Like many Asian professionals who came after the 1965 immigration reforms, my parents were liberated from the confines of working-class, Cantonese-speaking Chinatown by education and English. My family, like other Chinese who live abroad, are often called huaqiao, Chinese sojourners, as though one day we all might return, pulled back by the tentacles of Chineseness. In the meantime, huaqiaos seek and create Chinatowns. And New York has three—one each for Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, though only the original can claim the name. Since the 1980’s, Flushing has flourished as the Chinatown for Mandarin speakers from Taiwan, Shanghai and northern China. More recently, Manhattan’s working-class Chinese population has been squeezed down the N subway line to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and other satellite clusters farther out.
Today Chinatown is large enough to have two main arteries: Canal Street, the tourist-friendly thoroughfare that is still predominantly Cantonese, and East Broadway, which has become Main Street for Fujianese immigrants. My Chinese friend Charlene (who went by the English name “Beryl,” assigned by a middle-school teacher, until I pointed out that “Beryl” was out of date, and renamed her) agreed that East Broadway looks like China. Charlene, originally from Xian, now a graduate student at Syracuse University, was in the city for a visit.
Charlene, raised in the north, didn’t want the southern Chinese food all around us. She wanted hotpot, a festive Chinese dining ritual where food is tossed into a pot of boiling water.
So off we went to Flushing. First we bought Xinjiang-styled lamb kabobs on Main Street for $1. “Do you like America?” we asked the vendor, who had come from the western Chinese city of Urumqi on the Silk Road. “I like American money,” he said. But he would never raise his kids here—he doesn’t like the values.
We trudged to Minni’s Shabu Shabu, a hotpot restaurant off Main Street. Charlene ordered the thin slices of lamb, which she flash-cooked in the hot water; I ordered fish balls. It was definitely hotpot as an American experience, she observed. In China, everyone would use one big boiling pot, mixing their food together. Not here: “Each person has their own hotpot.” She had been lectured on American individualism in college and smiled at this simple example.
A Block of Gardens Is Refuge From the Busy City
By PHYLLIS EHRLICH | October 23, 1959
BENEATH THE HARD SURFACE OF MANHATtan’s sophisticated life exists another kind—family life in small, closely-knit neighborhoods. These areas are becoming scarcer because of the push for space by huge apartment houses and office skyscrapers.
Among such neighborhood cases still in existence is one of brownstones on the Upper East Side. In this “family block,” residents center their interests on parental duties, the children’s well-being and informal social activities—despite their own busy, sometimes glamorous lives.
“One of the enchantments of our neighborhood is the reassuring sight of the children playing happily together,” says Mrs. Al Hirschfeld, wife of the artist. The Hirschfelds, who are the parents of a 14-year-old daughter, Nina, have lived in the area for 11 years. Mrs. Hirschfeld is Dolly Haas, the actress.
Several families have converted their gardens into practical playgrounds, with swings, slides, seesaws and similar equipment. Sometimes a mother, such as Mrs. Vincent Sardi Jr., wife of the restaurateur, finds herself in the family playground with her own four children and six or eight others.
One mother, originally a Californian, is a firm believer in the outdoors. In fair weather, she and her husband pitch a sleeping tent in the yard for their sons. Because friends sometimes spend the night with her children, this mother also has some sleeping bags to accommodate the overflow of young “campers.”
And Mrs. William Riva (Maria Riva, the actress) has an unusual way of calling her youngsters for meals when they are playing in other yards. “I find a blast or two on an old ship’s whistle brings them home quickly,” she says.
Prewar Housing Aplenty
By MICHAEL STERNE | November 18, 1984
OTHER NEW YORKERS’ REASONS FOR NOT living on the Upper East Side say something about what it is and is not. Some prefer the less buttoned-up atmosphere of Greenwich Village. Others like the melange of ethnicities to be found on the West Side, or the opportunity to live an alternate life style afforded by SoHo, or the sense of the city’s ongoing history to be had in such older parts of town as Murray Hill and Brooklyn Heights.
