Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  Occasionally you’d go into the men’s bathroom and look in one of the stalls and there’d be two guys sixty-nining each other. Or there’d be a couple up in the balcony who were naked and getting it on, and you’d have to break it up. But those kinds of things didn’t happen very frequently. If people were drugged, it was normal; experimentation was par for the course.

  I never went to see Hair. Who had to see it? I lived it. Hair was for suburbanites; it tried to explain to them what we were doing. Besides, the music sucked. The hardness, the gutsiness of the rock ’n’ roll I was into was about power and strength. It was the basest, nastiest part of the blues amplified to 110 db with guitars and bass and drums pounding. This was not about the Age of Aquarius; this was about the power of the Age of Sex and Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll.

  Around ’71, Bill closed the Fillmore, and the Millard Agency moved uptown to East 52nd Street. The rent was radically increasing, and his profit margins were decreasing. If a tenant makes a whole lot of money, the landlord’s going to want it. That’s what happened here. But during its time, the Fillmore East was truly a magnet in Manhattan. Kids from all over flocked there.

  Today I tell people I worked at the Fillmore.

  “You did? I used to go there.”

  “Yeah, I was the one who told you to put your cigarette out.”

  (“But it’s a joint!” “Sorry, you gotta put it out.”)

  “Ah,” they’ll say, “you were the guy at the end of the aisle.”

  8

  East Side, West Side

  FATHER PETER COLAPIETRO: As a kid, I always saw Sixth Avenue as the dividing line between the East Side and West Side. The East Side was Rock Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral; the West Side was the stuff on 42nd Street. It was like you needed a passport to go from one to another.

  HOWARD KISSEL: Central Park divides the city in two. I was on the bus going up Third and as we approached 79th Street, a woman got up to get off. There was a tone of hysteria in her voice as she ran to the back and cried, “Back door!” I knew this woman was getting off to take the crosstown bus; she was running back to her side of town.

  The East Side has always been more settled, certainly from Fifth to Lexington. I’ve always thought of it as the adult side of town. Someone once explained to me that in the really exclusive buildings on Fifth and Park, you knew whether they admitted Jews if there was a thirteenth floor. If it went from 12 to 12A, it was a gentile building and Jews should not apply for a co-op there.

  When I arrived in New York in the fall of 1960 to begin college at Columbia, I was deposited on a Sunday morning at the Greyhound bus depot and took a taxi up Amsterdam Avenue to Columbia. It was pretty frightening. I saw a crowd of people outside a bar; a fight was going on. I remembered how my parents were afraid to send me to New York, and seeing this fight, I had the thought that this is a tough city.

  In 1961, my parents wanted to visit me so my mother gave me the names of hotels to inspect. I thought they all were great and selected a place called the Coliseum House on 71st between Amsterdam and West End. I had not noticed this was around the corner from what was then called Needle Park, that there was a motorcycle gang on the corner. My mother was just terrified. I didn’t understand. As far as I was concerned, I was in the Emerald City.

  A week before I arrived at Columbia, a murder took place in Morningside Park. I read about it in a Milwaukee paper; the headline was “The Savage and the Savant.” It was about how difficult it was for Columbia to maintain itself in the presence of this hostile, dangerous community.

  ANDREW BUSHKO: Columbia is a campus in the city, unlike NYU, whose campus is the city. I came back to Columbia after having been dean of students at Park College in Kansas City from 1968 to 1970. That was a tough couple of years to be dean of students. All you kept on saying was, “I hope it doesn’t happen here.”

  I knew about the riot at Columbia in 1969. Still, instead of being scared, I was happy to be going back to New York, where the only responsibility I’d have would be to go to school. But I found that the great Ivy League institution was frayed around the edges. People were living in the aftermath of the huge campus conflict; there were still what was known as “trashings” going on. You’d be sitting someplace on campus and all of a sudden some people would run by with lead pipes and buckets of red paint. They’d storm into Putin Hall, where allegedly defense research was going on, smash things in the laboratories, throw red paint all over the place as if it were blood, and say they were demonstrating against the war.

