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[General index]
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[Index to galleries]
[Full family history]
New York City
This is a chapter extracted from the
family history
I'm writing for my children.
By the time I got out of the Army I was fascinated by New York City because
of what I had been reading, movies I'd seen, etc — the diversity of
cultures and languages and social classes, the countless movie theaters and
restaurants of every nationality, etc etc. Most of the places I had lived
before the Army were pretty homogeneous. I first got to know NYC in 1966,
mainly the area around Columbia University in upper Manhattan when it was
still pretty gritty, decades before it was wrecked by gentrification. It's
where I married, where I worked, and where my children grew up.
Peter = My son.
Amy = My daughter.
You guys = Peter and Amy.
Judy = My ex-wife Judy Scott.
Rick = Rick Levine, Judy's second husband.
Granpa = Judy's father, Ulysses S. Scott.
Granma = Judy's mother, Consuelo Lillian Scott (née Bergen).
—Frank da Cruz <
[email protected]>
Most recent update: 6 January 2024 15:53:44
Moving to New York...
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Wendy Sibbison
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116th Street subway kiosk 1966
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Chock Full o' Nuts 116th Street and Bway 1966
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The Yumke Man
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Wendy Sibbison was a Barnard student and she got
me interested in going to Columbia, so I filled out an application while I
was living in DC with our friend Tandy Martin, where I went to get away from
Richard for a few weeks, and mailed it in. I first met Wendy in 1962 when I
was going to UVA, before I totally left home. I remember her being at our
house and meeting my parents and brother at some point, and me being at her
house and meeting her parents. She had written to me the whole time I was
in the Army and her letters meant a lot to me, so she was the first one I
wanted to see when I got back, and she was. Then while I was living in DC I
would go to NYC all the time on a Greyhound bus to see her and Peter and
Jude.
In August 1966 I moved to NYC all by myself on a Greyhound bus, with what I
could carry. I didn't even know if I had been accepted at Columbia.
Here's what the Columbia U area was like when I arrived:
- The transit fare was 15 cents.
- Everybody walked between subway cars.
- The IRT and BMT and IND were separate.
- Some trains still had wicker seats and leather straps.
- You put coins in the slot to pay for bus fare and if you didn't
have exact change, the bus drivers made change.
- Chase Bank was Chemical Bank (and before that Chemical Corn).
- The neighborhood around Columbia was cheap and diverse;
there were bodegas, Dominican beauty parlors, Cuban restaurants,
Jewish diners that served matzoh brei, Greek gyro stands, etc.
- There was a subway kiosk in the middle of Bway at 116th Street.
- Rents averaged about $100 a month.
- Newsstands were Jewish and sold the Jewish Daily Vorvaerts and
the Daily Worker, penny candy and egg creams and
two-cents plain, and proprietors spoke Yiddish.
- Taxi drivers were mainly Jewish.
- Washington Heights was 100% Jewish.
- The Bronx was mainly Jewish, Italian, Irish, and Puerto Rican.
- There were still Checker cabs.
- The public schools were among the best in the country.
- Public housing was a great place to live.
- City College was free.
- Columbia tuition was low enough I could pay it out of my pocket.
- Chock-Full-O-Nuts was on the corner of 116th Street.
- There were no chain stores except Chock-Full and Daitch Shopwell.
- They still had Italian street festivals in East Harlem.
- You could spend the whole day and night at the Apollo for $2.50.
- There were tons of movie theaters everywhere with cheap admission.
- On Broadway:
103rd St | 100th | 98th | 97th | 96th | 88th…
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Edison | Metro | Symphony | Riviera | Thalia | New Yorker
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- The Thalia and New Yorker were repertory theaters that showed
Marx Bros, Bogart, Eisenstein, Kurosawa…
- The only places along Broadway in 1966 that survived into the XXI century
(as of 2011, at least)
were Columbia Hardware (1939),
Mondel's (1943), Tom's (1940s), Amir's
Felafel, and the tiny shoe repair.
The West End
opened in 1911 and closed in 2006 due to astronomical rent increases.
V&T's Pizza on Amsterdam opened in 1945 and was still there last
time I looked. In the 1980s the West End was a jazz venue.
Columbia made a good first impression on me… In one of my visits
while I still lived in DC, there was a Martha and Vandellas concert in
McMillan Theater… pretty amazing, right? I went with Wendy and some
other people. Eventually I noticed the guy I was sitting next to was an old
friend from Frankfurt High School, Dave Kelston. He lived in an apartment
in a brownstone in the 80s (in those days, a rough neighborhood) and he had
a motorcycle, he took me on some rides and then I wanted one too.