The primary advantage of the Upper East Side is this: Along Park and Fifth Avenues and on the cross streets is clustered the city’s largest stock of luxury-class prewar apartment houses. Prewar is the essential characteristic. Almost nothing built since the 1930’s affords the same amenities—large rooms, high ceilings, windowed kitchens and baths, redundant closets, working fireplaces.
Single-family town houses still exist, with prices in excess of $1 million, but they have a major drawback. They cannot be left alone for a weekend without risking a burglary. The Upper East Side is a prime target.
A stroll on Madison is a window shopper’s delight, and you can drop in at the Whitney, the Metropolitan, the Asia Society, the Frick Collection and the New York Society Library.
It may not be apparent to outsiders, but the Upper East Side is a church- and synagogue-going community. These institutions, surprisingly, find themselves increasingly dealing with the problems of the poor, and recently established the Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter. It serves homeless women who have been drawn to the neighborhood by its relatively safer streets, which is one of the reasons the rich people live there.
Reluctantly Embracing The Upper East Side
By LYNN ERMANN | November 11, 2007
Townhouses on East 82nd Street between Madison and Park Avenues.
FOR YEARS, I LIED ABOUT WHERE I LIVED. AT parties in neighborhoods like Williamsburg or the East Village, I would pretend that the apartment I occupied on East 74th Street actually belonged to my grandmother, not to me. New acquaintances would nod sympathetically at my sad predicament, at my being forced to live on the Upper East Side.
The truth, too shameful to admit, was that in 1995, at age 24, I bought an apartment in a neighborhood that I and everyone I knew considered bland, conformist and kind of a bore. My friends came up here only to be hospitalized or to visit their parents or grandmothers.
I grew up on the Upper East Side. By the time I returned to the neighborhood after college, big-box stores had taken over 86th Street and everyone I knew, all my artist and writer friends, lived below 14th Street. I did, too—for a while—until my parents’ requirement that I live in a doorman building made it cost-prohibitive. So I relented and rented a tiny studio in a boxy postwar building near Second Avenue on 79th Street. I felt isolated.
Just as I was planning my escape, I came into a small inheritance from Grandma Eva, enough to buy an apartment. My eagle-eyed parents saw a real estate listing for an apartment in a doorman building on a street that Sue, my real estate savvy stepmom, knew well.
“You can sell it in a few years and buy a bigger place in another neighborhood,” she said reassuringly.
I agreed, reluctantly, to what I considered to be a minor detour on the way to my dream apartment. When I moved in, J. G. Melon was still there, in a tenement painted forest green, with its trademark two-story-high neon sign anchoring the block. It was full to capacity every night.
Six years after my arrival, I realized that my apartment was between two disparate Upper East Sides: the one my parents had lived in—the one offering services and affordable restaurants—and the one around Fifth Avenue that my Grandma Bea had inhabited, which is the one I associated with snobbism.
Now I also saw the beauty and surprising quirkiness of the Park Avenue side.
It is the mix of town houses and prewar and postwar buildings that makes the Upper East Side so singular. I was surprised by how varied the town houses were, that one with a Greek Revival facade might be right next to a stately brownstone. A Federal-style clunker is smack up against a lighter-than-air Italian vill
a.
In early 2005, the man I had been dating and I decided to get married. It was time to find that bigger place in another neighborhood. We scouted around near his apartment in Harlem and in prewar apartment buildings east of Third where the prices were lower and the ceilings higher.
We hit an unexpected hurdle: Board approval anywhere would be near impossible since we’re both freelancers. So Jonathan and I stood in the foyer of the 74th Street apartment and asked: Can we make this work?
On a wall in the living room, adjacent to the window, we installed a long, narrow mirror to reflect the view of water towers and rooftop gardens, of town houses and tenements, of pre- and postwar brick apartment buildings, the singular skyline of our Upper East Side.
Rising Fear On Upper West Side
By LAYHMOND ROBINSON | June 25, 1964
FOR THOUSANDS OF NEW YORKERS, MANhattan’s Upper West Side has become a “fortress of fear,” a survey reveals.
