ARCHER STREET ON BROADWAY Last week I reprinted some of the tributes sent in to “Stratton Park History Pages”, the official organ of my old Bronx neighborhood, aka “Paradise On Earth” if you read the contributions, and mentioned that the old place was becoming famous at last. By this I meant that a Pulitzer Prize -winning play on Broadway “Doubt”, is set there and the incidents and characters are drawn from its life. The author John Patrick Shanley, is a native and very much at home with his material. This has aroused interest in New York and newspapers have even interviewed some of the old settlers for their reminiscences of past times in the Bronx. Considering the present reputation of the Bronx, it’s no wonder that I’m often met with disbelief when I tell people that I had a good time growing up there and even managed to ignore the Depression, which was flourishing at the time. It takes more than that to sour the temper of a nine-year-old. All the same, traveling to other parts of the Bronx could be a depressing experience because so much of it was overbuilt, with solid blocks of apartment houses cutting off light and air and not leaving any space for a park or a playground to relieve the congestion on the streets. My neighborhood was if anything underbuilt, though. We had our apartment blocks, but we also had streets of one and two-family houses, and here and there vacant lots, including the Tennis Court Lots, which covered several blocks and encouraged our Tarzan fantasies. On top of all this open space, we had play streets, the schoolyard of P.S. 102, a city playground and wading pool close by, and streets where the traffic was never so heavy as to interfere with kids’ games. I never heard of a kid being hit by a car and neither did I hear of anyone being attacked by a mugger. We also traveled to swimming pools, movie houses, libraries, ball games, the Bronx Park and Zoo, and even to New York itself sometimes. We lacked for nothing, except money, but none of these things cost a lot, and we could usually find some scratch somewhere. We had no Little Leagues and probably wouldn’t have welcomed any, because the times were such that adults felt no need to watch over their children incessantly, and certainly not to transport them here, there and everywhere to meet their activity schedule. That’s what trolleys and subways were for, and the kids were considered able to use them without help. Suburban life, with no public transportation, has changed all that. “Doubt” is set in a time later than the one I’ve been describing, but with conditions relatively unchanged from that. The action takes place in the heart of the neighborhood, that is, in the offices of the local church, which was both the religious center and the educational center of the neighborhood. The protagonists are a nun, who runs the school, and a curate whom she suspects of abusing one of her pupils. This is a modern touch, because such things didn’t happen in the days before, as one writer says, “The seminaries were taken over by homosexuals”. That’s why the old-timers seeing the show have no trouble recognizing the nun, but don’t twig the priest at all. I also don’t expect to have trouble with the nun character, because brisk teachers who laid down the law for their classrooms, were no strangers to me, and I’ll enjoy seeing the Sisters of Charity in their uniforms again. Some reviewers have sneered a little at these, but we kids never did. They were actually quite up-to-date for nuns. They came out of the nineteenth century, when women wore bonnets, making it natural for member of the first American religious order to be so outfitted. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton was the foundress and she designed the habit on lines that were modern for her day, and didn’t look out of place in ours. The Sisters did good work for well over a century, turning immigrant kids like us into useful Americans in schools all around the country, along with running hospitals and even some good colleges. In spite of this, when I glanced at my local paper last month, which seems to have been Womens’History Month or something like that, Mother Seton wasn’t one of the outstanding American women featured in the daily articles. Neither was another lady named Mother Cabrini, who had the same type of career and achieved similar results. Instead the women selected for our admiration included types like Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, the first of whom was a crypto-Communist and the second was a racial politician whom I remember for helping re-elect John Lindsay Mayor in 1969. The only good result from that was that New York completely swore off electing “liberals” from then on. (The newspapers play these games with us sometimes. They buy this material from syndicates. One item was a history of Halloween which never mentioned any of its Christian associations, even its name, but did tell us how the Romans found it honored during their occupation of Ireland. Fortunately or unfortunately, this never happened. The Roman did take over Britain, and as we see from the ruins they left behind, they almost exclusively built bathhouses, probably as a reaction to their first encounters with the inhabitants. Everyone else remained “The Great Unwashed”.) I’ve mentioned the Sisters’ work in Americanizing the polyglot material swept into their schools by immigration. History played a big part in this. It was taught completely from an American point of view. Naturally Isabella the Catholic and her husband King Ferdinand were favorably mentioned in connection with the discovery of America by another Catholic, Columbus, and the Catholic French and Spanish explorers, some of them priests, were spoken well of, but the Protestants weren’t shut out by any means and we heard all about the Pilgrims and the Puritans and John Smith and Pocahontas. When it came time for America to split off from the Mother Country, that was the last we heard of England, or of any place outside the U.S.A. History was all America after that and everything we heard went to reinforce the patriotism we learned from singing ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’ every morning followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. The same pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln that hung on the walls of public schools hung on ours. I don’t know whether someone made a conscious decision to give us a total immersion in Americanism, or it just happened., but it worked. Contrary to what some people might think, we didn’t get Catholic arithmetic or English or geography, just the secular type, in all its horror. We didn’t get any politics either, as some suspect, but yes, we did get religion, and plenty of it. It was a good place. I’d go back tomorrow. Mr. Shanley has done a service by showing the world the kind of place it was and the kind of people that made it what it was. For corroboration of his thesis, I refer you back to my last article with its quotations from our old neighbors or to the Stratton Park website for more of the same.
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