Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences

by Pelonero, Catherine

  Victor and Kitty had been casual friends for the past few years, predating their employment at Ev’s. They had mutual friends and shared an interest in the trotters at Roosevelt Raceway, occasionally heading out to the races with others who enjoyed placing a few dollars on a thoroughbred. Group outings to the track were the only instances when Victor saw Kitty socially, however. He was of course a married family man, and aside from knowing that Kitty was unmarried, lived in Queens, and that she was good at her job and very well liked around Ev’s, he knew very little about her personal life. And when detectives showed up at his home early that Friday morning, asking if he knew of any reason someone might want to harm Kitty Genovese, he was at a complete loss.

  Vincent Genovese often said that he never had to support his daughter after she finished high school, that she always earned enough, always took care of herself. When people would ask Kitty when she was going to “find a nice man, settle down,” she would firmly answer that she did not need a man, that she had always made as much money as a man. In fact, there was neither any special man nor any romantic entanglements with the men in her life, but not for her lack of appeal.

  At twenty-eight years old, Kitty weighed barely over one hundred pounds, the same as when she had graduated from high school. Physically she had changed very little since her teen years. Petite in stature, she stood just two inches over five feet, her figure shapely and slender. Her Italian ancestry shone through in an olive complexion and dark features that were sharp and well-defined. Her hair was such a deep brown that it appeared almost black, worn in a pixie style that framed her heart-shaped face. Beneath prominent, well-manicured eyebrows, her brown eyes were surrounded by lashes naturally long and full. Her mouth had a delicate look and appeared small unless her full lips were parted in a smile, as they often were, showing a tiny gap between her two front teeth.

  As far as most of her friends and acquaintances knew—and Kitty, friendly and well liked as she was, seemed to have many more acquaintances than close friends in her adult years—she lived in Queens, had formerly been a barmaid in a couple other places much like the one where she worked now, and had been the manager at Ev’s Eleventh Hour for about the past three years.

  As her family, certain friends, and those who had shared a part of her history knew, Catherine Susan Genovese was born July 7, 1935, in Brooklyn, the most populous borough of New York City at the time, with more than two million residents within its borders.

  Born at the depths of the Great Depression, growing up in the shadow of World War II and then the Korean War, her childhood had nevertheless been a comfortable one spent in the embrace of loving parents and a large extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. She had been named Catherine after her paternal grandmother, which was in keeping with Italian custom (though friends from as far back as elementary school remember always calling her Kitty), and of course the family was Catholic, though as the years progressed Kitty would remain so more in name than in practice. Eventually she would find herself in conflict with certain expectations of the church, but that would come later. As a child, religion and its rituals were simply a natural thread in the fabric of a world woven from traditions shared by most of her peers, and the scope of this world did not extend much beyond walking distance from her home.

  Kitty’s father, Vincent, was an intelligent, hard-working son of Italian immigrants who had worked his way up from salesman to entrepreneur by the time she was a young child. He owned and operated his own small business in Brooklyn called the Bay Ridge Coat, Apron & Towel Supply Company while Rachel tended their home and growing family. After Kitty came her brother Vincent, Jr., two years younger. Eight years later came sister Susan, followed by brothers Bill and Frank. The gap in their ages actually accounted in part for the close relationships between Kitty and her younger siblings; she had been like a second mother to them, a role she embraced.

  Throughout Kitty’s childhood, the family lived in a classic brownstone at 29 St. Johns Place in Park Slope, a vibrant area in western Brooklyn, home to scenic Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Park Slope at the time was heavily populated by working class families of Italian heritage much like her own, living in the close quarters of the four-story brick row houses and brownstones that lined the side streets.

  Her childhood was not unlike that of other kids growing up in Brooklyn of that era, walking to and from school, playing on the stoops and sidewalks, roller skating on streets bereft of cars due to gas rationing during World War II—the upbringing of city kids in the pre-electronics age, with leisure time spent largely outdoors on concrete playgrounds of their own making. The apartments in which they lived were usually too small and crowded for indoor play, particularly since households back then tended to have more members.

  May Trezza grew up a block away from Kitty and was a friend of hers from elementary through high school. She could not recall ever being inside Kitty’s home or having Kitty inside hers. “We just stayed outside in those days,” May remembered. “Outside and in our own neighborhood, but that’s how we all got to know each other. Wherever you were, there was someone who knew you or your parents. It was sort of like having the whole block as your babysitter.”

  Neighborhoods typically were ethnic enclaves, separated by boundaries no less distinct for being imaginary. Staying within those boundaries meant streets that felt familiar and safe. It was common to find groups of kids playing outside without any adult supervision in sight. With parents occupied by tending the home or trying to scratch out a living during those lean Depression years, kids often supervised themselves in free time, the older kids looking out for the younger ones.

  May Trezza recalled the structure of their growing up years. “Everybody’s routine was pretty much the same. We got out of school early on Wednesdays to go to religion classes. Even if you went to public school, your teachers insisted that you go to your church class.

