Sunday Memories: a) Inheritance b) Neighborhood c) Heritage d) All Of The Above: Part 3

When the old people die in the old neighborhood, usually it's their kids who clean out the apartment.

But sometimes their kids send their kids who don't know what's what.   Or sometimes there are no kids so it's the niece or the nephew or their kids.  And sometimes it's even the kids of the neighbors next door  - complete strangers - who clean out the life of a person who has no kin and no connection except to the people in the photos they leave behind.

Which is how Laurel found all these old photos tossed in the garbage. She brought them home so that a discarded life and history could always have a home.
This is Delancy Street. The Delancy Street Florence roamed. The Loews Delancy in the background still looked like that when we went there on Saturday afternoons.


Laurel thinks this was taken on Orchard Street. The boy, the mother, and even if she was the sister, the young woman relegated to the back.  We all hoped the picture was taken when he was back for good. 


On the back of this, in beautiful fountain pen cursor, someone wrote "Herman. He played for the Czar." Since the only Russians who came to America in the early 1900 were Jews, all we could think was this was a Jew who played for the Czar. That was a big, big deal.

Did Herman ever make it here or did he die there, probably in a pogram or in the camps?




Me, Laurel and Joyce looked at this guy and we all said "He looks familiar. That place looks is familiar."

This picture, every inch of it, is a picture of one of those rare delicious moments I had as a kid - the evening dark, the clock early, the smells recognizable, the accent my own.

a) Inheritance b) Neighborhood c) Heritage d) All Of The Above: Part 2

Laurel and Joyce’s Uncle Joe and my Uncle George were friends.  They both played trombone. This was taken at the picture studio on Rivington Street.  Wittmyers. 157 Rivington. 

But after the war, both of them left New York and that was that. The only thing Uncle Joe wanted from New York was his trombone.  His mother mailed it to him.

a) Inheritance b) Neighborhood c) Heritage d) All Of The Above: Part 1

Another on-going series of New York stories



Joyce and Laurel’s father and his family grew up next door to my father and his family in the tenements on Henry Street. Not the hip, over-priced, badly renovated, tons of cache, faux-street-cred tenements of today but the rat-filled, roach-saturated, filthy, over-crowded tenements of yesterday.

Their great-grandfather and grandfather had the stables down the street. They were the blacksmiths.  Laurel and Joyce say it like it is, no bullshit.  Maybe that came from the horses because you know you can’t bullshit a horse.

My grandfather taught himself English, showed up to whatever work he could get, despite suspected depression and was pro-union (although there's speculation it was just an excuse to be self-righteous and punch other people besides his wife and kids).  I think workers should be fairly paid for their work and I’ve shown up to every job I could get despite suspected depression.  Yeah, I got a temper but unlike my grandfather I keep it in check.

After the co-ops were built and the tenements disappeared, our families all got new fancy apartments near one another.  In our world fancy meant elevators, hot water, toilets inside the apartment, no rats and less roaches. Trees too.

(Dana's husband, George was one of the couple of men who got those co-ops built.)

Every once in a while, Dolly their mother would say "Let's go visit Florence" and they would come over and sit at the kitchen table, watching the trains going back and forth. Both of them knew the plaid "lumberjack" jacket from LL Bean and the Kedd sneakers Florence always wore.  No one in the neighborhood looked like her.  So it made sense they would remember.

They also knew we all walked everywhere.  Spending carfare was a very serious decision and if it wasn’t necessary then we didn’t.  And by necessary, I mean if the destination was less than an hour away by foot, the answer was no.  Even if it wasn’t, like Gramma’s, we had to walk back. 

Laurel and Joyce still live in the old neighborhood that was built on top of the old-old neighborhood.  I come downtown for tea and talk.  As I walked in the door, Laurel said, "Betcha walked here."  Of course I did. And although I’m not wearing plaid, it’s clear to see from my sneakers to my jacket, I got Florence’s fashion sense.

Both of them point out the window to a new, ugly, blue high-rise rising on the other side of Delancey.  “Blue Smurf dick,” they both chortle.  Like I said, no bullshit.

Joyce reminds me they played with my hair during those visits.  I don’t remember.  But something inside me remembers more than what they did with my braids.  I will probably get details wrong and forget about dates and lose track of which family did what, but I don't get wrong the neighborhood.   Because, sitting at Laurel’s kitchen table, my lower east side accent returns full force and I talk like I was six and home again.

Inheritance. Neighborhood. Heritage.  All of the above.

