My Old Neighborhood Remembered

by Avery Corman

  Only when we reached dating age and certain proprieties were honored — you wanted to show you were appropriate and organized — did we bother to check the times of a movie to see it from the beginning. The common line while watching a movie was, “Did we come in here?” and if we really liked the movie we watched it to the end again.

  In a vanished movie-going custom, if no seats were available, people would stand in the side aisles waiting for someone to leave and until then we watched the movie standing.

  Going to the movies with family members was necessary, depending upon how old you were. Going to the movies with friends was excellent, except when we were of an age when we had to sit in the children’s section presided over by matrons dressed in white and armed with flashlights to pick us out if we hummed through our candy boxes. Going to the movies when you were too old to get in at children’s prices, but too young to be allowed to sit with the adults was a dark period in one’s moviegoing life. Going to the movies on a date was also excellent, unless you ran into someone from your family, or friends who snickered.

  Stories of adventures at the movies began to circulate in the neighborhood, the storyteller usually one of the local big shots, someone a little older, or one of the better ballplayers, and the main story line went something like this. The big shot went prowling the balcony of the Loew’s Paradise on a Saturday afternoon, picked up a girl who was sitting there, started to neck, and felt her up. The story was always somehow about the balcony of the Loew’s Paradise, not even the RKO Fordham or the Loew’s Grand. This was a recurring story of the neighborhood big shots. Necking with a girl you picked up in the Loew’s Paradise was astonishing to me, especially the feeling up part. Here’s the thing. I believed those stories. And it never happened to me. Not that I tried. And I wouldn’t have. Which is why they were the big shots.

  The Loew’s Paradise Theater opened in 1929, a fantasy palace, madly baroque in an Italianate style with a ceiling of stars in a sky of moving clouds. The Paradise was huge, 3,885 seats. A sold out showing of a popular movie meant a commensurate crowd filling the Great Hall lobby and into the outer lobby. This kind of crowd formed for The Three Musketeers in 1948 with Gene Kelly as d’Artagnan, Van Heflin as Athos, Gig Young as Porthos, Robert Coote as Aramis, and with June Allyson, Lana Turner, and Angela Lansbury.

  The theater was designed by John Eberson, who specialized in these “atmospheric” movie palaces as they were called. His son, Drew Eberson, wrote, “I believe that even if we had the financing today we wouldn’t be able to find the artisans who could create another Paradise.” We in the Bronx thought it was unique. However, Loew’s erected similar Eberson-designed movie palaces in New York: the Valencia in Queens, the Kings in Brooklyn, and the 175th Street in Manhattan. Well, it was unique to us, this elegant place in our very neighborhood.

  The Ascot Theater, tiny by comparison, was a couple of blocks south of the Paradise and less than a block from our apartment. The Ascot was one of the first art movie houses in New York, the only art house in the Bronx. Classic foreign films played there virtually in repertory, Beauty and the Beast, the Marcel Pagnol Fanny trilogy, The Baker’s Wife, and in the postwar period, the great Italian neo-realist films appeared in the Ascot immediately after they made their American debuts, Paisan, Open City, The Bicycle Thief. These movies that transformed cinema were not yet understood to be great and the theater manager would stand facing the audience as people exited after the first weekend showing of a movie like Open City, uncertain, asking, “So? Was it good? Did you like it?” And this was Open City.

  For deaf-mutes, being able to read the titles on the bottom of the screen of a foreign film meant they could understand the movie word for word. So the Ascot was an extremely important movie theater for my aunt and uncle and for me since they took me along from the time I was small. Other members of the family had the Ascot in their reference and would go on their own or with my aunt and uncle and I would be included.

  Children in the Bronx mainly went to the conventional movie houses. Because of my family, I went to the Ascot often. Later on when we were dating age, guys took girls to the Ascot to show they were different from run-of-the mill Bronx guys. I had been going there from the time I was a little boy.

  In my life as a young man in Manhattan when The New Yorker and the Thalia on the upper west side were running vintage foreign films, I was interested to see those movies — again. I grew up on them.

