Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  Then people began coming in for breakfast. The grill worked on gas so we were able to make eggs and toast the bread. We were able to make coffee because it was on gas. We were in business.

  I always used to say if anyone in this world gets to heaven, it’s going to be the man who made lamps on 14th Street. He was a true Village character and one of our best customers, a guy about sixty years old, married with two or three kids. He was completely unkempt, a free spirit with hair like Einstein’s going its own way. Except in the coldest weather, he walked around barefoot.

  But what he did was take in runaway children. You know the kind, a fifteen-year-old girl who gets off the bus at the Port Authority, gets grabbed by some sleazeball who makes her into a junkie and a prostitute. He would find kids like this, take them in, teach them the craft of making lamps, keep them going until they could get on their feet. He had a charge account, and it was a big account because he took care of so many people. At any given time, he’d have his regular family and a couple of kids he’d taken in, some who had just had babies and needed diapers, baby formula, and baby creams. All these people would be charging to him.

  One day not long ago, a young man came into the store holding the hand of a little boy. “Hi,” he said, “do you remember me?” I didn’t.

  “I’m Joel. This is my son.”

  I looked at him; I couldn’t believe it. He was one of the runaways, a junkie.

  “I live in California now with my wife and son. We came back to visit.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I got a lamp shop.”

  ANDREW BUSHKO: I arrived at NYU the summer of ’62, having gotten into a master’s program at the School of Education. NYU was vastly different from Cornell, where I had been an undergraduate. It was not much of a residential college at that time. The new library was not yet there. When you finished an evening class, you had the feeling that things were closed down. The West Village was always hopping, but toward the east, it was still light industry. Factories closed at five, and the storefronts were covered with metal doors. It was not a hospitable feeling.

  On the other hand, Washington Square Park was filled with people, especially on weekends, when long-haired troubadours, who probably came from Long Island, descended on the square. What a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon, sitting around the circular fountain or staking out a little space on the back of a park bench and serenading people with songs of protest or English-Irish ballads about women with broken hearts. This was the time of the Civil Rights Movement, the freedom rides and sit-ins in the South—the early Kennedy years when we had the feeling things were changing. There was such an optimism.

  South of the square were wonderful places like the Bitter End and Gerde’s Folk City, where people like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs entertained. People were very respectful of each other and the performers. You’d sit there with a cup of coffee and talk politics and music. I saw Simon and Garfunkel in one of those clubs; they were just becoming famous then. Art with his long hair and Paul with his short hair looked just the way they were supposed to look: cool.

  Every so often, you’d see mimeographed flyers announcing there was going to be a “happening,” say on Sunday at one o’clock. The word would get around, and on that day, everyone would gather, some wearing outlandish things like you’d see at Mardi Gras. There would be street performers, singers and dancers, mimes, people on unicycles, jugglers. There was a feeling of brotherhood, of being one with one another, of being where it was happening. There was a great emphasis on the love-in kind of feeling.

  NYU had an extensive program of tours for people who were visiting the university, and during the summer of 1963, I had the job of taking these groups around to the museums, Rockefeller Center, the Federal Reserve Bank, behind the scenes at Macy’s. There were about fifteen people in the group, most of them here for the first time. A good number were nuns studying at NYU, and most of them were still wearing habits. There I’d be with five or six nuns going over to the A train, going four blocks this way or that way, saying, “Sister Marie Louise, be sure you get on the train, Sister Mary Jean, we’re getting off at the next stop.” I was always counting heads, fearful I would lose this nun from Indiana someplace on the A train. Eternal damnation.

  Garibaldi statue in Washington Square.

  November 22, 1963, seems to mark the beginning of the long, dark period that culminated in 1968 when it all fell apart with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and the chaos of the Democratic Convention. The day President Kennedy was killed, I had just returned from lunch and walked into the Loeb Student Center toward the front desk. There was a radio on, and someone said there’s a report that the President had been shot. We got as close to the radio as possible. Events unfolded. Everyone was walking around in a daze, kind of dopey.

  When I left NYU for Fargo, North Dakota, in the summer of 1964, Greenwich Village was already not as nice a place as it had been when I arrived. Drugs were coming in, protests were no longer peaceful, and the atmosphere had become more mean-spirited. When I was an undergraduate at Cornell, the big fight was to allow Gus Hall, secretary of the American Communist Party, to speak on campus. The whole notion was that you were supposed to have a world where anyone could speak their piece and let their words either redeem or condemn them. But things were now moving to where people were starting to shout other people down. This was still early in the protest against the war, but already it was not possible to question anybody’s antiwar position.

  ELAINE MARKSON: From 1958 to 1961, we lived in Mexico and sublet our apartment in the city. A lot of people did that. When we came back, you could tell the money was moving into Greenwich Village. Washington Square Village had been built, which was kind of amazing. There were all these white luxury buildings that hadn’t been there three years before. But it was still a beatnik scene.