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Angela Davis
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When I arrived at Columbia and met Columbia students — who in those
days were not clueless narcisistic arrogant bubbleheads like today, but
socially aware, committed, intelligent, knowledgeable, fast-talking,
anti-racist, anti-imperialist, many of them Red Diaper babies — and
faculty — half of them Marxists — I started to understand why
the USA was invading all these countries. Marxist theory was taught in
every sociology course in those days, and International Publishers (USSR
English-language press) had a whole aisle in the bookstore. There were also
a lot of teach-ins going on by people ranging from Lyndon LaRouche (in those
days a Leninist known as Lyn Marcus) to Seymour Melman, an anti-war Columbia
engineering professor who had a Marxist-Melmanist analysis of Pentagon
economics. I read pretty much all of Marx and Engels except Volumes 2 and 3
of Kapital, hung out at Communist book stores (there was one called Taylors
where Papyrus was later on, and another one on 8th Avenue around 155th
Street), read Malcolm X, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Sam Melville, Mao,
Lin Piao, Fernando Cabral, Regis Debray, Franz Fanon, Sartre, Eldridge
Cleaver, etc etc. Subscribed to the Daily World (formerly the Daily Worker)
up until the mid-80s; it was delivered right to our door at 118th Street.
Read Pa'lante and the Black Panther newspapers every week, and have a big
box of them in Mommie's garage, probably just moldy mush by now.
The same day I arrived from DC I got an apartment and a job. What can I
say, life was easier then. There was a sign on College Walk that said
Employment so I went in and they gave me a job at Butler Library. Then I
went to the Taint (the passage between Hartley and Livingston halls, "t'aint
Hartley, t'aint Livingston") where the bulletin board was and found an
apartment in the Ta-Kome building.
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601 W 115th Street 2017
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Ta-Kome deli 1957-1984
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The apartment I got was a TINY room in the Ta-Kome (University Food Market)
building on 115th Street and Broadway, that I sublet from some Columbia
professors,
FW Dupee
and
George Stade,
who used it during the academic year. Little did I
know I would spend some 40 years of my life on that block. The apartment
was on the top floor (12th) and it had a huge window that looked out over
the Hudson, but the room was so small it only had space for a bed; there was
a tiny triangular bathroom in one corner with miniature toilet and sink and
shower stall and no kitchen or fridge. I was only there for the summer,
until school started. New to New York, one night I had such a strange dream
that when I woke up, like Coleridge, I
had to write it
down.
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The only time I ever got a telegram
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My brother Dennis came to stay with me for a week; I went to the Army Navy
store on 125th Street to buy a folding cot for him to sleep on. We cooked
meals in an electric frying pan on the windowsill, but the view made
everything kind of magic, especially at night with the Circle Line and other
cruise ships going by with music and dancing; you could actually hear people
on the boats talking in their normal voice, some trick of acoustics. I
remember taking Dennis to see
Hard Days Night at the Quad Cinema on
13th Street and stopping at the Ukrainian shops. I also took him to a party
at Neil Hurwitz's house at 610 W 115th Street, where he (Neil) still lived
49 years later in 2015, last time I was there.
I checked with GS and found I was admitted, so since my tiny apartment was
rented only for the summer, I went to the Taint and found another place to
live, a room in the apartment of David Stern and Erna Gold at 419 West 119th
Street across from Aki, the Japanese restaurant where "The Mean Man Pushed
the Lady" (Peter's interpretation of painting on the wall). David and Erna
were very nice and smart and funny and good Communists and Erna played Bach
and Scarlatti on the piano. But the place was stinky because they fried
frozen fish every day to feed to their cat. And sharing the bathroom was
tricky. The building had its own 1930s-era telephone system, with a
switchboard in the lobby. David was famous for having turned down a
National Defense scholarship, the first person ever to do that, it was in
Time Magazine. I always wonder if he is the same David Stern who is now the
NBA commissioner but I don't think so.
The Bertha on 111th Street...
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The Bertha
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Anyway everybody knew I wasn't crazy about living at David and Erna's.
Meanwhile Peter Marsh was living in a three-bedroom apartment at 515 West
111th Street, The Bertha, with Paul Brooke and Paul Nyden. Paul Nyden was
pretty famous left-wing guy, became a crusading pro-labor journalist in West
Virginia. He died in 2018; his kids' middle names are Mandela, Allende, and
DuBois. Anyway, he moved out at the end of the first semester so they
invited me to take his place. Our apartment (1E) was the first one on the
right as you go in the front entrance, with windows looking out on 111th
Street at street level.
In the photo, the four windows to the right of the entrance were our
apartment in 1966-67. The first two windows were Peter's, the second two
were Paul Brooke's. Kitchen, bath, and three bedrooms, about $300 a month
split three ways. It was so easy and cheap for students to find apartments
that there were hardly any off-campus dorms.
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Paul Brooke
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Paul Brooke's girlfriend was Mommie. I thought he was kind of arrogant and
didn't like how he treated her. This was sort of a mythic place; Jude was
always there, Mommy, Wendy, etc, and of course Froggy. Peter Marsh was
always playing his Chambers Brothers and Mamas and Poppas and Mothers of
Invention records, so those songs always take me back to the Bertha.
