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Last week in this space I described how fame had finally come to my old Bronx neighborhood as a result of the play “Doubt” being set in it and the interest taken in its background by the New York media. The neighborhood website, “Stratton Park History Pages", which was hearing from a lot of old residents anyway, increased its business several fold as a result.
The latest contribution covered no less than ten single-spaced pages and traced the history of one of the apartment houses, along with that of the neighborhood stores and even the vacant lots. Fifty or more people were mentioned by name, and their addresses were provided, along with a psychological profile and a marital history. Well, I’m exaggerating about the last two, but overall the letter was an impressive achievement in recordkeeping and reporting. What it shows, of course, is that the neighborhood was really a small town, and like other small towns, a place where everyone knew everyone else and everything about them. All the things urban scholars have written about went on. Neighbors looked out for each other, strangers were noticed, children misbehaving got reported to their mothers, storekeepers knew which customers could be allowed to run up a bill and which couldn’t, suspicious activity got reported to the police, and above all, the ambiance was such that there was a comfortable assurance of security and safety everywhere one went. Unlike the ghetto, where I later found myself working, no one ever came home from work and found their apartment ransacked. No one got mugged. No child was molested.
It all ended eventually and it’s all gone now, submerged in the rising tide of Caribbean immigration, which all the pundits welcome as a good development, recycling the neighborhoods to accommodate the new wave, while the previous immigrants scatter to the suburbs. Stability counts for nothing. I myself don’t see the inevitability of turnover. I’m inclined to blame rent control for it, considered a blessing in its day, but staying on to entrench old tenants in their apartments and driving out young people who couldn’t find local housing as a result. The parents stayed on in their big apartments while their children left them, since not only were the “old” (30’s) buildings unavailable to them, but new ones weren’t being built because landlords weren’t allowed a profit. One of the nostalgia items not yet mentioned on the website is the ‘concessions’ offered to tenants in new buildings in the days before rent control. The offer was generally three months free rent for anyone making the move. People actually refuse to believe this today, but in those days there really were people who moved four times in a year to avoid the curse of rent. Rent control, never repealed after WWII, changed all that.
To add insult to injury, in 1950 the City accelerated the disintegration of the neighborhood by building the Cross-Bronx Expressway right through it, using the route of one of the principal streets, dividing North from South. The only consolation the inhabitants got from this was the spectacle of the frequent collapse of the completed Expressway into a morass of stalled trucks resembling a World War II convoy after an air attack, but with more pollution poisoning the air.
Today it’s only a place where the Cross-Bronx travelers pass through at twenty miles an hour, without feeling any urge to shorten their journey by moving in. No one in fact would live there if able to go anywhere else. I’m serious; last year there was a double homicide outside the door of the street-floor apartment that was my last local habitation prior to moving out in 1958. Working for a Bronx lawyer, I helped with the appeal of another drug-related murder around the corner; the house where my cousins used to live had a domestic killing recently; there have been plenty of other cases.
Putting all that to the side, I’ll now return to memory lane to summon up my recollections of religion as experienced in the old Bronx . I haven’t seen it mentioned a great deal in the messages sent in from the exiles, but even so it makes its presence felt in everything they write. The “nabe” was Catholic, you see, and Irish Catholic at that. The Church was always a factor. Everybody went to Mass, and the children went to the parochial school. There was a Rosary Society, a Holy Name Society, a Mothers Guild, a Sodality, and a CYO, to name just a few, with a large number of other organizations waiting to welcome anyone who had enough energy left to join them.
But things weren’t monolithic. The dominating feature of the landscape was the block of flats built by an Irish cop who had gone into real estate and sent out the call to his countrymen to move in with him. They came in droves, but it didn’t mean the Italians moved out. They were there first, not in apartment houses, but in one and two-family ones, which went a long way to alleviate the claustrophobia engendered by the presence of so many massive apartment buildings. Their existence meant that the Irish didn’t have it all their own way in the new mixed neighborhood. There had to be intergroup harmony. Or else.
To my knowledge the person who did the most to bring this about was Father Burriesci, the pastor the Irish found in charge of their new church. New to them, that is, but actually long established, built in a completely Italian old-country style and named for Saint Anthony of…Padua. As if this weren’t enough, the pastor spoke broken English and smoked DeNobili cheroots.
It didn’t matter. Fr. Burriesci was clearly a man of good will, who was ready to welcome his new parishioners without any reserve. They liked him from the start. Those who cared about such things, like the kids, found that “Father Butch” was a whiz at saying Mass in twenty minutes, with no stops for sermons. His accent was imitated with affection. Every kid could repeat “Alla you boys and alla you girls, come to the nine-o-clock Mass on Sunday”. Allegedly on Friday nights he played cards with the church ushers in the rectory, consuming numerous DeNobilis. Intergroup relations were safe in his hands. And intermarriage was common.
Harmony characterized the area. The various groups mingled together indoors and out and kept the peace. Everything wasn’t Irish or Italian. There were others as well, Jews, Germans, Poles, and even people from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. All of these were fighting or getting ready to fight in Europe, but not here. We’d had our Civil War. Errol Flynn and the Union had beaten Randolph Scott and the Confederates. We kids knew all about it. It had been fought out to the last man at the RKO Chester.
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