Sunday Memories - How My Sister Spent Her Summer Vacation

On Lewis and Grand you had to walk up a flight of stairs to get to the now-luxurious-but then-barely-middle-class roof penthouse, a one bedroom affair quickly outgrown when I arrived and could no longer fit in a bureau's drawer.

But until my arrival, that penthouse was a sure fire way to beat the heat during the dog days of August. A metal bucket big enough for my sister and any breeze off the East River and stirred by the trains on the Williamsburg Bridge usually did the trick.

...A Shadow In The City....

Those spots - where I dreamed something kinder than a hot summer and a silent family lived. Dragged by during long walks I swore if I could just get in there another kingdom would open before me.







Then I discovered bars.

Why I Visit Dana - or - How I Keep Writing

"[Writing] makes me feel so close to my mind."

"Drag the brainless pen across the passive paper and see the result."

And on facing a blank canvas:

"The canvas is just four lines. What I put down is the fifth line. Let's see what the fifth line is."


Previous works by Dana:

The Gift That Kept On Giving

Sunday Memories - And What Was Your First Job?

Her's was when she was 12.

It was the depression, they were all stuffed into that tenement on Henry Street, and school was a thing of the past because only her brothers, my father and my uncle, got to go on to the next grade.

So a relative who had some connections nobody talked about (and maybe still shouldn't) got her a job taking bets at the Armstrong News which was a racing sheet.

She got fired because she talked too much.

At her next job, age 13, she got a job at one of the Settlement Houses and went on to changed the world.

Under The Boardwalk

Now the only time I can see this intimate corner is in the movie the Little Fugitive.

It was where we changed out of wet bathsuits because there was "No Changing Clothes" in the ladies rooms. Or where we slipped away, tired of the hot blanket and familiar faces. Where when it was too sunny we went for a quick respite before jumping back into the waves. It's where I saw full body necking for the first time and felt I had just visited an exotic land, that kind of touch in our neighborhood only happening behind closed doors or in movies.

I once asked Florence if she went under there as a teenager but her tough smile response let me know it had not been good memories.

Now, it seems there is no way to go under anything except in certain spots and those places look official.

When Bliss Intersects With Home

But here's the best part. After the game they let all the kids run the bases.



And I saw this gramma running as fast as she could. She reminded me of my gramma running after me...



And then I saw the fiercest little girl bursting past home base to get some place important.



She wanted to hug the mascot.



The gramma caught up with her, a bit out of breath, calling to the mother in the stands, trying to describe how she couldn't keep up.



But what I saw was how times had changed. A place me and my gramma would have never been allowed on and here the distance and the decades lessened by a gramma who ran the bases with her granddaughter.

Sunday Memories - Before The Days of Air and Conditioning

When it was a store front, the small theater had no air conditioning. Come summer the stage either went quiet or waited for deep night when the heat occasionally lifted a bit. The front door was always open.

The landlord raised the rent by a quatrillion gazillion percent and, after leaving a couple of tons of sand on the walls and in the basement, the theater traveled up four flights into another building. With no stoop to cool the stage, come the heat, the lights went dark.

Sunday Memories - Of Men and Mice... Part Four*

Today, reaching for a phone, it dawned on me that with the exception of one person, I was surrounded by people who had always dialed 212 or 718 or 917 or 646, and that the experience of picking up a phone and just dialing seven numbers had gone the way of the dodo along with some of my favorite diners, bookstores, cinemas, neighborhoods, streets, cities, and a few people I loved.

*and now for the joke
MAN ONE: Are you a man or a mouse?
MAN TWO: Put a piece of cheese down and find out!


Of Men and Mice...Part One

Of Men and Mice...Part Two

Of Men and Mice... Part Three

In The Still Of The Night The Sound of Silence...

Quiet was the absence of words, music, radio, and later, when we all went our separate ways and had our own homes, TV.

A New York silence, in a still night, was (and still is) filled with the noise of other people's lives. And the silence and stillness was (and still is) a muteness that came from watching lives we couldn't figure out how to replicate.

Sunday Memories: PS 110

They've cleaned up the brick and I hear they even have computers in the classrooms. In fact, one time a couple of years ago I met a little girl who was somehow related to one of my old classmates from the other side of the bridge and she sounded really smart which was definitely not the case when we were going there.

Today, walking down Cannon Street what I remembered was this spot by the side entrance. Where M.P., who I thought was my boyfriend, threw the first punch and I don't remember much except a teacher pulling us apart and then dragging me to the janitor sink to rinse off my bloody nose.