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  SUMMERS

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  In the summer of 1943 our combined family rented a bungalow in Rockaway, the beach area of Queens near the Atlantic Ocean. My aunt, my sister and I, and one of my cousins were there full time, my mother, working in the Bronx, made a partial commute arriving weekends, and my uncle, a clothes presser in the garment center in Manhattan, came out more frequently. We were in the Edgemere section near Far Rockaway. The war seemed closer at the ocean’s edge. Lampposts facing the water were painted black, theoretically to hinder U-boats, and the beaches were regularly patrolled by military personnel.

  So much seemed exotic my first time away from the Bronx, the waves for bellywopping, the arcade games on the board-walk, the silent movie house — an open air theater that played Lon Chaney classics, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, the young men, some in uniform, and young women jitterbugging to a juke box on the boardwalk, Takee-Cups — chow mein in a noodle dish; you ate the chow mein, then you ate the dish.

  Summers when we didn’t rent a bungalow we were like all Bronx families before air conditioning, we woke up sweating. If you could, you went to Orchard Beach near City Island on Long Island Sound. The good Robert Moses before he turned bad, or the two sides may have been interchangeable, the Robert Moses before he gave us the Cross Bronx Expressway, built the Bronx a splendid beach and families went there as often as possible. It was a tedious bus ride from where we lived and a long wait to get out of there at the end of the day. Still, most of us lived in apartment buildings, in hot apartments and we had a real beach to go to.

  Children who carried towels rolled around bathing suits were a common sight during the summers in the Bronx. Outdoor pools were run as commercial enterprises and charged admission fees, a part of lost New York. Nearest to us was the Cascades Pool on Jerome Avenue and 168th Street. Hand-bills for Cascades appeared every summer in the windows of retail stores. Bronx Beach and Pool was at East 177th Street and Longstreet Avenue. At Crotona Park, 173rd Street and Fulton Avenue, was a large municipal swimming pool. Sometimes people in the neighborhood went to Miramar Pool in Manhattan on West 207th Street over the bridge from Fordham Road. I think of those places and I can smell the chlorine.

  My mother began to earn a better wage and one summer I was enrolled in the Castle Hill Day Camp. This was part of the Castle Hill Beach Club, which competed with the Shore-haven Beach Club, both in the eastern reaches of the Bronx. Shorehaven was larger and advertised “the largest saltwater pool in the east.”

  We edged up economically and eventually my mother bought a family membership for a summer at Shorehaven. The facilities included the large pool, shuffleboard, volleyball, ping-pong, paddleball, handball, tennis, basketball, tables for mah-jong, a sound stage with daytime and evening shows featuring singers and comics. A bus service offered a pickup point about a block away from our apartment and I went by myself when my mother was working or otherwise engaged.

  The older teenagers and the older people seemed to love Shorehaven. At fourteen, I must have been too young for the place. None of my friends were members and I didn’t make new friends easily. When I went to Shorehaven, even with all those activities, I kept to myself. Mostly, I swam in the pool and practiced shooting baskets. I just was never comfortable there. For others, Shorehaven was spirited with a pleasantly self-congratulatory air — isn’t this great, aren’t we lucky? — people of modest means happy about having their own club — in the Bronx.

  * * *

  THE BRONX HOME NEWS
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  BRONX SERGEANT IN AAF MEETS HIS UNCLE IN ITALY

  An Italian-American GI at war encountered his uncle still living in the old country. This headline from a story in The Bronx Home News of June 5, 1944, amid the vastness of World War II, is the newspaper going about its unintentionally humorous business, finding the Bronx in everything.

  The newspaper came to our apartment each day. My aunt and uncle were avid readers and I became one, too. The Bronx Home News provided a child with straightforward, understandable reportage of the war with bold headlines and maps with black pincers indicating the lines of battle.

  ALLIES PURSUE FLEEING NAZIS NORTH OF ROME; FOE’S TENTH ARMY FACES ANNIHILATION BATTLE

  With its patriotic coverage, the war was not going to be lost in The Bronx Home News.

