Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  We had a job downtown on Wall and Beaver Streets putting in sidewalk walls, big boxes where the transformers go. You couldn’t get a machine down there because of the pedestrian and vehicular traffic. So this guy named John got down in that hole and steadily, steadily, for about four hours, dug that hole. Rhythmically, he didn’t even appear to break a sweat. But I know it was hard work because he swung a shovel of dirt weighing at least ten pounds up ten feet. John was forty-eight years old but he looked like he was sixty. He had been doing this kind of work for years.

  I did this kind of work for about six months. Later on, I would see those guys and say to myself “How the hell did I do that?” But as they say in Yiddish, Mehabt machen a leiben (You got to make a living).

  I was ordained in 1976 by Cardinal Cooke. It’s all a blur except for one point in the ceremony when we had the prayer of litany, where you mention a saint’s name and say, “Pray for us, St. Michael,” “Pray for us, St. Thomas.” Traditionally people kneel for that. But the guys who were being ordained would lay prone on the floor of the cathedral. The only thing I remember is getting up after lying prone on the floor of the sanctuary and seeing condensation marks.

  Cardinal Cooke wasn’t as visible as Cardinal Spellman. He was more behind the scenes. He benefited from Spellman’s power. I benefited from Spellman’s method of fund-raising: You find out who has the money and you ask him for it.

  HOWARD KISSEL: When the Reverend James Parks Morton took over at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam and 112th in the early seventies, they resumed work on the building, which had stopped some time before. The thought was that they were going to work on the church instead of giving the money to the poor, but they would employ people from the neighborhood and teach them skills so that the church would become a community center. Reverend Morton’s idea was that the church should be at the center of the community. He said, if there’s a material emptiness, that is a vacuum the spiritual and artistic can fill.

  JOHN TAURANAC: For my money, Grace Church at l0th Street and Fourth Avenue is the finest Gothic Revival church in the city. It was the first architectural commission of James Renwick II, who was a faithful member of the church until he died in the 1890s. He did everything except the deeper altar that is there now, which was done by Heins and LaFarge, the architects of the subway. In the late nineteenth century, Grace Church was the social church. Edith Wharton wrote about it. People bought pews like you buy a co-op.

  Although I went to school at Grace Church, on Sundays we attended St. James Episcopalian Church on 71st and Madison, where I’d sit in my wool suit and scratch. In the late nineteenth century, the church had to decide whether to build St. James east of Park Avenue and be a church for “the people” or on proper Madison Avenue and be an upscale church for the rich. They opted for Madison Avenue, and in their little history they are perfectly straightforward about the decision that was made. I always felt absolutely ostracized there.

  RABBI DAN ALDER: The Brotherhood Synagogue on Gramercy Park was originally a Quaker meetinghouse that is believed to have been one of the stops on the underground railroad.

  In 1965, the Quakers, who had another meetinghouse nearby, decided to sell the building to a developer who planned to erect a thirty-story apartment house. But local residents were able to get the newly established Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate it a city landmark, and a group of neighborhood people bought it with the idea of turning it into a center for the performing arts. When that did not work out, they sold it to the United Federation of Teachers.

  It’s now 1974. The real estate market is down. The UFT finds the building unsuitable and puts it up for sale. Coincidentally the Brotherhood Synagogue, which has been without a home for a year, learns the building is available and is able to get it for a good price. But it’s in a terrible state of disrepair. James Stuart Polshek, Dean of the School of Architecture at Columbia, and the contracting firm of Lawrence Held and Son volunteer their services. A wellspring of community support comes from non-Jews as well as Jews. The Epiphany Roman Catholic Church welcomes the Brotherhood Synagogue into the neighborhood. The Calvary–St. George’s Parish Episcopal Church invites our rabbi, Irving Block, to preach at a Sunday-morning service. And on April 6, 1975, our Torahs are carried into the sanctuary.