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My 1956 BMW R26
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Me on it 1967
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It was while living in the Bertha that I bought a 1956 BMW Motorcycle for
$300 from a guy in Queens. I registered it in Vermont using Peter Marsh's
address because insurance wasn't required there; I never had insurance or
even a driver's license. I took the test about 100 times up on Audubon
Avenue but in those days they just automatically flunked everybody every
time. In the winter I brought it inside the apartment, riding it up and
down the front steps. It wasn't fast or anything, but I rode it all over
the place, all over Manhattan, especially the Lower East Side (which was
like a bombed-out zone in those days), around Central Park (the S-Curve is
awe-sim on a motorcycle), up and down Palisades Parkway in NJ and out into
the Great Swamp. Sometimes I went to Palisades
Park, a big amusement park on the top of the Palisades across from
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Palisades Park NJ seen from upper Manhattan
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Washington Heights (you could see it at night from Manhattan, all lit up)
to get vinegar-soaked french fries (it closed in 1971). Peter Marsh and I
would go on rides together, he had a 500cc Triumph, which was a serious
bike, not a slowpoke like mine; once we rode up to the Little Red Lighthouse
along paths in Riverside Park in the middle of the night, another time we
went to a biker hangout in NJ but that was a big mistake; we didn't exactly
fit in with Hell's Angels, they made fun of us the whole time.
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Bertha Apartment 1967
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Bertha Kitchen 1967
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Froggy 1967
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The three photos at left were sent to me by Peter Marsh in 2024, which makes
them 57 years old.
The first one shows Peter's Triumph in his bedroom. The second shows the
entrance to the cramped kitchen / dining room where various combinations of
Judy, Paul, Jude, Peter, Wendy, (and Patty Chen? anyone else?) and I would
crowd around the tiny table; this was the only common area. The third photo
shows the foul-tempered homicidal cat, Froggy, who came with the apartment
and apparently had to power to shrink Peter's bike down to an
un-intimidating size. My second-least fond memory of Froggy is when he
(she?) attacked me while I was sleeping, bent on severing my jugular vein; I
pulled her off me and tried to throw him full-force out my bedroom door.
That was when I learned an essential lesson of life:
Never Throw a Cat.
Anyway when the fall semester ended, our merry band disbanded and gave up
the apartment. I forgot who was going to take Froggy (it definitely wasn't
me), but somehow I had the honor of carrying her out the door. Froggy
didn't like that and tore into me with tooth and claw, shredding my shirt,
my chest, and arms, so I just put him back inside. And as the years passed
and tenants changed, Froggy stayed; every time I walked down that block I'd
see her in the window.
109th Street...
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170 West 109th Street 2012
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Front door and Pedro's apartment
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Basement apartment entrance
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170 West 109th Street 2012
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Needing a new place to live, I went to Off-Campus Registry (the same place
where I got my first apartment) and found the basement apartment at at 170 W
109th between Amsterdam and Columbus, directly across from the Con Ed
substation, just $70 a month (but Peter Marsh would share it and pay half
when he came back in the Fall, so $35 each). At the time I was the only
person on that street who was not Puerto Rican or Dominican. I lived in the
basement in a condemned apartment, four narrow rooms in a row, a classic NY
tenement railroad apartment. There was no bathroom but there was a shower
stall in the kitchen. The tiny kitchen sink was also for teeth brushing,
face washing, etc. The toilet was outside the apartment, near the boiler.
The kitchen was the only room big enough to hang out in; it had a table and
some chairs. The landlord was an old Irish lady, Mrs. Gavaghan who was
exactly like Mrs. Lift in
Throw Momma from the Train. She lived on
106th Street in a huge apartment with her cat, who had its own bedroom and
slept on a king-size four-poster with canopy. My super, Pedro Lugo, and his
family lived right above me; he had three kids, Tony, Papo, and Maria; his
wife was very shy and nobody ever saw her. (Decades later Ivonne said she
knew Tony and Papo, they were much older than she was and famous drug
addicts.) I still had my motorcycle then, I'd take the kids for rides. The
next door neighbor was Mikey the drug dealer. Every night you'd hear people
yelling Mikey, Mikey, Miiiiikieeeeeee… Sometimes they'd come to my
place looking for Mikey (the two buildings were twins and he lived in the
corresponding basement apartment). I didn't have any furniture so I just
brought in stuff from the street (some of it I still have, like the black
chair). Pedro gave me a mattress with bedbugs. I was friendly with the
people who had bodegas and laundries on Amsterdam and would hang out with
them at night.
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Iris Chacón poster 1967
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Willie Colón album 1967
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The street had personality, especially in the hot summer. Half the cars
were up on blocks with their wheels gone and windows broken out, fire
hydrants and
Willie
Colón music blasting, the frío-frío man
(a 90-year-old Dominican guy with a rickety wooden cart painted light
blue with a big block of ice)… the famous
Iris Chacón
poster plastered all over the neighborhood... Delicious cooking smells
coming from the apartments… families barbecuing on the street, kids
of all ages everywhere hanging out, dancing, making out… old guys
playing dominó…
One morning as I left for work I saw somebody parking a big shiny silver
Bentley in front of my building. I thought to myself, that's not good.
Sure enough when I got home, it was up on blocks and burnt down to a hollow
black shell. I realized that to park my motorcycle on the street was a bad
idea too so I moved it to the Royal Garage on 107th Street between Amsterdam
and Columbus, $12.50 a month. I sold the bike after about 2 years.
109th Street stories continue below, after Double
Discovery.
