Just Kids From the Bronx (19 page)

The second introduction to the world at large was when I went to Bronx High School of Science. One of my best friends there was Jack Friedman, who lived in Riverdale. A three-bedroom apartment, a housekeeper, and a father who was a stockbroker. I couldn’t get over the wealth. I had never seen this before. A maid, a remote control on the TV—his father had the remote—and three bedrooms.

It was lucky that I went to Science, because everyone there was expected to go on to college. I didn’t get that from my home, as I’ve said. If you were affluent, then you could afford to go to a private school. At home, there wasn’t even a discussion about which college to go to. When it came up, it was automatic. City College or State University.

There was a hunger that I had growing up in the Bronx. It wasn’t financial. It was an emotional hunger. I was lucky that I had aunts in the neighborhood who balanced out what I didn’t get at home. But I had this added hunger to go out into the world. It was an achievement hunger. It was a pass to get out and the training was the Bronx.

When I worked in San Francisco, I was out of my natural habitat for eighteen years. There’s something about this town, New York. You feel it. You see it. It has the highest level of intensity, of humor, of creativity. And none of that gets separated from where we grew up.

As you grow older, you can grow in any environment because you have exposure and the possibilities of learning every day. And I’m still learning. The way I grew up turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.

ANDY ROSENZWEIG

Retired policeman, detective, chief investigator for the Manhattan district attorney

(1944– )

I guess somewhat to my detriment and certainly not to my benefit I was mesmerized by basketball. Playing it. Watching it. I wasn’t a very good player. A mediocre player in retrospect, but at the time I thought I was terrific. Basketball was everything to me. I even got to play with some very accomplished, very good players from time to time.

I played in my backyard, Bronx Park. Sam Borod and my friend Stan Golden, who passed on a few years ago, we’d be on the courts shoveling the snow off with a few others. It didn’t matter how much it snowed. It didn’t matter how cold it was. We’d even get brooms to clean off the courts, along with the shovels, and play there all weekend. Be there early morning until dark. We also played with Stanley and Leon Myers, a couple of young black men, African Americans, or we would have called them “Negro boys” back then. Stanley and Leon played ball in the park with us all the time. We never thought anything much of it, that they were black, I mean. I guess we had our social boundaries, but I wasn’t too aware of those things at the time.

Even though I went to Bronx High School of Science, I didn’t go to college right after graduation. I had thoughts about my future, but they weren’t very clear. When I was seventeen, before I graduated, I told my mother that I’d like to join the Marine Corps. Her response was very clear. Over my dead body! I did eventually join the marines, but not until I was twenty. The Jewish family tradition was definitely not to go into the marines. It was a struggle to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. It took a while. Eventually, after the marines, I became a policeman and then a detective.

All the things that happened in the ensuing years, like the turmoil of the civil rights movement, were foreign to me. I mean, it didn’t make sense to me because I had direct contact with African Americans and it never occurred to me that there was discrimination against them. I was in my late teens or early twenties when I started to get it, but it took a while. I was inured—not inured—Iwas blind to how badly other people could behave.

The Myers brothers, from my basketball days, we didn’t stay close friends, but probably in 1967 or ’68, which was, of course, in the throes of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam protests, I was on the police force. I was walking the foot post on a street called Wilkins Avenue near Boston Road. I had one or two years in the department, and who do I see walking down the road? It’s Leon Myers. And I hadn’t seen him in several years, not since we were younger fellas. I was really happy to see him. Leon was a distinctive guy. He was very tall and had thick eyeglasses. He probably would’ve been more accomplished in basketball if he didn’t have such bad vision. I think he went on to work in the post office.

So I’m in uniform. I’m alone at the time because in those days you had a beat by yourself. I saw him and said, “Leon, it’s Andy.” And he says, “Oh God, they’re taking anyone in the police department now, huh?” He had a good sense of humor. We laughed and chatted for a few minutes, and then he said, “Well, I gotta be going because this doesn’t look so good for me to be talking to you in this neighborhood.”

I kinda felt bad about that. I felt that way then, and I even feel that way now, so many years later. I’ve thought about it a lot through the years, and actually it was that racial divide that got to me. At the time, there was no thought of my being on any side, other than the one that I was on, which was being a policeman. But I look back on that sometimes with regret and I say to myself that maybe I was on the wrong side. I missed an opportunity in history. If I had it to do over again, I don’t know. Maybe I would’ve been a freedom marcher.

KENNETH S. DAVIDSON

Hedge fund manager, investment adviser

(1945– )

There was an empty lot next door to our building on Bronx Park East. The park right across the street had a playground and a lot of grass space where kids could run and play, but the lot was our place of choice. The land there was hilly and rocky with thick weeds and snakelike paths. There, we were away from supervision, away from the people in the park. That’s what I liked about it. It was our own place where we were able to light fires.