  That was the beginning of the Brotherhood Synagogue in Gramercy Park. But the congregation’s actual beginning took place some twenty-one years earlier in a Greenwich Village Presbyterian church. It was the vision of Rabbi Block, my predecessor, working with the Reverend Dr. Jesse Stitt, minister of the Village Presbyterian Church on West 13th Street. For two decades, they and their congregations not only shared a building, which was unusual enough in those days, but had a joint board and conducted cultural and social-action events together. It was a real covenant of brotherhood.

  The Village Presbyterian Church was built in 1846 on land once owned by the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in New York. From 1949 to 1953, a congregation of Reform Jews rented space from the church until they were able to establish a synagogue of their own. But a very young Rabbi Block, who was involved with this congregation, had an idea of creating a new synagogue that would equally share a facility with a church in a true act of brotherhood, a notion that Reverend Stitt and his congregation embraced.

  The union turned out to be quite simple. An ark was recessed into the wall of the church’s altar, and above it “Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself” was inscribed. A sign on the gate outside the main sanctuary read “One House Serving Two Faiths.” The building served as a synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath and holy days, as a church on Sundays and days of Christian observance. Members of both congregations attended each other’s services. The rabbi and minister spoke to each other’s congregation.

  This joint venture tapped into a powerful feeling that arose after the Second World War with the birth of the United Nations, National Brotherhood Week, the National Conference of Christians and Jews. As a concept, brotherhood was pretty cutting-edge. And it was somehow fitting that people in Greenwich Village, who were generally more progressive, would take to this idea.

  Still, Rabbi Block and Reverend Stitt were an anomaly—the rabbi and the minister who were friends. People were moved by the picture of the two of them standing side by side. Articles about them appeared in the New York Times. Invitations to tell their story came from all over.

  The rabbi and minister appeared on television, not only religious programs, but popular shows like I’ve Got a Secret and NBC’s quiz show The Big Surprise, hosted by Mike Wallace. For their category, they picked religion—the rabbi taking questions about Christianity, the minister about Judaism. They won ten thousand dollars, which they donated to the work of their congregations.

  This beautiful arrangement began to unravel in the summer of 1971 when Dr. Stitt retired. He died several months later, and the Brotherhood Synagogue said Kaddish for him for the entire year. Sadly, the new minister appointed by the Presbyterian Minister’s Council was a man who clearly did not share the same brotherhood values as his predecessor. By 1974, the situation had deteriorated so badly that the Jewish congregation left the premises. Ironically, the pastor resigned the following year, and soon after, the Presbytery of New York dissolved the Village Presbyterian Church and sold the building. In a fate not unlike that of the Quaker meetinghouse, this house of worship came up against landmark regulations, as it was located in a landmarked district. From the outside, it still looks like a Greek Revival church with six Doric columns. But inside, a sanctuary that seated eight hundred has been converted into apartments.

  KEN LIBO: My rediscovery of my Jewish roots began when I came to New York in the early 1960s. I’m not a New York Jew by birth. Rather, I grew up in what I like to think of as an American shtetl. What is an American shtetl? It is usually a Jewish community in a town of maybe two thousand people that pretty much re-creates the warp and the woof of shtetl life in Eastern
Europe. So I had an intimacy with Jewish life. I knew about the kosher butcher, I knew about the cheder, I knew about gefilte fish, which we had on Friday. Both of my parents were Yiddish-speaking, and I felt as though I’d grown up in a never-ending Yiddish play in which there was no first act, no last act. You always came in the middle and people were always yelling at each other just as they did on the Yiddish stage.

  I finished college, my navy career, and came to New York in the early 1960s. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do so I joined the international department of Bankers Trust and stayed there for four or five years. That was the time when banks were just beginning to open up to ethnic groups.

  By the mid-sixties, I realized I didn’t have any talent for that kind of work. I began teaching at City College, where I met Irving Howe and became chief researcher for World of Our Fathers.