Project Double Discovery...
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Ferris Booth Hall patio 1967
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The summer of 1967 I worked as a counselor in Project Double Discovery,
which was basically a Marxist revolutionary study group (just kidding) (not
really) paid for by the US government and
HARYOU ACT, and it was one of the places where the Weather Underground
was born. We lived on campus in Hartley and Livingston. The ostensible
purpose was to prepare mainly Harlem high-school kids for college. Mostly
Black, Puerto Rican, and Dominican kids but also some poor whites from East
90s and Hell's Kitchen (which were tough areas then) and some kids from
Chinatown.
In the morning the kids attended classes taught by top Columbia professors
like Jim
Shenton, who later directed the program. In the afternoon our kids, in
turn, had to tutor elementary school kids in Harlem. I took my kids on the
train every day to 145th Street and we walked from Broadway over to PS90 on
147th Street, just east of 8th Avenue. Besides tutoring the kids we did a
lot of projects around there, like price surveys in the stores so we could
publish lists of which stores had the best and worst prices for essential
items like milk (in this, we discovered a little-known dark and dusty relic
of the Marcus Garvey days, a nonprofit Hey Brother food market — you
can't even find this in Google). We'd spend lots of time in the Communist
bookstore on 8th Avenue at 155th Street. And for fun we'd go to Bradhurst
Park and Colonial Pool (now called Jackie Robinson). I didn't know it at
the time, but that is one of jewels in the crown of the New Deal in NYC, one
of 11 palatial public swimming pools and bathhouses built in the City by the
WPA in 1936. Anyway just being in Harlem every day that summer was
unforgettable, Martha and Vandellas and James Brown blasting out of boom
boxes… People making their own music on street corners, usually
involving multiple conga drums, everybody out on the street because it was
too hot to be inside… Fire hydrants going full blast long before the
days of sprinkler caps. Shabazz bean pies, egg creams, orange soda;
Sherman's Barbecue… I forget the name of that cheap sparkling wine
that came in fruit flavors and cost a dollar… Oh right, Boone's Farm
Strawberry Hill.
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NYC Subway tokens - Click to enlarge
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We got almost unlimited amounts of money for activities — cash, big
bags full of subway tokens — movies downtown (whatever movie the kids
voted on, e.g.
The Dirty Dozen), lots of times to the Apollo, plus
food festivals, trips to all different places, including one to the Cuban
Consulate — you could not believe how many camera shutters we heard
clicking as we entered. There was also a Kurosawa festival going on in
Ferris Booth Hall and we all went see
Yojimbo,
Throne of
Blood,
Sanjuro, and
Seven Samurai. It was their introduction to
Kurosawa and they ate it up. Mine too except for
Roshomon, which I
had seen in high school in Germany, where they showed it in the auditorium
one day.
And speaking of movies, the kids worked as extras in the (otherwise pretty
dumb) Hollywood film Up The Down Staircase, which was filmed at
Benjamin Franklin High School on Convent Avenue at 116th Street in the
uptown Little Italy (Mommy would teach at Franklin for years, starting about
1970). We went to the NY premiere and the kids were screaming with joy to
see themselves up on the huge movie screen. But all of those scenes have
been cut from DVD version.
Other counselors in 1967 included Mommy, Wendy, Howie Machtinger, Teddy
Gold, Mark Naison, Heywood Dotson (played for NBA), Paul Nyden, Paul Brooke.
Eric Foner and Jim Shenton were among the teachers. Just for the record,
the kids in my group were Mike Hall, Michael Alston, John García, Tony
Delbridge, Hollis Jenkins (who always wore a suit!), and Tim Lee (who took
the picture of me on my motorcycle).
109th Street, cont'd...
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Max 1967
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After Double Discovery, Peter Marsh joined me in the 109th Street apartment
for the 1967-68 school year, which was pretty tumultuous not just because of
the Columbia uprising, but the MLK assassination, the almost-riots in Harlem
only a few blocks away, the RFK assassination, the Nixon victory, etc etc.
At some point Peter and I found Max, a homeless cat, on the street and
brought him (no, her) home.
Peter and I shared the apartment for about a year and had lots of
adventures… For one thing, we both had motorcycles. Jude would come
over all the time, and would usually stay the night (Peter had the front
room, the only room that could be closed). We'd cook stuff but there were
constant assaults of roaches and mice. The roaches would literally jump off
the walls into the cooking pots. There was one mouse that was kind of a
pet, Max didn't bother it, and it would do cute things to entertain us like
stick its little head up through the burner ring on the stove (not when the
stove was on!)
One Sunday morning we heard a lot of commotion outside. A whole caravan of
suburbanite do-gooders had arrived in their station wagons to clean up our
block and paint everything bright pastel colors, improving the ghetto for
the poor people so they will be in a better mood when they see pictures of
flowers and smiley faces everywhere. They did the whole block except my
building because Pedro told them, "You touch my building, I kill you."