  The newspaper was delivered to doorsteps and employment as a Bronx Home News delivery boy was a rite of passage for many Bronx youngsters. The newspaper was acquired by The New York Post in 1945 at a time when The Bronx Home News circulation exceeded 100,000. In 1948 it was merged with The New York Post as The New York Post-Bronx Home News, but was terminated soon after.

  The lead story in the 1940s was usually coverage of the war or a story that might be reported in the other city newspapers. The rest of each issue was devoted to being the paper of record for Bronx births, deaths, engagements, marriages, for meetings of business and civic organizations, church socials, police blotter items, decorations of soldiers, block parties, war bond rallies, scrap paper drives, awards, appointments, school news, business news, news of local politics. If an event had a connection to the Bronx it found its way into the pages of The Bronx Home News. Advertisements ran for Bronx retail stores, Bronx restaurants, and Bronx businesses, advertisements that did not appear in other newspapers. These advertising pages were significant in conveying the sense of the Bronx as a place unto itself, our borough, and this was our newspaper, serving our borough.

  In 1945, a nine year old Bronx boy, Joseph Vitolo Jr., claimed he saw the Virgin Mary in a vacant lot near the Grand Concourse. The Bronx Home News was out front on the story with the earliest coverage.

  BOY’S STORY OF SEEING VISION OF VIRGIN DRAWS DEVOUT TO SPOT IN WEST BRONX

  The front page article about the boy’s contention was followed by additional pieces in the paper. Coverage in other newspapers followed and crowds gathered, increasing substantially, reaching an estimated 30,000. This was the ultimate Bronx Home News story, the Virgin Mary sighted in the Bronx.

  * * *

  ALEXANDER’S DEPARTMENT STORE

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  “Uptown it’s Alexander’s” proclaimed the store’s advertising. Alexander’s was located in each of the two important shopping areas of the Bronx. The first store opened in 1928 in The Hub, the East 149th Street transportation and retail store nexus, the second Alexander’s opened in 1933 at the intersection of the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road.

  At first, the Grand Concourse store was relatively ordinary looking with a restaurant at street level and awnings over the sidewalk windows. Awnings. Once upon a time in the Bronx, particularly along the Grand Concourse, buildings featured summer awnings over the windows. Announcement of a redesign was made in the fall of 1941 and the subsequent expansion and modernization resulted in a store that did not look like any other, certainly not like any other in the Bronx. Three long horizontal smoked glass window strips ran along the left and right facades of white brick. Vertical smoked glass strips ran down the center to the entrance. This was in the ocean liner style of architecture that came to dominate office parks.

  The net effect within a retail area of no architectural style was that Alexander’s looked ultra-modern and unique. A rendering of the distinctive exterior was used as a logo in the Alexander’s advertising.

  Along with Alexander’s in the east Bronx Hub area were numerous retail stores including the Ludwig Baumann furniture store and Hearns department store, while the Fordham Road Alexander’s was a flagship for the Concourse-Fordham area, which included Roger’s department store, and retail stores east and west on Fordham Road and the adjacent streets of the Grand Concourse. These retail stores suggested the idea that the Bronx was self-contained, that people didn’t have to go anywhere else for their purchases.

  Alexander’s offered the illusion of upscale shopping. It had department store size and variety and some fashionable items, but it was fundamentally a discount operation. With a working class clientele, which was the largest share of the population of the Bronx, this discount store with its modern architecture and promise of quality for value, was the perfect store for the Bronx.

  My mother was a graduate of Morris High School in the Bronx and then she became the housekeeper for her several working older brothers. She married my father and through their marriage still had not yet held a formal job. When my father left, my mother, without money, with two children, her life in disarray, walked the few blocks from our apartment to Alexander’s and applied for a job. This was 1941 and she was hired as a stock clerk for fourteen dollars a week. She became a salesgirl. A department manager. An assistant buyer working in children’s clothing. It was postwar by then and simple blouses, sweaters, and skirts for girls were evolving into something new, children’s sportswear, and Alexander’s was selling it, and my mother was there for the start of it and she had an eye for it. She shuttled between the Alexander’s store on the Grand Concourse and the store on Third Avenue.