  The overall neighborhood was pretty gritty. The part where I lived on 121st Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam, was okay, though, because almost all the buildings were university housing. There was a real sense of neighborhood. Mrs. Zersass was an elderly woman who lived in the apartment house, and if you didn’t see her for a couple of days, you would go by and check to see how she was. It was that kind of a community.

  George Carlin grew up in that building, and his mother still lived there. She was a middle-class Irish woman who even in 1970 would not go out without white gloves and a hat. I’d see her going down the block to Corpus Christi Church, where she and the nuns would say prayers for George. You’d come home at night and there would be a message stuck to the elevator wall saying, “See George Carlin on the Johnny Carson Show tonight. He’ll be wonderful,” signed “Mary Carlin.”

  HOWARD KISSEL: The neighborhood around Columbia was very cosmopolitan, but working-class cosmopolitan rather than sophisticated cosmopolitan. There were all kinds of little restaurants. There was a Hungarian restaurant on Amsterdam, there were Italian restaurants, and there were those chains like Bickford’s and Riker’s, advertising “no better food at any price”—the big lie technique because the food was awful. Bickford’s was a cafeteria and it struck me that the most forlorn people in the neighborhood went there. Chock Full o’ Nuts was around. All those chains that were uniquely New York and which are all gone now.

  There were still dairy restaurants on the Upper West Side. A friend of mine ordered herring, and on the menu it said, “With all fish dishes you get cole slaw.” When my friend asked for his cole slaw, the waiter said, “You consider herring a fish?”

  The West Side was supposed to be the intellectual side of town. So you had artists, teachers. And though in the fifties and sixties the area was economically depressed, it was still one of the last refuges for middle-class people.

  JOE DARION: Our lawyer was also the lawyer for Jackie Gleason, and when Gleason moved his whole setup down to Florida, we were able to get Gleason’s producer’s apartment on Riverside Drive. The living room had an enormous bar that ran from one end of the room to the other. It had been a gift from Gleason.

  One day we got on the elevator going down, and this very tall woman with three enormous men were there talking about a baseball game. “As soon as the center fielder began to move to his left, I knew the pitcher was losing his stuff,” the woman said.

  “That dame must sure know something about baseball,” I said to my wife as we walked out of the building.

  The doorman overheard me. “Don’t you know who that is?” he asked. “She’s Babe Ruth’s widow.” It turned out, as every taxi driver who ever drove us home confirmed, Babe Ruth had lived in our building.

  But for a long while the Upper West Side was run down. The brownstones on the side streets had been turned into SROs (Single Room Occupancy dwellings). The landlords were looking to get out, and they weren’t taking care of the buildings.

  MAURICE RAPF: My son came home one day and told me, “I saw someone lying on the sidewalk with blood running out of him.” I went down and sure enough there was a dead body around the corner. Once my daughter was in the elevator and someone tried to rape her. She got off at the twelfth floor and ran up the steps to the roof to get away from the guy. All my kids had experiences seeing people stabbed and so forth. If I encountered anyone who seemed like he was going to try to intimidate me, I would turn around and growl
.

  My wife and I and our three young children had moved to New York from California in 1951. We sublet an apartment at 325 West 86th Street. In California, I only knew movie people. But here all these different kinds of people lived in my apartment building—doctors, lawyers, engineers. They became my friends.

  The reason I came to New York was that I was a member of the Communist Party and therefore blacklisted as a screenwriter. Before I left California, I burned my twenty-four-volume set of Lenin, published by the International Publishing House. I was afraid to leave it behind and afraid to take it with me.

  There was a whole community on the Upper West Side of people who were escaping the Hollywood blacklist. The building at 344 Central Park West housed so many of them it was called the Kremlin of the West Side. The most famous of the left-wingers were on the top, and they got less famous as you moved to the bottom floor. Who lived there? I won’t tell. The bulk of them worked in the Broadway theater, which did not have a blacklist.