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Pharmacist's Mate Peter M
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Peter Marsh dropped out and left before the school year was over. His grade
point average was not good, and in those days Columbia reported everybody's
GPA to the draft board, and if it was below a certain number you were
drafted, and that's what happened to Peter. This was when the Vietnam war
was at its height, what a nightmare. He did what I did — applied for
CO status — and he was luckier than I was; the application was
approved and he went back to Vermont at some point after the 1968 strike at
Columbia but before the end of the school year (taking Max with him) to do
his alternative service, working 2-3 years in a hospital in Burlington,
where he was like pharmacist's mate (his work costume in the photo). He and
Jude and Max lived on the top floor of Abernethy's at the north end of Pearl
Street, in a gothic apartment that was full of turrets and ladders and
hatches and secret rooms.
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Patty Chen 1968
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And I had the 109th Street apartment to myself again. That summer I worked
in Butler Library and since I was in the doghouse for being in the strike,
they had me move the entire College Library stacks by myself, I don't know
how many tons of books, and it was like 120 degrees in there… This
was long before the library was air conditioned. I'd come home in the
evening exhausted and drenched in sweat, take a shower, go spend the evening
with Wendy, Jude, and Patty Chen (they shared an apartments in a townhous on
91st Street and then another on 101st Street); we'd cook dinner, drink wine,
and listen to music: Wendy's
Stax Review in Paris LP, the
Miracles
Goin' to a Go-Go LP, etc.
One night when I came home from work, the entire stoop was covered with what
looked like congealed bacon fat, but a LOT of it, it was several inches
thick and covered the whole stoop. Pedro was scraping it off with
scraper, filling up big garbage cans. He said it wasn't just the stoop, it
was the stairs all the way up to the top (fifth) floor. He'd been scraping
all day. He told me what happened. A guy who lived up there, I never knew
his name… he was huge. He must have weighed 400 or 500 pounds.
Every morning he'd come down and sit on the stoop all day, smoking
cigarettes. I always said hi to him but we never had anything to actually
talk about, he never really talked with anybody. At the end of the day he'd
hoist himself back up to his apartment and, it turns out, drink and smoke
himself to sleep. Apparently he was smoking in bed and the bed caught fire
and melted him and all his fat ran out the door, down the hall, down the
stairs, and out the front door, probably 400 pounds of it.
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Judy at 109th Street
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Judy at 109th Street
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Judy at 109th Street
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I kept the 109th Street apartment until Mommy and I got together, which was
in May or June of 1968. She stayed with me there about week but that was
all she could take (vermin, no bathroom, no closets...). The picture on the
left shows some things about the place: the no-view window at the foot of an
airshaft, the kitchen sink that was also the bathroom sink, the adjoining
shower stall right in the kitchen, the bright colors I painted everything.
I wish I had photos of the toilets out in the hall with mushrooms growing
around them. Or all the crazy makeshift gadgets we had for locks and
doorbells, made with ropes and pulleys and two-by-fours and hinges and
buttons.
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French New Wave pose
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In the kitchen
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Judy at 109th Street
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Judy and I decided to move to a better apartment, even though it would cost
four times as much. I gave my apartment to Mike Hall, one of my kids from
Double Discovery, just to piss off racist Mrs. Gavaghan. Mike had a pretty
horrible life, he grew up in the Bronx, once his mother locked him in a
closet all summer, later he saw his brother murdered, etc… After PDD
he hung around Columbia for the rest of his life, homeless, usually sleeping
on the Broadway center strip. In later life he had huge dreadlocks, no
teeth, and hobbled around with a cane. He was very smart and a very nice
guy but he just couldn't take care of himself… All the old PDD people
at Columbia watched out for him. Oh right, I almost forgot, once we got him
a job as a kind of "security guard" at Amy's Own Broadway Presbyterian
Cooperative Nursery School when Amy was going there. He was still around
when I moved out of Manhattan in 2012.
Before leaving 109th Street, let's have some more pictures. In the second
one, I still have those two mugs. The left one I brought from Germany. The
right one Jerry Jacobs sent me from Frankfurt but over the years the
Henninger Bier logo wore off, now it's just plain grey.
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Me at 109th Street
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Me at 109th Street
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Herbert at 109th Street
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Judy and Herbert
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Who ate the mattress???
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Amsterdam Avenue 1968
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110th & Amsterdam 1968
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Judy gave me a puppy for Chistmas, I called him Herbert.
Actually she and Paul Brooke gave me a different puppy first (Paul is
holding him in the
picture back in the Bertha section)
but it got sick and died within a couple days, so then they gave me Herbert.
I had him for six months or a year, but it was a real bad idea. I was in
school or working almost all the time and he was locked up in the apartment,
so he'd get crazy and start wrecking things. One day I came home and the
entire apartment was up to the ceiling in feathers; I'm not kidding, when I
opened the door all I saw was white. He had also eaten all my books,
including a hand-typed manuscript of my grandfather's. So eventually I took
him to the ASPCA, whose job (I thought) was to find him a new home.
Anyway, in some of these photos you can see the secretary that I had until I
moved to the Bronx; Peter Clapp gave it to me when he went underground.
