My
mother’s new apartment was smaller than our old one had been, and we soon got
on each other’s nerves to the point where she kicked me out – though she
subsidized my move to a place of my own to the tune of $75 a month. So I
started hunting for an apartment within walking distance of Columbia.
I
now find it hard to understand, from a purely geographic point of view, why I had
chosen to go to graduate school in Morningside Heights over Greenwich Village.
I was familiar with the Village from my sorties to the City from Ithaca to
listen to jazz; I had two friends who also loved Coltrane and Art Blakey and
the Modern Jazz Quartet, and we always seemed to end up at the Village Vanguard
downtown on 7th Avenue. But staid, button-downed Columbia was located on the
Upper West Side, and I thought it would feel like home. It didn’t. Above 96th
Street, the neighborhood became a very different place from 77th Street; it
even had a different zip code. The process of gentrification had not yet begun
up there in 1960, and outside the penumbra of safety surrounding the
University, the streets were slummy and even dangerous. Nobody except the
real-life Sharks and Jets or people buying and selling drugs ventured into
Morningside Park at night. And as soon as I started looking for an apartment, I
discovered that the housing stock within a few blocks of the campus – which
pretty much meant in the corridor that ran from Morningside Drive to Amsterdam
Avenue between 110th and 120th -- was both pricey and scarce.
After a week of futile searching I
settled for a one-bedroom walk-up at 8 West 105th Street, a stock brownstone
between Central Park West and Manhattan Avenue – eleven blocks south and four blocks
east of Butler Library, which would be my ground zero for the next few years. It was not a good choice. I had a bothersome
trek up the hill to Morningside Heights, especially in bad weather, to campus, and,
besides, 105th was a depressing street in its own right.
Despite
its proximity to Central Park, there was nothing fancy about the area. The
apartment itself was a decent-sized floor-through – a bedroom facing the rear
courtyard, an adequate bathroom and kitchen, a living room in the front, all
for $75 a month. I thought the rear-facing bedroom would be quiet, but it was
anything but. My neighbors were mostly Puerto Ricans, and the conga beat went
on from early morning until the middle of the night. It was bad enough during
the day, when I was trying to study or write, and worse when I was trying to
sleep. It wasn’t the music I hated, just the volume. I was actually was a fan
of the Afro-Cuban sound, whose beat is the basis for American jazz, and I even
knew how to play the bongos; there were times when I wouldn’t have minded
sitting in with some of the groups down below, thumping out their mambos in the
style of Desi Arnaz and Tito Puente. But I was persona non grata among the Latinos whom I passed in the street
every day. Men sitting on their stoops would stop talking while I walked by;
mothers would pick up their children, holding them in their arms lest the
gangly gringo took it into his mind to snatch a little brown baby for whatever
reason – were they worried about the Blood Libel?
This
happened to be the Puerto Rican moment of the Upper West Side. New York
neighborhoods change with fascinating rapidity; one decade’s slum is the next
decade’s hottest place to live, to eat, to work. Take Hell’s Kitchen (please!).
It once deserved that name, for reasons that the movie Gangs of New York make abundantly clear: the predominantly poor,
predominantly Irish neighborhood, officially known as Five Points, was largely
supported by bootlegging during Prohibition, and ruled over by such colorful bosses
as One Lung Curran. Other neighborhoods that went from cold to hot overnight
also acquired new names, or at least acronyms: Soho, Noho, Tribeca, Dumbo,
Nolita. One of them that kept its name is Harlem.
The
process by which these ‘hoods were transformed has followed a familiar pattern:
Manhattan is an overcrowded island in which land is at a premium, and the
upside of this limitation, at least for the real estate and construction
industries, is that no area is too far from everywhere else to make it not
worth developing. Brooklyn is a curious case; Manhattan is gorged with public
transportation, but the fact that Brooklyn has relatively few subway lines or
bus routes hasn’t kept Williamsburg and Red Hook from popping. Fort Greene,
with its proximity to the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the F train, is
entirely livable; Gowanus, not so much. Wherever it occurs, the process is
pretty much this: a squalid, run-down area of cheap tenements and mom-and-pop stores
is colonized, first by artists, then by artist-wannabes, and finally by
yuppies; developers take note and begin to buy buildings cheap in order to
convert them to lofts and floor-through condominiums. Trendy new restaurants
appear, boutiques open, driving out the original candy stores and bodegas. Of
course, chain supermarkets are required to feed the new population, which is
usually young, white, and fairly affluent.