Apprehension over frequent muggings, thefts, robberies and other forms of violence cause many residents to “seal themselves in at night” and not venture outdoors after dark.
“It’s like a combat zone,” reported Joseph Lyford, who has been conducting a two-part survey of the West Side for two years for the Fund for the Republic. He said that “more than half of the people polled were tremendously worried about muggings, theft and other types of violent crime.”
The part of the survey conducted by the John F. Kraft public opinion organization, which involved extensive interviews of 200 whites, 157 Puerto Ricans and 44 Negroes in a 40-block area, showed that more residents felt the police were doing a good job than not.
“Their chief complaints,” Mr. Lyford said, “were that there were not enough policemen, that they were not around when you needed them. But there was very little mention of police brutality.”
He and Jefferson Berryman, vice president of the Kraft organization, said the survey also showed the following:
That Puerto Ricans, who make up 39 percent of the 60,000 inhabitants of the 40-block area, were establishing a “stable, healthy community and were moving toward a middle-class economy.”
That Negroes, who make up 11 percent of the area’s population, had no roots in the community and were largely “drifters or transients” on their way to other communities.
That the Puerto Ricans, most of whom had moved into the survey area from nearby neighborhoods, were less satisfied with such city services as streetlighting and garbage collections than were the Negroes, who had generally come from Harlem, or the whites, who had been there for many years.
On the Job On “Nannies Row”
By WILLIAM E. GEIST | October 17, 1984
IT WAS “WESTWARD HO!” THE STROLLERS ON A warm, sunny October morning. The babies were out in force on the Upper West Side, rolling along the sidewalks on nearly every block and converging at 83rd Street and Riverside Drive.
Most of the strollers were propelled by hired help down the hill and into the playground in Riverside Park known locally as “Nannies Row.” There lurked Susan Pierce. She does not consider herself a nanny-napper, but she was prepared to kidnap a nanny if need be.
With something of a baby boom in the neighborhood, and with mothers scurrying back to their careers, nannies are in great demand. Miss Pierce, a 32-year-old mother, was there to ask if they knew of anyone to watch her 4-month-old daughter, Sarah, when Miss Pierce returns to work. Implicit in her generous offer was the suggestion that they might want to leave their employers.
Marjorie, a nanny who was watching Jordan, 22 months old, toddle about, said there were more nannies than ever on Nannies Row, with new ones showing up every week. She said that nanny-nappers generally tried to lure them away with more money, better hours and less work.
Some of the nannies said the job had never been more demanding, what with a new generation of parents who have them taking children as young as three months to exercise, music appreciation, dance and art classes—as well as demanding plenty of “social interaction,” which means setting up “play dates” with other children. “With a few of them,” said Bea Newell, another nanny, “you really wonder why they bothered having children at all.”
Downtown’s Uptown Suburb
By AMANDA HESSER | March 21, 1999
Susan Lally walks her son Teddy to school in their Upper West Side neighborhood.
SANDWICHED BETWEEN FRIENDS IN A BOOTH at Lot 61 on West 21st Street, dressed in leather pants and Manolo Blahnik heels, Tait Chatmon took a moment to appreciate the view. “In one glance you have dreads, then you have lawyer types, then you have city kids, then you have bridge and tunnel,” she said, dragging her finger across the room as if swiping icing off a cake. “I love it!”
That’s what you get on a Monday night downtown, and that’s why Ms. Chatmon and half a dozen of her friends make the trip down here. They come by car.
But they’re not bridge and tunnel. They’re from a part of Manhattan where strollers are more menacing than cab drivers, where the Gap is never more than a short walk from one’s doorstep and an exciting cultural moment is the opening of a new branch of Gracious Home. The Upper West Side.
Ms. Chatmon and her friends—like many, many Upper West Siders in need of a style fix—shop everywhere but their neighborhood and do almost all their socializing downtown. The Upper West Side is their bedroom community, bridged to the city by the Nos. 1 and 9 local subway lines.
The Upper West Side has gone through phases. Once a literary and artistic haven of creative eccentrics and liberals, it became a swinging singles scene in the 1980’s. But now its trendsetting appeal has eroded. Nearly everything that once gave the Upper West Side its quirky charm—from Shakespeare & Company books to Charivari, the clothing store—has been wiped out.