  Every day I would meet my friends at the Tip Toe Inn on 86th and Broadway. All the left-wingers gathered there. It was like a Hollywood studio commissary except that the waiters were insulting. That was something new for me coming from California, but the lunches for $1.25 were wonderful, the Nova Scotia salmon, the chopped chicken liver. If you had lunch at two in the afternoon, that would do you for the day. One block east was Lichtmann’s, the bakery on the corner of 86th and Amsterdam. It was owned by Jewish people from Vienna. They must have had a smell machine—you couldn’t walk by there without being sucked in by the smell.

  I knew Zero Mostel from California, where he used to entertain at left-wing parties. He was so overpowering, he drove you crazy. When I met him again in New York, he had lost a lot of money because of the blacklist. I bought a picture that he painted when he was broke. But my wife hated that picture so much that to this day I don’t know where it is.

  I joined a poker game that had started in Zero Mostel’s place on 28th Street. Then Zero and the poker game moved to the Belnord, an expensive apartment house that occupies the entire block from 86th to 87th Streets, Amsterdam to Broadway. We would order our midnight snacks from the Carnegie Deli, which delivered to us all the way uptown, or from Barney Greengrass.

  SAUL ZABAR: In the 1960s, I knew the Upper West Side was considered a dangerous place, that people were moving out to Westchester and Long Island. From my standpoint, however, it was never dangerous. West End Avenue and Riverside Drive retained their integrity. The Irish had moved from Amsterdam and Columbus, and that part of the neighborhood became Hispanic. But to me it still seemed like the same West Side I had always known, the same customers going about their lives and buying things.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer was a customer at Zabar’s. He lived in the Belnord. He frequented the Senator Cafeteria on 96th and centered his stories on the literary crowd that hung around there. They could sit there all day long, speak in Yiddish, read the Yiddish newspapers, shmooze with each other, write their stories.

  HOWARD KISSEL: In 1972, we paid an agency five hundred dollars for a rent-stabilized apartment on 88th and Central Park West. They were delighted to have a middle-class couple. As we were moving from 90th and West End, we schlepped a lot of stuff over ourselves. We were a little nervous. You were either west of Broadway or east of Columbus. In between was a no-man’s-land that was thought to be dangerous. Only a few years earlier, it was not safe to walk on the side streets, where there were rooming houses filled with druggies and prostitutes. Turned out that had already changed. Due to the urban renewal project, people had bought brownstones on those blocks between Columbus and Amsterdam for thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars. By the mid-seventies, the West Side was turning around.

  Soon after we moved to Central Park West, I took a walk down Columbus, which was sort of brave. I thought I had entered a time warp. All the storefronts I saw had probably been there in ’42, ’52, and ’62. Old hardware stores, groceries, mom and pops. But one of the things I noticed was a restaurant called Ruskay’s with a hand-painted menu in which it not only told you the dishes of the day but the chef of the day. It was the beginning of the culinary revolution. In a few years Ruskay’s was so hot you couldn’t walk down that side of the street.

  KEN LIBO: When I first moved to Chelsea in the early sixties, there were three of us living in three rooms on the top floor of the old Victor Herbert mansion at 424 West 22nd Street. Then I moved in with three army intelligence officers in the London Terrace between 23rd and 24th and Ninth and Tenth. It was built in the late twenties, and I heard from many sources that in its day it was the largest apartment complex in the world; it takes up an entire block.

  The Irish landladies were very conspicuous in Chelsea at that time. They owned the SROs, town houses that had been built in the middle of the nineteenth century for merchants and their families by Clement Clark Moore, who wrote “The Night Before Christmas.” The tenants were mostly single or widowed men who worked on the wharves, and retired stevedores who’d sit on the steps outside the houses smoking their pipes. The Irish landladies sat on the steps too, although there was very little mixing. But as you came down the block, you felt very safe because these landladies on the stoops were like policemen. After all, their children were policemen, and so they knew how to manage. They were there all the time, watching.