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Judy and me 1968
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Peter Marsh 1968
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Expo 67 Montreal (1968)
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These are from a trip we in 1968 took to Vermont and Expo 67 in Montreal
(the Expo supposedly ended in September 1967 but it was still there). Peter
and Jude were already living in Vermont in a little house they rented in
Burlington for short while, which is where the first two photos were taken.
103rd Street...
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308 West 103rd Street
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View from 103rd St.
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Mommy and I sublet a studio apartment of a friend of hers at 308 W 103rd
Street, 9th floor, for a few months in 1969 and when her friend wanted the
apartment back, the one next to it was vacant so we rented that; it was a
fairly modern building; we had a separate but tiny kitchen, and one bedroom.
There was an Orthodox synagogue on the first floor. We looked out over its
back yard, where they sounded the ram's horn, conducted various ceremonies,
and pitched their Succot tent in the Fall. We stayed there for about 7
years, during which time I was working and going to school full time,
earning my BS and MS, until 1976, when she was pregnant and we needed an
apartment with more bedrooms.
118th Street...
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419 West 118th Street
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In 1974 Mommy and I decided to get married and have children. We were
married at the end of 1974 in Mama Lori's house in Queens. All the family
was there, plus Peter and Jude and some of my engineering school friends.
Mommy has the wedding album but I looked really stupid in the 70s with big
stupid hair and beard and 1970s suit.
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Long dark hallway
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In 1976 we rented the place at 419 W 118th, apartment 51 on the fifth floor,
a 7-room apartment that had a pretty nice living room and study but the rest
was a long, long, long hall with little tiny rooms off it that looked out on
a dark airshaft: the kitchen, bedrooms, and 1930s-era bath, and there were
so many cracks and crevices it was impossible to keep the cockroaches and
mice out. The original rent was $350 and gradually rose to about $850
by the time you guys vacated in 1994.
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419 West 118th Street
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At 118th Street May 1980
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The first baby miscarried at 5 months, but the next two came out OK: Peter
October 7, 1977, and Amy on May 26, 1980. We all lived there until 1988 when
Mommy and I split up, and you guys and Mommie stayed there until 1994. By
that time Columbia had found out I wasn't living there any more (somebody
ratted us out) and had issued an eviction notice and we had to go to housing
court, but Mommy and Rick found the house in Riverdale just in time.
The 118th Street years are documented in
the photo CD I made in 2001. Our next-door
neighbors were the Garcías, Marshall (Mariscal?) and his wife whose name I
forget, and their grandson Max (Peter's good friend) and Max's mother, whose
name I also forget. Peter told me Max died in 2017 of one of several
conditions he was born with.
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Hungarian Pastry Shop 1978
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Ludi and Peter 1980
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This is where you guys both spent your first years: Peter 17 of them and Amy
14. Your baby sitter was Lourdes (Ludi) Charles, and your "nanny" was Holly
Papas (in a neighborhood of white children cared for by black nannies, you
guys were the notable reverse exception). You had all your birthday parties
there except for the time we had one of Peter's at a bowling alley on
Broadway and 230-something in the Bronx very close to where he would live
one day. You played at St John the Divine ("Peacock Park"), the Columbia
campus, Riverside Park, and Morningside Drive. We normally cooked meals at
home but also ate out pretty much, often at Mama's Place (the Greek diner on
the corner), sometimes at V&T on 111th and Amsterdam, Moon Palace on
Broadway at 112th. The Hungarian Pastry Shop was right across Amsterdam
Avenue from Peacock Park and we always stopped in there for treats; it's
still there as of 2020. Around the corner was Green Tree, an old-fashioned
Hungarian restaurant, long gone.
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Going to school
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Barnard Toddler Center
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Both of you started your schooling at Barnard Toddler Center on 120th
Street, even before you turned 2. Then Peter went to Tompkins Hall Nursery
School on Claremont Avenue where Lita Eskin worked. Amy went to Greenhouse
School on 116th Street, then Broadway Presbyterian preschool on 113th. Then
you both went to PS87 on 78th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus for
elementary school. I was pretty strong on sending you guys to public
school, but Mommy would have sent you to private schools if she could have
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Earl Carroll
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(she applied to one on Fifth Avenue for Peter, Manhattan Country Day School,
but luckily wasn't accepted). I would have wanted you guys to go to PS36 on
Amsterdam and 122nd Street; it was the neighborhood school but Mommy wanted
something more downtown. PS87 had a famous janitor, Earl Carroll, who was
lead singer of the Cadillacs who had a huge hit in 1955, "They often call me
Speedoo but my real name is Mister Earl". After that he was in the Coasters
for 20 years. He died in 2012 at 75. Also Chaka Khan was a school mom, we
saw her all the time (did you know she had been a Black Panther?)
Then you both went to IS44 on 77th Street (which was one of the early
schools that was broken up into mini-schools, like the Science School, the
Computer School, and which was unceremoniously shut down by mayor Bloomberg
in 2009), also between Amsterdam and Columbus. Famous parents or
grandparents there included Peter Boyle (he was the monster in Young
Frankenstein) and Fyvush Finkel from Picket Fences.