  Then in 1966 we went to Europe, and when we returned in 1968, the changes were astonishing. It was the time of Vietnam, of political activism, and the Village was at the center of it all with candlelight vigils and protest marches. I returned in time for the Oceanhill Brownsville school strike with two small children who were entering public school. A group of parents who were liberal and interested in education broke into the school to conduct classes during the strike. As a result, we got the Board of Education to allow us to start a new school, P.S. 3 on Barrow Street.

  The Village was a hotbed of political activity. There were political positions on every issue you could imagine. Some argued there should be restrictions to keep people from peeing in the sandbox while others said that that would be restricting what people should be allowed to do. It was quite hilarious.

  But the drug situation was hardly funny. Washington Square had become a little drug scene. We were living in a brownstone on West 4th and MacDougal by then, and Dan Rather did the first segment of 48 Hours from my living room, calling it “48 Hours on Crack Street.” You could look out the window and watch all the exchanges taking place. My children learned how to open the door, looking around to be sure they were not going to be threatened before taking the keys out, how to negotiate the streets.

  When they went to Intermediate School 70 on 17th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, the kids were not allowed to go out the back door because the High School of Humanities, which was around the corner, had too many bad kids. But with all of this we never felt the Village was unsafe. In fact, I felt it was the safest place one would possibly want to live. There was always street traffic. You were never alone day or night.

  In 1970, I began working for a literary agent in the basement of my brownstone. After two years, I went out on my own, first in my apartment and then at 44 Greenwich Avenue, which was the headquarters of Vietnam Veterans Against the War when I took it over. It was a mess.

  It was the emergent feminist movement that motivated me to start my own agency. There were a lot of women agents in the business, but not many who owned agencies, s
o I was part of a new breed. I had two small children and a husband, but husbands didn’t cooperate much in those days, so it wasn’t easy.

  The publishing world wasn’t a collection of huge conglomerates then. They were small companies, all centered in New York, run by people you would actually get to talk to. I got to know all the editors and publishers. It was much easier in that respect. Being a woman in the Village had a lot to do with my getting so many female writers. But also, I knew many people from the political scene, like Victor Navasky, who sent me a lot of my clients. I met Grace Paley through the activism. She told me, “When my agent dies, I’ll come to you,” and she did.

  LACONIA SMEDLEY: I came to New York from Detroit, Michigan, the summer of 1956. I got off the train at Grand Central Station and took a taxi uptown along Fifth Avenue, which was still two-way. And as soon as we reached 110th Street, I sensed a change. Downtown it was bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum—very regular, everybody marching with their little briefcases. But at 110th Street, it became da-dum, da-dum, da-dum; the swift repetitive beats had become a relaxed kind of syncopation. Without hearing it, I felt a different rhythm.

  Then I noticed the radical change of people from mostly white folk to mostly black folk. The suits and ties had come off; I saw people walking with no shirts, I saw a guy walking with a mattress on his head. It was a high-powered energy that I felt when I came into Harlem that first time. It made me relaxed but at the same time apprehensive because it was a vibration I had never felt before.

  Coming from Detroit, which had a communal sense, and a family sense, and a respectful sense, I was in culture shock. In Detroit, you had your black sections. We lived on one side of Warren Avenue, and on the other side were Polish people. But Harlem seemed an enclave by itself. In Detroit, the fathers had factory jobs at Ford, Chrysler. The family unit was intact. Here everyone was out on the street in the middle of the day; I saw people nodding on the streets. In Detroit, people didn’t use profanity. If you cursed, the neighbors would say, “Now there, watch your mouth.” But what I heard immediately on the streets of New York was raw talk, vulgar talk, disrespectful talk that made me think everybody was getting ready to fight, and I was afraid.

  There was such a mixture: the churchgoers, the street people, the people who hung out in the bars. Not that you didn’t have a rowdy section in Detroit, but it was just a couple of strips on the east side. We were cordoned off from it, protected from it. It wasn’t the whole area. Harlem was a bigger canvas, a multiplicity of classes, different kinds of people all together.

  But once I got settled in, I knew if someone called someone else an “MF,” it didn’t mean that they were going to fight. It was a product of stifled anger, not a matter of imminent violence, a way to express rage. Harlem was one place where you could express yourself, where you could say, “This is me. I don’t give a damn what anybody else thinks.”

  I had come to New York following my uncle, Professor Edward Boatner. He wasn’t my uncle genetically, but in the black family you adopt people. He was a larger-than-life type of person, very dynamic and direct, a big, bug-eyed, powerful black man who scared his choirs into singing. Like many of the black professionals of that time, he always wore a vest and a tie. And he was a very good cook, especially of Creole food.

  I became an assistant teacher to Professor Boatner. My students were people from the neighborhood. Some went on to make a name for themselves, got into Broadway shows, became well known. Others were people seventy, eighty years old who wanted to take piano or voice, wanted to do the things they weren’t able to do before because they had to work so hard to raise their children. I marveled at the little black fingers of these elderly people learning to play for the first time.