But
after a few years, as greedy landlords start raising rents and home prices, the
new restaurants and galleries and boutiques are driven out, to be replaced by
enormous banks and chain drugstores. It’s not uncommon to find an entire block
with only two storefronts facing an avenue – a Chase bank and a CVS. Walk down
Bleecker Street or through St. Marks Place; what used to be among the city’s
most alluring epicenters of culture and fashion is now listless and moribund,
half its stores and galleries and clubs boarded up, and of no interest to
either tourists or residents. In the 90s, when I was teaching at NYU, my
students complained that they couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan and had to
trudge to and from Brooklyn every day; ten years later they were moaning that
they couldn’t they could afford ike Fort
Greene, but had to settle for Alphabet City instead.
And
so it was on the Upper West Side, though the process took longer. When I first
came to live there with my parents after the war, the whole area was considered
by many a dangerous slum, though in fact, we lived in the cordon sanitaire, the two blocks east of that Broadway. It was
largely the side streets that ran through Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues that
witnessed the blight produced by overcrowding and poverty. Edward Albee, in his
play The Zoo Story, produced a piece
of sociological theater in the confrontation between the East Side, personified
by the mild, complacent, well-off Peter, and Jerry, “not
poorly dressed, but carelessly,” a man on the skids like his West Side
neighborhood. Jerry lives in a row house that has been carved into low-cost
single rooms for rent. When the collective decision to build row houses, or
brownstones as they are popularly but not always accurately called, was made,
they were designed as single-family homes for the wealthy, and many had fancy
architectural details that go unnoticed today. But they were very flexible
buildings that could be configured in the way that Jerry describes:
I
live in a four-storey brownstone rooming-house on the upper West Side between
Columbus Avenue and Central Park West. I live on the top floor; rear; west.
It's a laughably small room, and one of my walls is made of beaverboard; this
beaverboard separates my room from another laughably small room, so I assume
that the two rooms were once one room, a small room, but not necessarily
laughable. The room beyond my beaver board wall is occupied by a coloured queen
who always keeps his door open; well, not always but always when he's plucking
his eyebrows, which he does with Buddhist concentration. This coloured queen
has rotten teeth, which is rare, and he has a Japanese kimono, which is also
pretty rare; and he wears this kimono to and from the john in the hall, which
is pretty frequent. I mean, he goes to the john a lot. He never bothers me, and
never brings anyone up to his room. All he does is pluck his eyebrows, wear his
kimono and go to the john. Now, the two front rooms on my floor are a little
larger, I guess; but they're pretty small, too. There's a Puerto Rican family
in one of them, a husband, a wife, and some kids; I don't know how many. These
people entertain a lot. And in the other front room, there's somebody living
there, but I don't know who it is. I've never seen who it is. Never. Never
ever.
Hardly
a portrait of the kind of living conditions Jane Jacobs had in mind when she
advocated for neighborhoods whose vitality came from the interactions and
street life of their diverse inhabitants. Albee wrote his play in 1961, almost
ten years after my parents and I had moved into 320 West 77th;
Jerry’s apartment might have been only three blocks from ours, and both Puerto
Ricans and gays were quite prominently visible, though I had no idea at the
time what kind of homes they went home to.
And
then came the Renaissance. Important people like David Rockefeller and Robert Moses
decided to raze what they must have considered the worst part of the worst
neighborhood in the borough, the southern quadrant of the Upper West Side. That
this would have the effect of making its inhabitants homeless was considered not
unfortunate collateral damage but rather, one of the important benefits of the
plan. But it wouldn’t do to replace the tenements with a 16-acre parking lot,
so a socially and financially acceptable alternative was conceived in 1956: the
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, stretching from 60th to 66th
Streets between Columbus and Amsterdam.