  “Kitty was the oldest girl in an Italian family just like I was, and we were expected to help out a lot at home,” May continued. “We’d walk up to 5th Avenue to do a little shopping for our mothers, and back then you shopped almost day to day since nobody had freezers or any room to store things. In the summer we had peddlers selling fruits and vegetables that would come down the street with horse and wagon. Each neighborhood had its own peddler, and our mothers would send us out to buy from him. The guy in our neighborhood called himself Tony Scarole. Sometimes if you were lucky, he’d give you an extra apple or something for your little brother.

  “When we finished whatever we had to do for our mothers, we’d play cards or dolls out on the stoop, maybe walk up to the candy store on 5th. We walked everywhere. Everybody did, and nobody ever worried about it, although we didn’t stray far from home. It was a nice way to grow up, really. Pretty ordinary, but very secure.”

  Kitty had an especially close bond with her mother. People who knew them described Rachel as Kitty’s counselor, whom she heeded and respected. Friends in Kitty’s adult years also noted the devotion between mother and daughter.

  As an adolescent, Kitty did well in school and enjoyed an active social life. A remarkably outgoing and confident girl—self-assured beyond her years, as friends described it—people were drawn to her, and she to them. By the time she entered Prospect Heights High School, then a public all-girls school located across the street from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Kitty had blossomed into a pretty and popular teenager known for her sense of humor and sunny disposition.

  Formerly called The Girls Commercial High School, Prospect Heights High was an immense five-story building designed to accommodate 3,500 students who came from all over the borough. Even among such a large student body, Kitty distinguished herself as a girl with a personality almost as big as the school itself.

  “Kitty was a big cutup, the class comedian,” May Trezza recalled. “She was very, very funny, always cracking jokes or belting out songs for a laugh. Seniors were allowed to go up to the roof a
t lunchtime. We would go up there to eat our lunch, but mainly we would smoke. I remember Kitty walking on these benches along the side of the building, standing up there and telling jokes and singing. She was one of those people who was always in a good mood.”

  Classmate Peggy Cahill remembered Kitty the same way. As Peggy put it decades later, “I never met anyone as happy as Kitty. You never saw her with a frown, never. She loved people, she loved life, she was just full of life. She was overflowing! If you were around her, you couldn’t be miserable.

  “I don’t think there was a single girl in that whole school who didn’t like her. She was always singing or telling gags. Just loved to have fun all the time. She liked to call people ‘kid,’ as in, ‘How ya doing, kid?’ Then she’d wink and laugh.

  “Sometimes she’d get a little loud with all the goofing off, walking down the halls singing and all that. I was on the student police force and I’d have to tell her to keep it down. But she’d always cooperate. She’d giggle and say, ‘Okay, kid,’ and then she’d settle down. She was never obnoxious, just a very happy and upbeat person, so much fun to be around.”

  Other classmates agreed. The 600 seniors in the graduating class of June 1953 voted her one of their twenty-three “Class Celebrities”—Kitty Genovese, Class Cut-up. A tribute to her class celebrity status appeared on the front page of the school newspaper dated June 22, 1953:

  The class cut up, that’s Kitty,

  She’s quite a gal you know.

  Always doing things for a laugh

  Like going swimming in the snow!

  Somewhat surprisingly for such a popular student, Kitty’s participation in school activities was minimal if not nonexistent. Her only credit in the senior yearbook—aside from her appearance on the the celebrity page and a humorous write-up in the class prophecy—is Class Day Rep. She didn’t show much interest in the small honors or club memberships prized by some other girls her age, preferring to march to the beat of her own drum, which at that time led her most often to local dance halls, alive with the syncopated rhythms and shrill brass of band leaders like Billy May and Perez Prado.

  Dancing made her feel alive, she told friends.

  Latin American numbers were her favorites—mambo, cha-cha, Latin jazz—and she could hold her own with the best of them. At least with the best of them at neighborhood dances around Park Slope, where she was noticed for more than her fluid steps.

  A former boyfriend who met Kitty at a dance when she was sixteen described her as “a very attractive girl with beautiful eyes that looked straight at you, a flawless complexion, and a lovely smile.”

  But again, it was her sparkling personality that truly set her apart. “She was lively and outgoing, very open to the people around her. Kitty had a lot of her own friends and she interacted very well with mine. She was quite popular. Most people I knew enjoyed her company.

  “At the time, her passions and areas of interest were what you would expect from a teenager: dancing, movies, Coney Island. She was not conceited but enjoyed nice clothes, was always well dressed and conscious of how she looked and how others saw her.

  “Outwardly, Kitty seemed to possess a good sense of herself and what she wanted from life. Considering the time, early 1950s, and her family background, her goals in life appeared to replicate that of her family, without a particular career in mind. She did not express interest in furthering her education beyond high school; that was the general mode in the environment she lived in, which did not expect her to go beyond just getting married and having a family.”

  The boyfriend, who dated Kitty regularly during her high school years, recalled her home life at that time. “Kitty had a very close relationship with her family. They played an important role, effectively dictating what her activities and freedom were. Whether going out on a date with me or spending time with her schoolmates, she was expected to return home at a reasonable hour. Her mother was her counselor, whom she heeded and respected. She adhered to a Catholic upbringing as I did, and complied with the rules.