  Once a year, Mrs. Thornwall, one of the women who sang in Professor Boatner’s choir, would invite all thirty-five people in the choir to a big dinner in her apartment. She lived in Graham Court, the building on Seventh Avenue between West 116th and 117th that had been commissioned by William Waldorf Astor. When it opened in 1901, Harlem was like the suburbs to Manhattan. It’s the most luxurious apartment house in Harlem, with eight elevators and a two-story arched entry that leads into a gardened court.

  After Astor, a man they called Daddy Brown owned it. He was going with a young lady named Peaches. It was the talk of the town. Then a series of managers took over the building who were not very good. By my time, the people in Graham Court were middle-aged to elderly. I had the impression that some of them worked for wealthy people who had turned the apartments over to them. But there was a mixture of people in the building, a dentist, doctor, some teachers. There was a Dr. Anderson who had a big goldfish tank in his window.

  After Mrs. Thornwall died in 1960, I took over her apartment. I began going to tenant meetings, and an elderly lady upstairs, very smart and lovely, said, “I’m getting older. We need someone younger and better than the current president.”

  As president I tried to get landmark status for the exterior and interior. They had cut up some of the apartments in the 1950s so we couldn’t get interior landmark status, but we did get exterior.

  Harlem has always been unique because you have the combination of so many different kinds of people. You had the Harlem Renaissance with all the great writers in the twenties and thirties, and the street people were right there, maybe next door. The writers and artists fed off what was happening around them. Sometimes in the struggle and isolation, you create a lot of beauty. It’s like a beautiful flower growing from manure; it’s the coming out of something that makes you rise up above it.

  ALVIN REED: In 1965, I took the police test and was disqualified because I was missing seven teeth. The impression that I got was you failed the medical, and that’s it. On the train going home, I saw one of the other guys who was disqualified. I sat down next to him. “What was your problem?” he asked. “You got a heart murmur, too?”

  “No,” I said. “I got too many teeth missing.”

  “They disqualify you for that?”

  “Yeah.”

  He said, “You know what to do? You go to a dentist, tell them to make up a cheap bridge and then you call up and get a reexamination.”

  It seemed he had been through the process; he knew a little more than me. So I did exactly what he told me.

  The dentist charged me a hundred and twenty dollars. “Don’t wear it now,” he told me. “When you go up for reexamination, wait till you’re on the elevator going upstairs, and then you put it in.”

  It killed my mouth, but I passed with honors. Then white kids were asking me to help them out; it was a whole new awakening for me.

  At first I worked in the Thirty-first, Thirty-second Precincts in Harlem. I saw instances where someone said, “Let’s see who can knock him out.” “Go ahead, take a shot.”

  “Oh, man, you can’t hit hard.”

  Meanwhile, the poor guy’s—you know. I’ve seen where they handcuffed a guy to the chair and everybody came by and took a shot. A couple of times the black officers just walked out. I didn’t get along with people who beat on people, who hit people.

  TOM SLATTERY: When I was twenty-one, I became a police officer assigned to the Thirty-second Precinct in central Harlem. The first few months I walked a beat, then I was in a radio car. I thought I was doing something important, and I got along very well with the people. That was from 1956 to 1963, when the uniform had a tremendous respect in the community, although if it was fear or respect, I don’t really know. Many police officers kept complete neighborhoods under control and never, never had to use a gun. There was one fellow who used a rolled-up newspaper as he worked his beat. The police knew the people, and the people knew the police.

  We had disturbances but no riots. One night my partner and I were on 147th and Eighth Avenue when we got a call to assist a patrolman on 125th and Seventh Avenue. Usually, by the time you would get down to, say, 141st Street, you’d get the message “No further assistance required.” But not this time. We were the first car
to get to the scene, where a mob had stopped traffic. The African Nationalists were on one corner, and the Muslims were on the other. Some of the Nationalists had rifles and shot into the other group. We never found out the story as to what the final outcome was. But as we came out of the car without a nightstick or anything, four men with rifles were marching toward Eighth Avenue. We shoved them into a hallway. More police arrived, and it was over. That went down in the papers as a minor disturbance.

  Protesters picketing along 125th Street in Harlem, 1965.

  On the other hand, we might respond to a noise complaint and join the party. We “divorced people”—sometimes the same people twice a month, common-law couples who’d had a spat. We would settle it with “You’re divorced.”

  Nothing ever happened on the ground floor. It was always on the top floors or rooftops of walkups. We were always taking people to the hospitals, taking dead bodies out. I delivered babies in apartments, in basements, everywhere. I think I delivered well over forty babies in close to eight years. Some were named after me.

  In the early years, I looked at the job as a big game, cops and robbers. Then it got very serious as I saw what things could happen. The biggest problem in Harlem was drug trafficking. Druggies were a nuisance to the average working family. They’d break into apartments, steal toasters and TVs. There were crimes of violence perpetrated between friends. And drug lords would shoot each other in the bars.

  Still, I always looked around Harlem. I was very impressed with Strivers’ Row, the area around 137th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues with beautiful town houses owned by mostly professional people. I noticed these beautiful stone pillars engraved with the inscription “Private road, walk your horses.”