ticket to an afternoon show at Radio City was ninety-nine cents for the movie and the stage show with the Rockettes. I bought her a box of Mason Dots; the Bonbons were too expensive. This was the first time I was going to sit in the orchestra. In the past, I had always sat in the balcony, where the cheaper seats were. We walked down the center aisle, I stepped aside to let her go into the row first, and before I entered, I genuflected: down on one knee, made the sign of the cross. Force of habit. Thank God she didn’t see.

  Afterwards we went to the Automat across the street, something she had never seen before. She asked me what Postum was. I didn’t know what the hell it was, but it was always there. I showed her how to sit and stare at those revolving things until they turned and were filled up again. If you looked real hard, real close, as the turntable turned, you could see a flashlight and actually catch a glimpse of a person behind the wall.

  KEN ARETSKY: The Lower East Side was an interesting mix of people during my childhood: Jewish, Irish, Italian, and some Polish. There were no Puerto Ricans living in the area yet as I remember. The Chinese lived in Chinatown on the other side of the border, which was probably the Bowery.

  For the first twelve years of my life, I lived at 504 Grand Street in a three-bedroom apartment in the Amalgamated Dwellings, which was built by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union
in 1930. It was one of the earliest co-ops in New York.

  I went to P.S. 147 on East Broadway, where there were great teachers who were really involved with the parents. Once school was over, you played with your friends until your mother opened the window and called out, “Suppertime!” You played every imaginable game with a Spalding from stoopball to hit the penny. You were able to move around. Parents weren’t on top of you all the time.

  I was at a very formative age when the Subway Series were really happening. The three best baseball teams in the major leagues were in New York, and there were only sixteen teams. We ended up having a disproportionate number of Subway Series. I thought it was our given right; it never occurred to me somebody had to win something for this to happen. I can remember looking out my third-floor window and seeing the Yankees on a bus going down Grand Street. They were headed to the Williamsburg Bridge on their way to Bedford Avenue and Ebbets Field.

  When my brother was twelve and I was eight, he used to take me every Saturday to triple-header college basketball games at Madison Square Garden. There were great players, great games. We’d go on the subway, stay the whole day, take the subway back to the Lower East Side, and stop off at Katz’s Delicatessen for a hot dog before going home.

  It was a great place to grow up, but it was a rough neighborhood. I saw gang wars, lots of them. After P.S. 147, I went on to P.S. 12 for the junior high school grades. My mother would give me fifty cents a day for lunch money, and I would give this kid Tony Gallo twenty-five cents a day for protection. He was big, tough—he looked like a giant to me. And he really shook us down.

  “How come you’re losing so much weight?” my mother would ask me. I would never tell. But when you’re eleven years old and you give somebody twenty-five cents a day so you don’t get beat up, it teaches you something. If I have any street smarts, I learned them on the Lower East Side.

  I used to go to the Eldridge Street Synagogue with my father. It was crowded with what seemed to me to be old, sad-looking people. The smell was unlike any place I knew, not offensive so much as it was frightening. The atmosphere was strict and very awesome. The rabbi was up on a platform. The women were upstairs. These were the years after the war, and a sense of peril, of something dangerous was communicated to me.

  Still the neighborhood had a great beauty to it, a great sense of neighborhood. Orchard Street was filled with pushcarts with lots and lots of stuff hanging from them. That was where my mother bought my clothes. My grandfather was a barber. He had his own shop with two stools on Eldridge Street. I was the only kid who got a quarter whenever I got a haircut.

  Sundays were elaborate days. In the morning, my father would go to Saperstein Brothers, an appetizing store off Essex Street, across the street from Gus’s Pickles. Herman Saperstein lived two floors above us in apartment 5D. His son Michael was my age and we became great friends. Because we were neighbors, Herman Saperstein would cut us a better piece of sturgeon or salmon. My aunts and uncles would come over, my mother would make lox, eggs, and onions, and we would have a huge Sunday Jewish breakfast.

  At night, we would walk over to Chinatown for Chinese food. What Jewish family didn’t? We had a favorite place where the bartender knew me and always gave me a ginger ale with a cherry because I was afraid of the food. All I ate was some white rice while my parents and brother had the spare ribs and chow mein. Then we would walk back home, and everyone would sit in the living room and listen to Name That Tune and other programs on the radio. There was such a sweetness to it.

  The neighborhood high school was Seward. I would have gone to Stuyvesant, where my brother went, had my parents not made the decision around that time to move out of New York to Long Beach. The Sapersteins, who became very wealthy from their appetizing store, had already moved to Neponsit. I was bar mitzvahed in Long Beach, but the whole Lower East Side came out for the occasion.

  I became a Long Island boy—but I didn’t. Long Beach was a beautiful place. You had the beach and everything; I had great friends there. But those first twelve years are what you build on. Those are the years that have stayed with me. I grew up on the Lower East Side, and there was something about that which was magical.

  2

  I Want to Be a Part of It

  STANLEY DRUCKER: I think beginnings of people are the most interesting part, how they got started, how they became what they became.