What I also don't remember is what happened after. If I was scared to go home or scared to go to school or if my heart was just broken.

Back Of My Neck Getting Dirt And Gritty

The subways were never a place to get cool until I was too tall to slip under the turnstile.

Now subway cars are floating respites through quiet corners of the city.

Cat On A Hot Tin ... Wait. We Live In An Apartment.

This is one spot he hangs out in these days. The other is behind the toilet.

A couple of days ago it was too hot even for a hairless cat. I turned on the air conditioning in the bedroom, cooled the room and then got the cat from behind the toilet.

He was limp and exhausted and when I placed him gently in the cool bedroom, he stretched out deliciously.

A few minutes later I went into the bedroom to get something and found the air conditioning cooling an empty room.

Where was the cat?

Right back behind the toilet.

Sunday Memories: Part One: Cindy - That Day We Met

An on-going series about my friend, Cindy.
Because she is so much a part of the heart and soul of Her New York


The Official Meeting happened when I was three, but Cindy and I must have passed each other in our respective carriages for years since she lived on the third floor and we lived on the fifth of the A Building in the Courtchyard.

She had several older sisters and I had one but I'm sure, judging from the wide gap in lifestyle our sisters did not play together. We were one second away from being considered gentile weirdos and they were Orthodox and, well, normal like the rest of the neighborhood.

In those days, either you got splinters from the old wood floors that had been there since the 1930s or you put down carpet or linoleum over all the wood. We didn't cover the wood.

And that's how, one day when I was three we met. The splinter must have been so deep and so large and my screams must have been so blood curdling, that Florence must have made a rare, and perhaps panicked, phone call because suddenly through my screams, I saw Cindy's mother appear in the bedroom doorway.

There was no way I would let her near me, especially in light of the very large needle she held, and my screaming wasn't diminishing because the pain of the splinter was growing.

Then Cindy stepped forward and thrust something into my hands.

It was a doll. A large girl doll and she was beautiful. I had never seen anything that extraordinary in my life. That's not what our parents spent money on. Clutching that doll, I let Cindy's mom remove a very large splinter.

All the cooing and caressing that follows serious operations followed. But all I did was clutch that wonderful doll.

In other neighborhoods, Happy Endings happen here.

But this was the Lower East Side in the 1960s. Because once everything was all over, Cindy stepped forward and before I knew it she took back her doll.

Maybe I wanted another crack at that doll but from that moment on we were fast friends.

We Are...

From Adriene

O. graduated from middle school last night. It was a nice atmosphere. All of the 100 8th graders were supportive of each other. They marched down the aisle into the auditorium one at a time. As each child crossed the stage they called out the child's name and cheered them on.

When one boy got on stage the entire 8th grade class stood and clapped for him. O. later told me that no one from his family came to the graduation so they were his family. When another boy came on stage they started clapping, stomping their feet and chanting - the boy started dancing freestyle.

Three of the boys that graduated were blind. They came into the auditorium, across the stage and back to their seat without assistance - no cane. Most of us didn't even know they were blind. Last night was a "good night".

My neighbor took O. and their daughter out to dinner at a sea food restaurant - they consider him family.

Ghost In The Machine

The building is on a 1903 map so it's old.

Still, some of us believe that when leaks appear in one place but not another and sometimes not even near a pipe, it's Schneller back from the grave to remind us we were all terrible tenants who flushed things we shouldn't have and broke the elevator with our bicyles.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - Encores of Early Posts And An Echo Of Freedom

In honor of a line in a prayer "I deserve the freedom to be all that I can be...."

July 2009
...And Dancing In The Rain

It wasn't that I had forgotten. It's just that I hadn't had to remember. But there she was, a little girl jumping and giggling and running and shouting in Wednesday's downpour.

When I was young and it poured humongous cats and dogs, Florence would send me out in maybe rain boots, maybe sneakers to play in the storm. I'd race around the empty courtchyard and jump and dance and skip and stick my face up into thunder and wind.

As of her decline deepened, the months and months and months turned into years and years, and to pass the time we would watch Singing In The Rain over and over and over again. The blessing of dementia allowed it to be an exciting revisit, one she didn't realize had just happened the week before.

Today, quickly snapping a picture as I futilely raced against getting soaked and miserably wet, I wondered if her quirky idea of playtime came from that passionate dance Gene Kelly did when he realized he was in love.

Rain Delay on the Fourth of July

Because Freedom is an elusive subject and some time is needed to capture her in a memory.