  Because there were so many people living in a compact area, you saw the life cycle played out in front of your eyes. Here is Mrs. O’Leary. Mrs. O’Leary has a son. Maybe he’s old enough to live on his own, but Mrs. O’Leary is a protective Irish mother who wants one of her children to be with her in her old age. She selected this son, and they live on the ground floor of this town house that they bought for fifteen thousand dollars. When you see Mrs. O’Leary, she smiles. She treats you very much as if you were living in a small town. “How are you?” she asks. “Did you have a nice day?”

  I didn’t get to know the stevedores or Irish landladies personally, but I did get to know Louise Bourgeois, whom many consider America’s foremost sculptress. There she is, Louise, part of the neighborhood. She’s from France. “You know, I was married to a Jew.” she’d tell me, “but when our son Jean-Louis was born in Paris, I did not have him circumcised even though his father was Jewish.”

  “Oh, Louise, why is that?”

  “I love Paris so much. If Hitler had won the war, I would want to go back with Jean-Louis, and if he were circumcised it would be very dangerous.

  I also got to know Ben Zion a very famous artist in the fifties and sixties. His widow, Lillian, has made a museum of her house, which gives you a wonderful sense of his career. Here were two artists, stevedores, Irish landladies.

  And the Chelsea Hotel, which made a big impression on me at the time. Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan had lived there.

  HILTON KRAMER: In 1957, I rented an apartment in Hoboken. The fire station was only four doors away from my building. Nevertheless, not long after I moved in, I returned from a weekend away to discover there’d been a fire. Fortunately I hadn’t unpacked my books yet. So I moved into a small furnished apartment on the sixth floor of the Chelsea Hotel, where I lived for the next three years.

  The people who ran the Chelsea were Hungarian Jews. I found you had to sort of qualify to rent a place there. The manager said to me, “What do you do?”

  I said, “I’m an art critic.”

  “A kind of writer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah,” he said. “We like writers here. We’ve buried some of the best of them.”

  While living at the Chelsea I had a very dramatic experience. The poet Delmore Schwartz was married to a writer, a beautiful blonde woman named Elizabeth Pollet.

  The summer of 1957, they were at the Yaddo Colony in Saratoga, New York. When Delmore left for a few days to give a poetry reading, Elizabeth availed herself of his absence to leave him. He had been very abusive to her, and she just disappeared. It turned out afterwards she had gone to a friend in Californ
ia.

  By sheer coincidence, some weeks earlier Elizabeth had asked me if she could try out as a reviewer for Arts Magazine. I said sure and wrote her a letter telling her what the deadlines were for the fall issues.

  When Delmore came back to Yaddo and found his wife had left him, he also found this letter from me. Convinced Elizabeth was living with me, he moved into the Chelsea Hotel and began calling me at odd times, threatening to kill me. Once he called just after I returned from a difficult weekend in Massachusetts, where I learned my mother had a fatal illness. “I can’t really deal with your situation right now. I have a lot of family problems,” I said, and hung up.

  The next day he called again. “I know what your family problems are. You’re divorcing your wife to marry Elizabeth.” I’d never had a wife.

  Labor Day weekend, I stayed in New York hoping to finish a writing project. Delmore called Saturday night. “I know Elizabeth is up there with you, and I’m going to come up and shoot you,” he said. Sure enough, a few minutes later, he’s banging on my door. I put the chain on and opened it just enough to see him standing there with a gun. I slammed the door shut. Fortunately the Chelsea was built like a fortress.

  I called down to the desk. Delmore had been at the Chelsea for weeks by this time so I didn’t have to tell them how crazy he was. The night manager came up. “Now Mr. Schwartz,” he said, “if I go in and search Mr. Kramer’s apartment and I don’t find Mrs. Schwartz there, will you believe me?”

  When Delmore said, “I won’t,” I said I would call the police. Hearing that, Delmore went back to his room.

  I put a few things in a bag and went over to Hoboken to spend the night with a friend, who came back to Manhattan with me the next morning. We went to the local precinct station to file a complaint. Since I hadn’t suffered any injury, they didn’t want to have anything to do with the situation. But I made such an issue of it that just to get rid of me they assigned an officer to come back to the Chelsea.