  Something told me the place to begin researching was the secondhand bookstores on Fourth Avenue, which are now practically all gone. I would go there religiously, look through everything in their Judaica sections and find books that nobody knew about. Many were vanity press, but for our purposes they were invaluable because they described the life of the immigrant and children of the immigrant at the turn of the century better than anyone else. One of them in particular was by Sophie Ruskay, who wrote a wonderful book about what it was like to be a little girl growing up on East Broadway in 1910, what kind of games she played, what it was like in her house, what school was like. I found memoirs written by these Jewish political hacks who worked for the Irish politicos. They told what it was like to work for the Ahearn gang, which controlled Tammany politics on the Lower East Side until the 1930s, because the Jews knew if they voted for an Irishman they’d be better off than if they voted for a fellow Jew. Irving had given me a budget so I bought these books, which ranged from one to eight dollars. I would come home with fifteen at a time, and he was delighted with them.

  There were maybe a dozen stores, all owned by Jews who were book lovers, carrying out the tradition of love of the written word from the sacred into the secular. Very few of them had college educations. The stores were very cramped, there were tens of thousands of books in each of them, but the owners knew where everything was.

  Before coming to New York, I had a rather flip idea of my Jewishness. I was not terribly respectful of Judaism, no more than Alexander Portnoy was. I was rather resentful of my mother being overprotective. I was ashamed of my father, a kleyner mentsch, who—although he had mastered the mechanics of the English language—spoke with an accent. I wanted very much to be mainstream American. Israel was but a speck in the eye of world Judaism when I was born in 1937, so the attitude Jews have today about being Jewish, which came about largely because of the success of the State of Israel, is very different from the attitude I had when I was growing up, which was like that of the military: “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  Coming to New York with that kind of baggage, I discovered Jews predominate in New York. As Lenny Bruce said, “Even the goyem in New York are Jewish.” I would go to Jewish restaurants like Ratner’s from time to time and have the experience of being waited on by Jewish waiters who would give people a hard time.

  “What kind of soup do you want, Mr. Fancy-Dancy?”

  “Potato soup.”

  “You want to live to tomorrow?”

  I hadn’t been aware of this carrying on before. But I loved it. To me, this was life on the wing.

  HOWARD KISSEL: An edition of Fortune that came out around 1960 entirely devoted to New York City included an article entitled “The Jewish Elan.” We know the Luce magazines were not known for their philo-Semitism. So for Fortune to acknowledge the Jewish motor of New York was remarkable.

  The Jews themselves were busy assimilating until the late sixties. Around 1969, the Jewish Museum on Fifth and 93rd, which had been a haven for avant-garde art and had little or nothing to do with Jews, held an exhibit on the Lower East Side. That was the busiest the museum had ever been. It was a big turning point, the first time the Jews stopped fleeing the legacy of the Lower East Side and embraced the notion.

  6

  High Culture or “Who the Hell Is de Kooning?”

  HILTON KRAMER: The thing I very quickly discovered when I came to New York in 1950, and which continued to both interest and baffle me all during the fifties, was the enormous role played by psychoanalysis. It seemed everybody I met in the academic world, in the literary world, in the art world, was in analysis. I couldn’t understand how they could afford it because most of the people in those worlds didn’t have any real money, and the going rate in those days was twenty-five dollars an hour. I knew people who went three or four times a week.

  In the mid-fifties I got to know the art critic Clement Greenberg. I knew he was in analysis, and one day when we both had had sufficient quantity to drink, I asked him, “How long has this been going on?”—meaning the role of psychoanalysis in the lives of educated people.

  He said, “Well, that depends on whether you were in the army” (which he had been).

  I said, “What do you mean?”

  And he said, “Well, if you were in the war, it’s been going on since 1945, but if you weren’t in the war, it’s probably been going on since the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939.”