The triangle of real estate roughly defined by Zabar’s, Lincoln Center and the Museum of Natural History is a style-free zone. In between the Nine Wests and the Eddie Bauers are countless restaurants, clubs and shops. Yet many who live there insist that there’s nowhere to eat or go out to. At Rain, a Vietnamese restaurant, the droopy fernlike plants seem left over from the 80’s. People who live on the Upper West Side get their hopes up with every new flurry of openings, often only to be disappointed. Recently, a dozen or so boutiques and restaurants designed to make the area more of a style destination have opened. The most sophisticated newcomer, Calle Ocho, serves Latin American fare, the cuisine of the moment, but in an oversize room teeming with Banana Republic émigrés. Balthazar it isn’t.
Which is why many residents feel shame when confronted by someone who lives south of the border at Central Park South. When a young woman was recently at dinner with Adam Rapoport, an editor at Time Out New York magazine, who lives in the West Village, and mentioned that she lives on the Upper West Side, his response was typical. “I’ve heard of that,” he said.
How Harlem Became Big Time
By MARY ROSS | March 1, 1925
BLACK FINGERS WHIPPING FURIOUSLY OVER the white keys, beating out cascades of jazz; black bodies swaying rhythmically as their owners blow or beat or pluck the grotesque instruments of the band; on the dancing floor throngs, black and white, gliding, halting, swinging back madly in time to the music—this is the Harlem of the cabarets, jazz capital of the world.
Downtown specialists who have wearied of the tricks of Broadway come northward to this new center of pleasure. In some of its 15 cabarets black and white eat together, dance together in the rich abandon of the race which evolved that first jazz classic, the Memphis Blues; which refined the cakewalk into the fantastic fling of the “Charleston.”
Fifteen years ago Harlem looked much as it does today on the surface—a prosperous district north of Central Park, with brownstone houses bordering the broad streets, with “new-law” tenements, costly churches, magnificent avenues. Originally a Dutch village, it had become in turn predominantly Irish, then Jewish and Italian. About 1904 a few negroes began to trickle in east of Lenox Avenue. The d
istrict had been overbuilt, and a negro real estate operator, Philip A. Payton, offered to fill the vacant houses with self-respecting negro tenants. There was first organized opposition by the whites, then a panic which left rows of houses vacant. If one negro family moved into a block, every one else moved out.
With the war a black tide of laborers rolled in from the South and the West Indies to the metropolitan district, where work was waiting at wages beyond their rosiest dreams. The white resistance in Harlem broke.
And then those negroes, who were earning big money for the first time in their lives, bought the real estate of Harlem, which in the war slump could be had at prices far below their actual value. During the height of that fever it was no unusual thing to see a negro cook or washerwoman or workman go into a real estate office and plunk down $1,000, or $2,000, or $5,000 on the price of a house. Fifteen years ago there were only a few negroes in all Manhattan who owned real estate. Now it is estimated conservatively by John E. Nail, a negro real estate operator in Harlem, that the property owned and controlled by negroes in that district alone exceeds $60 million.
The Harlem Renaissance
By ISHMAEL REED | August 29, 1976
IT WAS CALLED THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE because Harlem was where the action was. Some of the writers belonging to the movement didn’t even live in Harlem. That didn’t matter. Harlem became the symbol for the international black city. It was home of “The New Negro” (Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on …) from the title of a book, compiled by Alain Locke, the brilliant Harlem Renaissance philosopher.
I still remember Langston Hughes, witty, such enormous sophistication behind that cigarette holder, inviting me for a drink at Max’s Kansas City. He encouraged young writers even though, shortly before his death, he told Arlene Francis, on a radio show, that we were all downtown writing poems even we didn’t understand. That was Langston Hughes, who wrote all day, breaking only for cocktails and dinner. The walls of his Harlem town house were covered with Afro-American cultural memorabilia, particularly from the Harlem Renaissance.
The New York Times Book of New York Page 66