There were eight of us in our gang, all from our same building. There were, maybe, three years separating the oldest from the youngest. Matty and Jimmy were the oldest, Mitch, Peter, and Steve were next, followed by Andy, Henry, and me. Age, overall toughness, and courage established ranking in the gang. When it came to courage, none of us could beat Mitch. He was slightly built and unafraid of any confrontation with anyone of any age. From the age of eight he lived with his grandparents because he’d been orphaned. His grandfather was a distinguished-looking German immigrant who always wore a cardigan sweater while he listened to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast on Saturday afternoons. I don’t think he was the kind of role model that Mitch responded to. Mitch was described by the building tenants as a troublemaker, although some just called him “troubled.”

Mitch was fascinated by fire and was never without matches in his pocket. He had book matches or those white-tipped Diamond brand matches that came in their own boxes. At age nine he could light a white-tip with one hand and a flick of his thumbnail, which he probably learned from the George Raft or Hopalong Cassidy movies we used to see.

We helped ourselves to the discarded newspapers in the basement of our building to help start the fires in the lot. As soon as the super, Mr. Hartmann, caught us gathering papers and junk, he knew what we were going to do, and he’d put a stop to it. Sometimes we’d be lucky enough to get a fire started before the super could stop us and put it out. To us, fire meant defiance and excitement, especially since I was expressly told not to fool with it. “You could burn your eyes out,” was my mother’s warning.

Our kitchen faced the lot and I can still see my mother leaning out of the window when she’d smell the smoke and see the flames rising. She’d whistle a two-tone birdcall that stopped me dead in my tracks. Then with her loud, shrill voice she’d blast my name until it echoed through the lot. Ken-
neth
! It was Pavlovian. I would stop whatever I was doing and head home to my apartment. At other times when she smelled the smoke on my clothes she’d say, “There was a fire. Who had the matches?” It was usually Mitch so I never had to lie.

Years later I got in touch with Andy, who had been my best friend in the days of the lots and the fires. When I asked if he knew what had become of Mitch he said, “I think he became a social worker somewhere in New Jersey.” A social worker? If you had told me that he was running a numbers racket somewhere I would’ve believed it, but a social worker?

DANIEL LIBESKIND

Architect, founder of Studio Daniel Libeskind

(1946– )

We came to America from Israel on the SS
Constitution
on a voyage that was very long and very rough. After maybe fourteen days on the ship, my sister and I were awakened at five in the morning by my mother. “Get up. You’re going to see the Statue of Liberty!” It was very powerful and moving. And then we were looking at the skyline of Manhattan. To see the cluster of skyscrapers—I was thirteen years old and had never seen these buildings before—was like a fata morgana. It was not just the massiveness of the buildings, but that people made them. It was like something out of a dream. That stuck with me. It was unbelievable in every sense.

As we got off the boat, what struck us was how friendly people were to us.
Why were people so nice to us?
When we went to Israel from Poland, Israel was only eight years old. It wasn’t like it is now. It wasn’t so easy to live there. Even jobs were hard to get.

We were probably some of the last immigrants to arrive in New York by the Statue of Liberty like that iconic picture of the immigrants on a ship. And then we went straight to the Bronx. We went to the Bronx and that was it! We went straight from the boat, literally. We didn’t speak English. None of us. Not a word.

Before the war my mother was an anarchist. She didn’t believe in government. She knew the founders of the cooperative apartment buildings in the Bronx, the Amalgamated. Some of them were old anarchists from Emma Goldman’s time, but there were also Socialists, and Social Democrats, and so just through the grapevine our name, through my mother, was why we were able to get an apartment there. In the beginning, we lived in the Sholem Aleichem houses. In Israel, at that time, Yiddish was neglected and not very well tolerated. Hebrew was and still is the official language. They didn’t even want to talk about Yiddish. Can you imagine what it meant to us that there were buildings named after Sholem Aleichem, the beloved Yiddish writer? Then we moved to Building Number 1, the first residential cooperative building in the Amalgamated Houses, the oldest middle-income co-op in America.

Mr. and Mrs. Straus, very elderly Jews who were our friends, lived in a small apartment there, but in it they had the complete works of Goethe, Schiller, the music of Bach. They were highly intellectual people even though they were working class. The people in the Amalgamated all worked in factories, but when I look back they had more books and literature than any Harvard professor would have today. The love of learning of music and art—how lucky we were. There was a cultural program every week, a small performance, or a poetry reading. There were gatherings. There were places where painters could paint. We adapted easily because we could speak Yiddish and Polish with all the people around us. We thought that we had come to Utopia.