  Clem didn’t elaborate; he tended to be very laconic. But he meant that quite seriously. When disillusion set in with Stalin, the Soviet Union, and Marxism, people switched from Marx to Freud or his followers. The bourgeoisie remained the enemy, but instead of class warfare, it became war between parents and children. Instead of fighting on the barricades, you were fighting on the couch, excavating the past and demonizing your parents.

  Jackson Pollock was in analysis for years and years, first Freudian, then Jungian analysis. A lot of good it did him. I remember a breakup of a romance of my own with this girl I was quite mad for because of something I said about psychoanalysis. “All this time you’ve just been pretending to be well adjusted,” she said.

  Psychoanalysis was going on in other parts of the country, but the heart of it was in New York. Even though it happened much more in this country than in Europe, a lot of the analysts were European, and New York had a very European atmosphere in those days.

  HOWARD KISSEL: A dear friend of mine left Vienna the day of the Anschluss and came to her brother, who had an apartment on 115th and Broadway. She still lives there with the family furniture they were somehow able to bring from Vienna. I used to go to Vic and Katie’s Viennese Restaurant on the Upper West Side, which was run by a couple who came here in the thirties; they served Wiener schnitzel and all those sorts of things.

  And then there was the pair of sisters from Germany I became friends with. The older was statuesque, so beautiful; the younger was a little zaftig but more sensual. In March 1969, they asked me to be their escort to the opera. If I would rent a tuxedo, they would pay for the tickets. I didn’t get it at the time, but afterwards I pieced together that the older of the girls was being kept by a married man who had provided the tickets but for obvious reasons wasn’t able to go to the opera with her.

  We saw Il Trovatore. It was one of the great performances: Leontyne Price in her prime, Grace Burnbry in her prime, Placido Domingo in his first season, Zuban Mehta, who was sublime. Our seats were in the orchestra of the old Met on Broadway between 39th and 40th, which was quite a thrill as I was used to standing room for $1.75. The older sister wore a kind of linen brocade gown that was just so elegant, and the younger a kind of Moroccan pajamas, which was a little shocking as pants on ladies were not yet common. I was there in my tuxedo with my unruly hair, thinking I looked like a young conductor.

  As we marched up the stairs during the intermission, we were a very impressive sight. We passed a woman, who was clearly from the upper rungs of society, wearing a dress that came down like a bell with layers of chinchilla. She was engaged in conversation with someone, but as we moved in her direction, she nodded at us. It was one of the most glamorous e
venings of my life

  STANLEY DRUCKER: When I joined the New York Philharmonic in 1948, nearly all the musicians were European—German, Italian, French, Russian. Outside of the Lewisohn Stadium concerts, there wasn’t much summer playing, and the musicians would go hack to Europe just to soak up the atmosphere. Musicians were very individual in those days. They were all ethnics, characters; they had a certain personality.

  HILTON KRAMER: Classical music was totally different in New York than in any other place because of the sheer population of European émigrés. If you went to Carnegie Hall or Washington Irving High School on Irving Place, where they had wonderful chamber music concerts, a large percentage of the audience would come with musical scores that they would follow. There was a big central European—German, Austrian, Hungarian—element in that audience; they were properly dressed, musically sophisticated, and harsh judgers of performance. Many of the musicians had the same background. These were people who had gotten out of Europe when Hitler came to power, and it was a tremendous enrichment to the cultural world in New York.

  The New School was actually founded in the twenties, but it really didn’t get going until the thirties when it had all these émigrés. It was virtually an enclave for them.

  The faculty at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University was almost like a German enclave for a time and largely Jewish. Virtually the entire surrealist movement came to New York from Paris because of the Nazi occupation, and that emigration affected the emergence of what came to be called the New York School—the abstract expressionists. Jackson Pollock famously said, “It’s been tremendously important for these European avant-garde artists to have come here because they spurred us on.” If you look at what Pollock was doing in the thirties, he was a provincial artist.