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From the The Tenement Series of non-fiction essays by Harry Buschman
© by Harry Buschman
Long Time Passing
The "Tenement" stories were written from memory. They were written from a child's point of view and much of the life that adults had to endure were only suggested. Nonetheless, they are an accurate picture of the life families lived in those five-storey wall to wall dwellings in New York City between the wars.
I realize that
middle class America today cannot fully appreciate those conditions, many New
Yorkers are unaware of them as well. America is a big country now -- far bigger
than it was in the twenties. Most of us have our own "space," and
a window to look out of. We have heat and light and a phone on the kitchen wall.
We tune in our television sets and watch news happen -- while it happens, in
some ways we even make it happen.
We didn't know much about America in my day. The little we knew was limited
to our personal experience. The subway would take us from one end of our world
to the other -- from the sand and sea of Coney Island, to the forests of the
Bronx. The daily newspaper told us of distant horizons but they didn't concern
us. We would never see them. None of us could understand why America would go
to war over an assassination in Europe or grieve for people devastated by an
earthquake in San Francisco. These were places we would never see, places we
weren't sure existed. We were sentenced like prisoners for life within the four
brick walls of our apartment in Park Place -- people above us, below us and
to either side.
You can read Jacob Riis -- and he'll tell you far better than I how such an
environment affected the children of the tenements and how it colored their
adult lives forever. All I can tell you are the things I remember well, and
if I seem apathetic at times or find humor in situations I recall, it is because
the awful truth has been mellowed by a long time passing.
The first of the tenements were built in upper and lower Manhattan before the
turn of the century. As the city grew, they expanded to Brooklyn and the Bronx,
and when a law was passed making them illegal there were already 86,000 of them
in Manhattan alone. Those early tenements were six stories high and the backs
of them stood sixty feet from the backs of the tenements on the next block.
They were built wall-to-wall with shafts that passed light down through transoms
and windows to the interior rooms. The bottom of the shafts were littered with
the rubbish thrown from the windows above.
A builder could
construct a six-story tenement for as little as $25,000 on a single 25 by 100
foot lot and collect rent from as many as twelve families. The street fronts
of the six-story tenements were a steel lattice work of fire escapes from the
sixth to the second floor of each unit. We slept on them in the summer and kept
our food cold on them in the winter. In an old book by Moses King written in
1893 it was recorded that there were as many as 3500 residents living in one
city street. He extrapolated that a square mile of such tenements would house
1,000,000 people.
The danger of fire, disease, crime and ethnic friction threatened all of us.
There was no central heating, and we carried red hot kerosene stoves from room
to room to warm our bedrooms. Fires were a common occurrence in winter. The
fire department could handle outbreaks on the ground floor and basement but
it was difficult to reach the apartments above. No government agency kept records
of disease, there was no way to take a census except by estimate. In short it
was a Ghetto, pure and simple -- a Ghetto in the new world, and although the
city outlawed the tenements, it could not make the decision retroactive. Where
would they put the people?
The people! "yearning to breathe free." They had come from the four
corners of the earth -- to America where every golden paved street led to a
life of freedom and independence. Where every man could find security and a
future for his children. Thank God there were jobs to be had.
New York was a
seaport, a center of commerce and a place where a craftsman could make a living
doing what he learned to do in the old country. Every worker was confined to
a small space on the factory floor. He traveled to and from his job on the subway,
shoulder to shoulder with people he never spoke to. He and his family lived
in a crowded building yet he didn't know his neighbor's name. He might grunt
a wary 'good morning' to someone he passed on the stair, but more than likely
he would pass them by without looking. He was never alone, yet if he needed
help in an emergency there was no one he could turn to. The walls were thin,
and the sounds and smells of other families surrounded him -- strange tongues
-- strange odors -- strange rites of worship. You might think this closeness
would bring people together and foster understanding, but instead it bred estrangement
and distrust and left a lasting scar.
Children were a different story, they played together. They learned the fascinating
language of English in the schools they attended, a language they rarely heard
at home. In the middle of all the mistrust and suspicion their parents felt
for their neighbors, the children developed a common bond of fellowship with
kids their own age. We called each other kikes, wops and niggers, Polacks, micks
and guineas. There was no resentment -- none of us got excited -- after all,
that's what we were. None of us took our heritage seriously .... we were young
Americans, each of us had an equal shot at life in the only world we had ever
seen.
It was the English
language that bonded us. That beautiful and flexible tongue that borrowed so
much from the old world. We spoke it fluently in our own company and then lapsed
clumsily into German, Italian or Polish at home. With every passing day we drifted
further from the shores of the old country .... further from our families ....
we were a family of the young.
My friend Ernie's father, a pants cutter in the garment district, would nod
to me as he sat at the dining room table and turned the pages of his Jewish
Daily -- "Oy, Ernie's little goyem friend," then it was back to the
Jewish news. The 'Promised Land' he never saw and never would see. I never saw
Ernie's father, Moshe, without a yarmulke, I never saw him in the street without
his skin tight black coat and black fedora -- regardless of the heat or the
cold, he would not dress for the weather, he dressed for Palestine. America
had opened its doors to him and like the kid at the bakery store window he stood
outside looking in. Ernie, with no interest in the land of his fathers, would
be an American, his father could not.
Our friend Ralph was a nigger from Atlantic Avenue. Oh, that "N" word
-- so hateful now, but spoken so naturally then, without bitterness or rancor.
Ralph's mother, with skin like brown velvet, soft and sweet smelling, welcomed
us whenever we trailed in from the street -- "you must be hungry .... here,
try these, they just come outta the oven." Shrimps and fried bananas, chicken
wings and refried beans. We ate tentatively having never tasted such things
before, then thanked the good Lord for having Ralph as a friend. I ask you how!
-- how in the name of God can we be so far apart today? Ralph Mandeville didn't
move up with us to PS 9, and that was the first tier of bricks in the wall of
mutual distrust that stands between us now. The black and white wall .... we
built it ourselves. We became strangers day by day, never really knowing why.
Of late, these years come back to haunt me, the people are gone now .... all
of them and I often wonder why I have been spared to write some words of repentance
for the wounds we inflicted on each other. It's a huge responsibility, but I
will write them as best I can with no excuses for the part I played. At the
same time I will show, as fairly as I can, that I was not the only guilty one.
But, to be honest, there are occasions in the middle of the night when I wake
with a start and remember a time when maybe I should have done something differently.
A kinder word, a hand -- something that would have made our friendship last.
Life is so short -- friendship is so fleeting, and when it leaves on the outgoing
tide, it leaves not a wrack behind.
©Harry Buschman 1995
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