It
was correctly believed that such temples to middle-brow culture as the Vivian
Beaumont, Alice Tully Hall, the New York State Theater and the Juilliard
School, spaced around a plaza with fountains, would attract a nouveau-riche
middle class that would require high-rise apartment buildings to live in, and
these soon followed. The expansionist changes flowed up Broadway like mercury
rising in a thermometer. As far uptown as 100th Street, the old but well-built
mid-height apartment buildings on Riverside Drive, Broadway and Central Park
West began to empty of tenants who had up till then enjoyed the benefits of
rent control. Everyone talked about elderly widows who paid $400 a month rent for
the classic sixes that growing families
coveted -- families like the one that
Herman Wouk presciently described in his 1958 novel Marjorie Morningstar, the Morgansterns, who moved to Central Park
West from the Bronx to raise their Jewish princess. But when they reached a
certain figure, rents were no longer controlled, and landlords could start
charging market value. Nora Ephron for many years rented an apartment that she
loved in an iconic block-square apartment building built around a central
courtyard called the Apthorp, which occupied the entire block bounded by West
End, Broadway, and 78th and 79th Streets.
She
wrote, in The New Yorker, “To move
into the Apthorp was to enter a state of giddy, rent-stabilized delerium,” but
it didn’t last; eventually the owner jacked up her rent to the point where even
a woman as successful as she was forced out. Elmore Leonard described the
change in the West Side more succinctly than anyone else: “The old neighborhood
has changed. Hurley Brothers Funeral Parlor is now called Death n’ Things.”
Could
my neighbors on 105th Street sense that within a decade, their little slice of
Latin America would be “reclaimed” and rebuilt by and for middle-class white
people like me, whose rents would rise to unaffordable levels? That their bodegas
and taquerias would close, to be replaced by Gristede’s and Key Foods
supermarkets that didn’t stock plaintains and refried beans?
What
summed up everything depressing about my bnew home was the view from the living
room windows. On the north side of 105th Street sat a huge, grimy building called
the Towers Nursing Home; now it was deserted. Sarah Bernard, in New York Magazine, described it
accurately as “one of the city’s spookier ruins.” You can see below how, after
a developer got his hands on it, it became a perfect metaphor for the
renaissance of the West Side: a complex of condos, some of which sold for as
much as $8 million.
Before and after
The
other depressing feature of my new life was Columbia itself. What I was
expecting from postgraduate education was pretty elitist: membership in a small
band of brother-scholars intimately engaged with famous professors like Mark
Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. Ho, ho. Those big names taught only in the
undergraduate College, and never once, in my eight years there, did I catch a
glimpse of either of them. The Graduate Faculties was a very different place from
the College. Its English Department (totally separate from the College’s) had
accepted over 300 M.A. candidates for the 1959-60 school year, and, not
surprisingly, the attrition rate approximated that of a combat infantry company.
This was by design; there was hardly any financial aid, so we all paid tuition,
making our numbers a profitable proposition. All my classes except one were
large lecture courses, in which students didn’t write papers, take exams, speak
in class or do anything else to catch the professor’s attention – we just
received “R” credit, which testified to the fact that we had registered and
paid our money. The exception was the masters’ proseminar in drama, and in
that, I had the great good fortune to be taught by the young and exciting
Robert Brustein, a brilliant teacher who had been recruited from Vassar, where
his students all loved him -- including Jane Fonda, who, a
classmate of hers told me, would spend half an hour doing her hair and makeup
before their class. But at Columbia, because of the
overpopulation problem, Brustein was forced to teach three sections of our
course, of 15 students each, so even in what should have been an intimate
setting, it was all he could do to remember our names. Still, he and I bonded
to a degree, and I was consoled by the thought that if I went on for my
doctorate, I could choose him for my thesis director. It never happened. A year
after I wrote my M.A. thesis for him (on the trendy new French theater of
Beckett, Ionesco, Genet et al), he left Morningside Heights for New Haven,
where he founded the Yale Rep, and then moved on to Cambridge, where he started
the American Repertory Theater at Harvard.
Not
that I had lacked alternatives when it came to choosing a grad school. Besides
NYU, to which I had been cordially invited, I had been accepted to Berkeley (though
whether I would have survived the Free Speech Movement in the mid-60’s is problematic).
The deal at Columbia was that the M.A. was a terminal degree; you had to
petition to be accepted in the doctoral program. I was told that I could
continue if I chose to, but I chose not to. Instead, I decided to try working
for a living.
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