Day camp: Ramapo, 1980s. Sleepaway camp: ECCC, Episcopal Camp and
Conference Center, Old Saybrook CT, formerly Camp Incarnation, because
Mommie had started hanging out at St John the Divine some time after 1988
(actually I think it was after Granpa died and she got religion). In 1993
at ECCC Peter snapped his ACLs in one knee while Mommy was away on a trip
and unreachable. I rented a car and drove there (like 100 miles) the next
day to pick up him up, arranged for surgery, and kept him in my 112th Street
apartment, took him to hospital, visited him each day while he was there,
brought him back to my apartment on 112th Street, and even bought an air
conditioner so he wouldn't suffer in the heat. This was over a week or two,
it was super traumatic. The first doctor who saw him (at camp) told him
he'd lose the leg. In the end, he was in a leg brace and in rehab for six
months and recovered OK, but with a huge scar.
Vermont...
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Peter and Jude's house
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Peter Marsh and Judy Bryant have been my friends since 1966, just off the
boat from the Army in Germany. They've been together since high school and
have a daughter Hannah. Peter is a fanatical Vermonter, with good reason:
it's a beautiful state and the people are almost universally good-natured,
open, kind, and friendly. He grew up in Arlington (near Bennington), where
Norman Rockwell lived and so the Marsh family appears in some of Rockwell's
paintings and Saturday Evening Post covers. As noted earlier, Peter left
Columbia and NYC because of the Vietnam war and the draft and returned to
Vermont to do his alternative CO service in Burlington. Not long after,
Jude joined him there and after a few years they bought a fairy-tale log
house in the woods in a high valley over Starksboro (pop. about 1000). We
went to stay with them every summer for 30-some years, it was a big part of
our lives. The visits diminished after Mommy and I broke up in 1988 because
I didn't have a car, although a few times I rented one so we could go. In
recent years Amy went there with a former boyfriend and Peter went with
Sophia before they split up in 2019. And I went there with Pam in September
2019; they had sold their fairy-table cabin and moved to a house in Bristol
right near Cubbers.
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Peter and Jude's house
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Creek scene
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Bridge over creek
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Peter and hammock
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Outhouse
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Vegetable garden
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Big Rock
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Clifford's Pond
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Clifford's Pond
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At Jude's studio
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Country fair
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Cubber's in Bristol
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For the record Peter has been a carpenter (and I think also a woodworking
instructor at the Shelburne Craft School), a house builder (his own business
for many years), a restoration carpenter at the Shelburne Museum, and most
recently a house inspector. And Jude has a been a potter all this time, and
also a pottery teacher at the Craft Center.
Kinapic...
Kinapic is the name of a little colony of "housekeeping cottages" on lake
Kezar, about 5 miles outside of Lovell, Maine, owned by the family of my
ex-sister-in-law Christine's husband Henry. Starting when Peter 8 months old
in 1978, we went there every summer until 1988 (and Mommy continued to take you
guys there after that, right?). Lovell is a tiny town whose only store (an
old wooden house) is a combination diner, convenience store, and gas
station. Steven King lives there, but I don't think we ever saw him. At
first we stayed for a week, but it was so nice that the next year we stayed
two weeks, and after that three weeks. THEN we'd drive across New Hampshire
to Vermont and stay with Peter and Jude another week. Yes, it's hard to
believe but I had FOUR WEEKS of vacation in my job (and of course as a
teacher, Mommy had the whole summer off).
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Judy and Peter at Kinapic 1977
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Uncle Henry
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View of Lake
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View of Lake
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Dock, boats, diving platform
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The voyage to Blueberry Island
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Kinapic scene
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Granpa, Christine, Granma at Kinapic
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Kinapic
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Amy
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Peter jumping off the dock
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Kinapic
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Goodnight Moon
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112th Street...
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605 West 112th Street
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No furniture yet - 1988
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Mommy and I were together for 20 years (1968-1988) and were also married for
20 years (1974-1994). I moved to 605 West 112th Street in 1988 (not a
Columbia apt) and stayed there until 2012, 24 years, the longest time I ever
lived anywhere. At first you guys came over every weekend, and I would come
back to 118th Street every morning to get you off to school. Eventually you
got older… And summer camp… And college… and
Brazil… and South Africa.... Amy also went to Spain and to Italy on
class trips in middle or high school. (You guys can write your own bios!)
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Ivonne García about 2000
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Peter's 12th birthday at 112th Street
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But we had a lot of fun in those years… You guys would come over for
the weekend and we'd always go to a movie, usually at Leows 84th, and then
eat in a restaurant, usually Broadway Cottage II on 94th Street. Sometimes
we'd go the West Village or the East Village or the Feast of San Gennaro or
Chinatown or other places reachable by subway. Once (twice actually) Amy
and I went to Staten Island on the ferry. After about 10 years, Ivonne
García became part of the family, so there would always be 4 of us at the
weekend gatherings. I used to cook a lot... super salads, eggplant
parmagian, lasgana, various chicken-cutlet extravaganzas, plus every Friday
night we always had a large pizza with spinach and mushrooms from Pizza
Town, which was right around the corner.
