An East Bronx Obituary 1980
Charlotte Gardens, it sounds like a name to a cemetery. It is a neighborhood that died and ranch houses are its gravestones.
Bronx, mein shtetleh Bronx* what has become of you? President Jimmy Carter proposed it, and President Reagan bulldozed built it. Rows of silent ranch homes replaced a community once radiating with energy.
The joyous sounds of laughter from children ricocheted off the facades of the tenement buildings, the cement sidewalks where we played box-ball, potsee and bouncing the ball into a metal-graphed milk box. The street where we played stickball, triangle, two-hand-touch, punchball, 3 feet to Germany, ringaleevio, Johnny-on-the pony, hide-and-seek, off-the-curb, pitching in, and hockey have been silenced.
We cashed in our deposit bottles for two cents, called the neighbors to the phone in the candy store, sent paper wrapped pennies to the man singing in our backyard, and left our apartment doors and windows open during the summer to let the flow breeze in. Where depression finance was conducted over the gray marble counter of Kosloff’s grocery, Adoff’s drugstore, the butcher, the candy store. All of this has been covered over with a comatose veneer called Charlotte Gardens.
It began with thieving teenagers lurking in cellar passageways ripped pocketbooks from the hands of women returning from the Jennings Street Market. It continued with a flaming match dropped into our mailbox burning my father’s anemic social security check. Apartment buildings housing striving laborer’s families were gutted. Metal pipes and electrical wires brazenly ripped out of the cement walls, and then set alblaze by numb-headed felons. The beat went on until a doctor’s note enabled my parents to move to a housing project in Pelham Parkway.
The ranch houses that have replaced, the tenements have appreciated in value. A car can be parked in their garage instead of the street, but try and go for a stroll at night, or go for an evening visit to Crotona Park if you dare. Yes, The Times They Are A’ Changin’, but they have been A’Changin’ towards its grave for the past sixty years.
Is this called progress? I’m not asking to bring us back to the Bronx days of the Great Depression, but the Bronx does not deserve the shroud that envelops it today.
*A parody on the Yiddish song Belz, mein shteteleh Belz. It is a yearning for the songwriter’s little town in Poland.
For the complete story read: Seabury Place: A Bronx Memoir by Daniel Wolfe
danielwolfebooks@aol.com