Historian, author, educator
(1938– )
I was born in 1938, and I like to say that I’m as old as Superman and Bugs Bunny and one year older than Batman. I guess it was in my DNA or I got it from osmosis or something like that, but from the time I was a toddler I’d ask my parents, my aunts and uncles, what happened before I was born. The question was usually about what happened with my family—with my grandfather, and even my great-grandfather, who was still alive when I was young.
My parents were caught up in the Great Depression. My mother used to laugh when she’d say she went to Theodore Roosevelt High School—in one door and out the other. She actually quit to take care of her family. She therefore always felt the lack of education and so she educated herself. She did crossword puzzles to increase her vocabulary. She listened to classical music concerts with Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony on the radio, and she read historical novels. She said that was the best way she could get to understand history. My father, on the other hand, wanted to be an architect. He was in his first year at City College when he had to leave to take care of his family. My younger brother got my father’s interest in architecture. I got my mother’s interest in history. So I’m a historian and he’s an architect.
When I was two years and ten months old, we lived one block west of the Grand Concourse. There was a hill there. We were walking when my mother suddenly grabs me and we run up the hill with her holding my arm. We stand on the barrier that separates what would be called the service road from the main part of the Grand Concourse. I have no idea why we are there. I remember so distinctly that across the way, on the opposite barrier or mall, there was a woman with a pageboy haircut wearing a print dress. Suddenly this woman leans forward, turns to her left, and starts applauding like a seal. I look in the direction she’s looking, and coming up the Grand Concourse is a car. And in the back of the car, talking to a person next to him in the backseat, is our president, Franklin Roosevelt. I turn to my mother, who is still holding my hand, and I say, “President Roosevelt? Here?” Of course, as far as I was concerned as a kid, Roosevelt’s first name was “President.” But I knew that he was an important man because everyone knew his name. Everybody talked about him. And every time there was an election, my mother took me into the voting booth and I watched her cast her ballot.
The Grand Concourse was also a big parade route, especially on Memorial Day and July Fourth. There would be flags, bands, veterans’ groups, and after them the civic groups. Because these parades were huge, the massing of units would occur along the side streets. They would come into the Grand Concourse as the last contingent in front of them passed by. I think because of that, every Thanksgiving morning I turn on the television to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. To this day, I love a parade.
Between the ages of seven and fourteen I had asthma so I really couldn’t do much in the way of athletics. Whenever I ran, even just a short distance, I’d find it difficult to breathe. So I never developed any skills of hitting or running with a ball. One result of this was that I turned to books. I read a lot. The first book I ever took out of the New York Public Library was a history book. The book was a historical novel, called Og, Son of Fire. Toward the end of third grade, the teacher said, “Next year when you go to class, you’ll have two new subjects, history and geography.” I said, “Ooo!” and the kid next to me said, “What’s that?” I was sort of in my own world, and I was perfectly happy with it.
Even though my parents didn’t have much money, they were determined that their kid was going to get everything that New York City had to offer. So every weekend we went someplace else. One place we went was the Bronx Zoo. First of all, it was free. I found out later that you had to pay on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, but nobody went there on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. I got to know what all the animals were and where they were. The African Plains had already been built so I saw the animals roaming around in what was close to their natural habitat. I can still walk around the Bronx Zoo and know exactly where I am, even with all the new installations.
My parents made it very clear when I was in elementary school that if I wanted to go to college either I had to get a scholarship or I had to do very well and get into one of the city colleges. So I got into Hunter College in the Bronx, which was only eleven minutes away by subway.
After World War Two, they wanted to integrate Hunter to get their hands on the GI Bill money. They couldn’t do it as an all-girls’ school, but they could preserve the all-girls’ atmosphere by keeping the Park Avenue branch that way and integrating the Bronx campus. When I got there, in the freshman class of 1955, Hunter’s president, George N. Shuster, said that this was the first Hunter College class that had an equal number of men and women.
For my graduate work, I bless Nelson Rockefeller because I was able to get a New York State Regents College Teaching Fellowship to Columbia University, which is not very far away from the Bronx. That paid my entire tuition plus room and board. They gave the money in one lump sum for me to decide how to spend. Whatever was for tuition was tuition. But as for room and board? I stayed at home in the Bronx instead. And of course Columbia University, at that time, had some of the top historians teaching there. Richard B. Morris for colonial and American revolutionary history, Harold C. Syrett, who at that time was editing the papers of Alexander Hamilton, and William Leuchtenburg, who taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories. These were the top historians of the day and it was wonderful.
In 1977 two things happened in the Bronx, both in the same month, and within days of each other. In October 1977 Jimmy Carter was at the United Nations to attend meetings and speak before the General Assembly. At lunchtime, he gets into his limousine and of course he’s followed by all the press. He goes up to the Bronx to Charlotte Street, and suddenly he’s walking on rubble. Block after block of rubble. The print photographers take out their cameras when they see Jimmy Carter walking along Charlotte Street and the television cameras do the same thing and suddenly—poof—this is seen all around the world. The image of the Bronx until then, at least in many eyes, was that of a largely middle-class area, upwardly mobile, healthy. And then all of a sudden these pictures come on and people’s jaws drop. Then the New York Yankees are in the World Series that year and it’s a night game. The Goodyear Blimp is circling overhead for occasional shots from that angle. You see this shot of Yankee Stadium from above, gleaming in the darkness, and suddenly the blimp moves, Yankee Stadium hovers out of view, but the narration is still going on. And this is on ABC television. It’s broadcast nationwide and also picked up internationally. You see the outline of the streets and the little pinpoint streetlamp lights and the rest is all blackness. And then somewhere, about ten blocks to the east of the Concourse, what hovers into view is a huge tongue of flame leaping to the sky. Howard Cosell is the broadcaster and he says, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is what Jimmy Carter saw. Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.” And I’m at home going “Aghhhhhhhh,” grabbing my head. The combination of the two really shook the image of the Bronx.
A few years later, the nail in the coffin happened with the filming of the 1981 movie Fort Apache, the Bronx. People in the neighborhood are complaining to Paul Newman and Ed Asner about all the negative things in the movie. So Newman and Asner meet with these people at a local diner and explain that they can’t stop production because all this money has already been spent. They have to go ahead. But they did promise that at the beginning of the film they would put in a disclaimer saying that not everything is like this in the Bronx, and that there are good people living in the area, etc. etc. etc. And true to their word there is a disclaimer at the beginning of the film. But I defy anybody by the end of the film to remember the disclaimer at the beginning! Danny Aiello is also in the film. He plays a bad cop. In one of the most shocking parts of that film, he’s standing on the top of a triangular burned-out building, and he takes the perpetrator, puts him over his head, and throws him over the parapet to the streets below. Shocking! Before that scene is shot, Aiello is approached by the director. “Danny, come up with me in my car. I’ll take you to the set.” When they get there, the director says, “Now you go to the top of that building and shoot the scene.” Danny Aiello takes a look at the building and says, “That’s my house. That’s where I grew up!”