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Me at the foot of 112th Street
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View from 112th Street
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On Saturdaysnbsp;we'd always make sure to be home in time for Hercules
and Xena, and then Peter would stay up till all hours watching Headbangers
Ball, then we'd wake up early to watch the Smurfs, while eating our
traditional breakfast of grits, toasted bagels, and soy sausages. The three
of us (or sometimes just Amy and me or just Peter and me) went on some good
trips too… Misquamicut, Cape Cod, Howard and Lita's and Saratoga
Springs (the stinky water), Vermont, a little diner in rural Canada, a zoo
somewhere in Quebec with drooling giraffes… I remember on one trip we
had big black fuzzy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror of the rental
car. If I did that now I'd be arrested.
The Bronx...
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277 East 207th Street
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Oval Park seen from my window
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The purpose of living at 112th Street was so I could walk to work but once I
lost my job, there was no reason to stay there. The rent in my 112th Street
place was $1100 in 1988. It stayed in the low-to-mid 1000s for about 20
years but then a new management company took over and was raising it 20%
every year; it was $2400 in 2011 and it was about to go up again. I was
sick of the increasingly gentrified neighborhood and the whole borough of
Manhattan so I decided to look for an apartment in the Bronx. At first I
wanted to live on Sedgwick Avenue along the reservoir in Kingsbridge and I
looked at some places that were pretty nice, but it was not near any stores
or transportation, and walking there from Broadway was like climbing a
mountain. So I "settled" for the place on 207th Street overlooking Oval
Park. Turns out to be the best place in NY I ever lived.
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Oval Park view on a winter night
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Once I moved I realized that I was never comfortable among Columbia people
(except janitors, AA's etc, like Freddie Cocco and Terry
Thompson)... privileged, entitled, arrogant, competetive, and increasingly
clueless. Now I'm back among working people, like my whole life up until I
left the Army, and it feels right. I love it here. It's the most diverse
place I ever saw except maybe Woodside, Queens. Everybody is so nice, the
total opposite of Manhattan. Not just nice to me, but also nice to each
other… Dominicans, Black Americans, West Indians, Bangladeshis,
Puerto Ricans, West Africans, Mexicans, Albanians, Yemenis… And a few
very old Italian, Irish, and Jewish holdovers from decades past. No
arrogant yuppies, no masters of the universe, everybody working hard to get
by, mostly families with children, but they're not angry and hateful like
the people who voted for Trump, because unlike them, these people have
always been on the bottom. When they come home from work, they forget about
the job and live their lives. Nobody is an outsider or foreigner here
because everybody is.
This is the first place I've lived since high school that is like Frankfurt,
where there is a common gathering place — Oval Park — where all
the kids go after school and all the families take their children and
everybody walks their dogs.
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Amy Peter and Sophia
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Sophia
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Peter and Sophia at City Island
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Then in 2017 you guys moved here too... All three of us living in the
same building!
(until COVID, when Amy lost her job and had to move back in with Mommy).
Aleida
En la
República Dominicana...
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Aleida en el campo
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Con familia en Sabana Cruz 2004
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Aleida en Santiago
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Casa en el campo
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Aleida and I have known each other since 1998 when she came to work as a
cashier at University Food Market (formerly Ta-Kome), across Broadway from
Columbia University and right on the corner from my work. We became friends
when the market was sold and she was going to lose her job. She didn't
speak much English and I didn't speak much Spanish; over time we both
learned. She grew up in a tiny village in the Dominican Republic near
Montecristi on the north coast near Haiti, 7th of 8 children in a family of
subsistence farmers. They lived in a "rancho" (light blue house above
right) with no electricity, no running water, no sewage, no paper, no
pencils, no nothing.
En
Nueba Yol...
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When the food market changed hands, she followed her two older sisters into
Mary Kay and became a beauty consultant. I helped her by making a website,
which was pretty successful. But after three years it became obvious that
it was impossible to make enough money to live and support her children (and
her parents) zooming around all over creation in her free Mary Kay car; she
never saw her family and she was always falling behind. So, since she was
already involved in the "beauty industry" I converted the website into a
bilingual Amazon Associate site where Hispanic and Black women could find
information and advice and order beauty and hair products. This made sense
because Dominicans are famous for their hair-straightening technique that
uses no chemicals or direct heat, and therefore doesn't destroy the hair.
We did quite well for about five years but our audience (mainly poor people)
just kept getting poorer and poorer and orders went down and down, so about
2010 she went to work at a livery taxi company in Long Island and since then
I saw her less and less and finally, never. She works seven days a week,
twelve hours a day and that's all she does as far as I know. So she kind of
drifted away into a life of toil. We still touch base occasionally; last I
heard the taxi company closed and now she's a gig worker. The pictures
above are ones that I took for her website, which closed in April 2019.
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Christmas 2008
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Dominican breakfast
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Ear operation
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The Chistmas photo is by me of her big extended family; her dad and
mom are the second row. Her father died January 5, 2021, age 97.
Dominican breakfast:
Mangú (mashed boiled plátano), vinegared onions, yuca, fried eggs,
salami, casabe, and queso frito (fried cheese). The ear operation
photo is of me after surgery to repair a puncture, taken by Aleida,
who drove me to the hospital and home again in 2017.