  MICKEY ALPERT: They still flock here. We still get the best and the brightest. The names of the places change, the look changes, but it’s the same kind of experience.

  STANLEY DRUCKER: When I was ten years old, Benny Goodman was the rage. That was my inspiration. My parents bought me a cheap clarinet and found a teacher who came to our apartment in Brooklyn to give me a weekly lesson. There was not much music in the home. My parents were immigrants who were just eking out a living. There wasn’t much music in the elementary schools, either. Once a week a string man would come in and conduct an ensemble of a few violins, an alto saxophone, and me on clarinet. We all played the melody line.

  But things just developed from that point. I joined every kind of community group you could get into, going from one rehearsal to another. I got into the National Orchestral, which had three rehearsals a week in Mecca Temple—a Masonic building that today is City Center—and gave concerts at Carnegie Hall. Leon Barzan, a famous conductor and educator who had been the principal viola player in the New York Philharmonic under Toscanini, was our conductor. His talent was in training orchestral musicians.

  I went to the High School of Music and Art. It took an hour by subway, and then I had to walk up the hill. But each day there was new to me; everything was for the first time. We had different ensembles daily in addition to a very heavy academic program, which didn’t interest me very much. I had been at Music and Art for a year and a half when I won a scholarship to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. I fully expected to remain there for a long time. But when I was sixteen, I auditioned for the music director of the Indianapolis Symphony and, to my great surprise, was offered a position. At that point, I went to Efrem Zimbalist, the director of Curtis, and asked what I should do. “You must take the position,” he told me. “You can always come back.” I never did.

  While at Indianapolis, I played for Adolph Bush—the leader of a famous string quartet who hired me for an eight-week tour. At one point he recommended I play for William Steinberg in Buffalo. So I did, and at the age of eighteen, I became principal clarinetist of the Buffalo Symphony.

  While in Buffalo, I got the message that I should come to New York City and audition for Bruno Walter at the New York Philharmonic. I didn’t know which chair it was, and I didn’t care. On a weekend in 1948, I came down to Carnegie Hall. I walked into the Green Room, where a committee of principal players was seated. I recognized one or two of them.

  The door opened, and Bruno Walter came in. That was the first time I saw him; he was a very dignified and serious-looking man. I wasn’t scared though; I had won every audition I ever tried out for. He sat down at the piano; he had me play certain orchestral solos. Some discussion followed. I heard him say to the personnel manager, “He will become a valuable member of this organization.”

  Soon after I returned to Buffalo, I got a letter from the Philharmonic Society that offered me the position of assistant first and E-flat clarinet—piccolo clarinet. What a big excitement that caused. There was a tremendous story and picture of me on page one of the Brooklyn Eagle. My father thought I was Joe Louis.

  I really worked at it. I don’t want to call it practice. I played every day. I never had the clarinet out of my hands. It wasn’t a question of saying, Well, for a half hour I’m going to do this. I didn’t work that way. My mind wasn’t organized like that. I just played.

  Every rehearsal at the Philharmonic was a master class for me. I knew how to listen, and so I was able to learn from the great players: John Corleano, the concert master; James Chambers, the solo horn; John Wolmer, the solo flute; Leonard Rose, the
principal cello—all legendary names. I would hear one of these great performers play a solo, and I’d hear something I never thought about before. Some of these players could make a fantasy out of one note.

  When I first got to the Philharmonic, I thought the fact that I played in three other orchestras meant that I knew a lot. I was still eighteen years old, burning with ambition, and I thought I knew everything. I quickly found out I knew nothing.

  ROBERT MERRILL: My mother, who had sung professionally, was interested in my having a singing career. She found a teacher for me, Samuel Margolis, whose studio was in the old Metropolitan Studio Building at 40th Street and Broadway. He was born in Europe and had taught there before coming to New York. The older generation of teachers was mainly from Europe. They came here because of the power of the Met. Going up there for my lessons, it was as if Caruso were singing in every studio.

  In 1945, I auditioned for the Metropolitan Auditions of the Air and won. I was the youngest person at that time to have a Met debut in a major role. It was Germont in Verdi’s La Traviata. For me, it was like being a baseball player coming from Brooklyn and playing at Yankee Stadium.

  My debut was on a Monday night. My one and only teacher was there along with my mother, father, and kid brother, who took the subway from Brooklyn. My father was a tailor. He did not understand singing at all. He said it was not a profession. When he came backstage after the performance and people were congratulating me, he stood there in awe.

  We took the subway back home to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My mother had baked a cake. We sat around the kitchen table, drank tea and ate the cake. My father asked, “When do you work again?”

  “Thursday night,” I said.

  “You see,” he said and smiled, “I told you it is not a profession.”

  I had a job with NBC radio on a live program called Music America Loves Best, where I sang pop songs and an occasional aria with the NBC orchestra. On Sunday afternoons, the show was broadcast nationally. By chance, Arturo Toscanini tuned in. He told the man in charge of the talent on the show, “I like this voice. I want him to sing Germont.”