  “She depended very closely on her mother and father, loved and cared for her brothers and sister. Her family was extremely important to her. I would say that the family relations dominated her life, but they did not necessarily relate to her needs or understand her.”

  As would become apparent, those needs included a strong sense of independence and possibly some misgivings about the traditional route of marriage and family that most women were expected to follow, although it is not at all certain—even unlikely—that Kitty ever articulated this to anyone.

  Whatever doubts she may have harbored or however independent her true nature, she cared very much for the feelings of those closest to her. As her former boyfriend observed, “Kitty was a very sensitive, empathetic person. Her strongest defining personal quality was that she was very outgoing and open to the people around her. I think her biggest talent was being able to interact with people in a very friendly and sympathizing way.”

  Perfect qualities, it might be said, for someone destined to work in the bar business. Not that any of the people close to her back then, least of all her own family, had envisioned Kitty with such a career. Or any career.

  The early 1950s marked a time when traditional values and gender roles not only ruled, but were seldom questioned in most circles. Though Kitty adhered to the strictures of her upbringing, there was one repeated act of rebellion in her teen years that indicated a curiosity if not outright longing.

  Brooklyn offered a lot, but it paled in comparison to that pinnacle of excitement across the bridge known as Manhattan. The subway system made it accessible; her own nature made it irresistible. If she had to sneak around a little or skip school once in a while to get there, it made the experience all the more enticing.

  May Trezza’s fondest memory of Kitty—one that seemed to capture the essence of her personality—sprung from one of these furtive trips to the city.

  “Instead of going to school we met Kitty and some other gals at the subway and we rode into Manhattan. We had done this a couple times. Mainly we’d go to the Paramount Theatre in Times Square because they had a first-run movie and a stage show. We’d hide our lunch and our books under our coats and see the show, then hang out in the ladies room until it was time to go home.

  “This one particular time, as we came up the subway steps, Kitty ran ahead of us up to the sidewalk, threw her arms out wide, and started singing, ‘New York, New York! It’s a wonderful town!’ Then she burst out laughing. That’s how she was. Just burst out singing in the middle of Times Square!”

  Fun at the movies aside, for Kitty the major draw in Manhattan became a place further south of Times Square.

  Greenwich Village, commonly known as “the Village,” was the bohemian enclave in lower Manhattan that in the early 1950s served as the east coast stomping ground of the Beat movement. Kitty and her friends visited the tiny darkened clubs, listening in amazement to the music and poetry so different from any they had heard before. They were awed by the audaciousness of the Beats: self-styled rebels who eschewed convention, daring not only to live alternate lifestyles but also to talk, write, and sing openly about it.

  As May Trezza recalled, “We went there either on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon to hang out. We were trying to be Beat, you know, pretending we were beatniks.” Of course their home lives made them anything but beatniks. “They wouldn’t serve us any liquor because we were just kids, but it was still quite the experience.”

  From a modern perspective it’s difficult to grasp how remarkable the experience of Greenwich Village must have been for “ordinary” teenagers of that time, before mass media and the Internet made all things accessible, stepping into a community filled with men and women who casually, flagrantly—sometimes angrily—thumbed their noses at the stifling conformity of the time. For a teenage girl like Kitty from a traditional Italian-American family, where everything from clothing to curfew was dictated by loving but exacting parents who thems
elves lived by time-honored codes of conduct, the Village must have seemed like a new planet—one worthy of exploration. According to May Trezza, “Kitty had gone to the Village a couple of times, way before the rest of us. She was hanging out in Manhattan a lot towards the end of our senior year.”

  In hindsight, the exposure to this brave new world may have stirred something in Kitty that she had perhaps been too reluctant to acknowledge before. In any event, her visits to Greenwich Village would not end with high school.

  After graduation in June of 1953, May and Kitty lost touch. The last time they saw each other was a chance meeting on 5th Avenue in Park Slope. “It might’ve been six months to a year after we graduated. We were talking about where we were working, what we’d been doing. And she mentioned she was engaged,” said May, who recalled Kitty saying that her fiancé was a military cadet. He was, in fact, a young army officer and college graduate, an exceptional young man with a promising future. They had met in Brooklyn at a neighborhood dance.

  When Vincent and Rachel Genovese moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, the year after Kitty finished high school, they may have preferred that their oldest daughter move with them, but with her wedding date set for the fall, Kitty remained in Brooklyn at the home of her grandparents.

  The young couple wed as planned, taking their vows in the beautiful old family church. They married the same year as a very glamorous couple of the time, Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. DiMaggio and Monroe’s famously brief marriage would outlast theirs by seven months.

  By year’s end, to the shock and dismay of both families, Kitty and her husband separated. The marriage was eventually annulled.

  In the years following, neither bride nor groom would speak much about their short-lived union. Both viewed it as a painful mistake best put behind them, a brief but sad episode that neither wished to discuss in depth, if at all. With few exceptions, people who knew Kitty throughout the better part of her adult life had no idea she had once been married.