  J. W. Mays in downtown Brooklyn, another discount department store, was beginning to sell children’s sportswear and my mother was hired as the children’s sportswear buyer at J. W. Mays. Each day she traveled a long trip to and from Brooklyn on the D train and the A train. But she had become a buyer.

  My mother had a long and successful career. She held other jobs after J. W. Mays, and died at 87 working nearly to the end of her life. My mother always credited the buyer who picked her out of the salesgirl line and gave her the promotions that helped launch her out of the working class. Anyone who might have cared is long gone now, but out of respect to my mother, and to that person, her name was Frances Simmons and the store was Alexander’s.

  * * *

  ROOTING FOR BASEBALL TEAMS

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  The Yankees, logically, were our most popular team, but Giants fans were also sprinkled among us. The Giants’ ballpark, the Polo Grounds, was only one subway stop away from Yankee Stadium and routinely we went to both Yankee games and to Giants games. Ebbets Field, in some mysterious place in Brooklyn, always seemed too far away. At the nearby Polo Grounds we could see the Dodgers and some of the outstanding National League players the Yankees didn’t play against during the regular season, like Stan Musial and Ralph Kiner.

  When a team with a star was coming in for a weekend series you felt the buzz among your friends on the street. Bob Feller pitching the Friday night opener for the Cleveland Indians or the Dodgers against the Giants for a series at the Polo Grounds — was anybody going? Going to a baseball game was not unlike going to the movies in that it wasn’t a big deal, you just went. A typical moment: my sister and cousins decide to go to the Polo Grounds to see the Giants play the Cardinals and they gather me up — the little kid in the house — and we all go to the ball game at the Polo Grounds. We had more Yankee fans in that group than Giants fans. The idea was merely to go to a game as entertainment. Both ball parks were right there.

  A separate thought within that. I was always being gathered up. I had no father. I was watched over. The people around me, my mother, my aunt and uncle would take me along to the movies, and my sister, my cousins, their boyfriends who became their husbands, would take me with them when you might not necessarily take a child, such as when they were going to a baseball game within their own social lives.

  I once saw a replica of the vanished Polo Grounds in the Museum of the City of New York and what came back to me was an olfactory memory, the way the damp Polo Grounds corridors smelled of beer.
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br />   Youngsters my age were fortunate to be coming into the peak of our baseball awareness at the very moment the game was changed by Jackie Robinson joining the Dodgers for the 1947 season. Nobody I knew who was a Yankee fan rooted against the Dodgers or the Giants. They were also New York home teams, their ballplayers familiar to us. Only if they were playing against the Yankees in the World Series did you want them to lose. Jackie Robinson on the Dodgers didn’t mean we rooted against him, rather it was — why didn’t we get him? He was spectacular. The sight of Robinson running from home to second on a double, or first to third on a single in his choppy, rapid stride, and the way he tormented pitchers with his leads off the bases was something you never forget.

  My cousin, Leo, was the serviceman overseas I wrote to during the war. Prior to his entering service he was looking for a white collar job and anti-Semitism being what it was in corporate life, rather than present himself as Leo Cohn, he changed his name to Leo Brody. After the war, Leo Brody found a job unusual for the times and for Bronx boys, Cohn or Brody. He became a motion picture publicist and worked for Eagle-Lion Films, the distributor of the 1950 movie, The Jackie Robinson Story, which starred Jackie Robinson playing himself. My cousin came to know Robinson as he shepherded him around for interviews and told me that one night they were walking along the street and somebody shouted angrily at Robinson after a game in which he did not do well at the plate, “What kind of hitting is that?” Jackie Robinson’s response makes you wonder about the toll extracted for everything he gave. He died at only 53. He said to my cousin, “What do they want from me?”