A Personal Walk Through Time

My dad was born and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 1920s. His family was low-to-middle class, mostly sitting toward the lower end of that scale. He and his two brothers shared a single bedroom from the day they were born until they each left the nest. None of them ever complained. His “home,” as a young boy was a tenement building near the Bowery.

Dad always had stories to tell and man, did he tell them well! Through him, I learned about the ice man delivering huge blocks by way of hoisting them up the side of the buildings right into the kitchen window. I learned about the corner butcher who would occasionally throw in an extra pork chop if you always paid your bill on time; people didn’t need to have cash upon every visit, he’d just run up a tab for them. Stick ball was played in the streets and you knew every single neighbor for two square blocks. In the city, that’s a lot of neighbors.

With no television or telephone in the house (his earlier years), families and neighbors did a lot of visiting in the evenings and on weekends. In his extended family, everyone could play at least one musical instrument, and they’d all gather in the living room to entertain one another with their talents. It didn’t matter if you were pitchy or scratchy, everyone sang along.

No matter what you did throughout the daytime ~ whether it was work, school, or just hanging around on the corner playing marbles or stick ball ~ at dinnertime, everyone converged in the kitchen and the family ate together. There was something almost sacred about this ritual. I have kept this up in my own household as well. I love it.

One of dad’s stories that is ever-present in my mind was the time he and his gang of friends, (gang had a whole different meaning back then), went off to the Central Park Zoo. Some of them had a few beers in them and started goofing around when they arrived - walking on the lawn where they weren’t supposed to and tossing peanuts to the monkeys (another no-no).

One of the guys scaled the waist-high fence that was put in place to keep people back from the old black bars of the Polar bear cage. The guy started to taunt the enormous bear to come closer and closer. As he stood with his back against the bars, suddenly his friends called out in horror as they saw the bear take one swipe and rip the boy’s entire arm from its socket. One swipe. A drunken (or sober) teenage boy is no match for a Polar bear. My dad said this happened within a split second. It stayed with him forever. It will stay with me forever.

Dad talked about his childhood quite a bit, and though he wasn’t an overtly emotional man, I could see a glint in his eye with each new story. He loved recalling his youth.

I chose this as my post topic today because I was surfing around earlier and located a website for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. If I knew how to insert a link inside my posts, I’d share the URL but I haven’t advanced that far yet in my blogging career. Soon.

A couple of faithful readers have stated that they would love to visit NYC one day, and I can’t think of a finer and more detailed tourist attraction to recommend than this museum. After all, thousands upon thousands of immigrants started out in this area, in these buildings, in these crowded apartments, speaking their own languages and learning to speak an all new one (English) ~ which would be passed down to their families throughout many lifetimes. Jews got along with their German neighbors, and Italians lived quite happily among the Irishmen. Local merchants trusted people and nobody tried to outdo the Joneses; basically because in those times, you just couldn’t ~ and it just didn’t matter.

I was thrilled to tears to have had an opportunity to visit this Tenement Museum a couple of years ago while showing my fiancé around the city. It turned out, for me, to be quite a spiritual trip. Not in a religious sense, but in an “affecting the very soul of me” sense. We took the tour (which is laughably inexpensive), and were guided through two different tenement buildings which were preserved just as they had been abandoned some eighty years earlier. There were personal belonging inside: shoes, tablecloths and complete table settings, beds with blankets, overcoats hanging on hooks in the wall, mugs dangling over a crude stove and walls ~ oh the old, old walls ~ featuring paint chips that allowed you to count the various coats that had been painted over.

For effect, our tour guide was dressed in period clothing and proudly spoke in her genuine Ukranian accent. As she led us up the creaking stairs to one of the sample apartments, we passed a universal bathroom in the hallway. People shared everything back then, and without shame.

When we entered the dimly lit apartment, I swear to you I fully expected my grandmother to come in from the other room. Now, I never met my grandmother on dad’s side, because she had passed away long before I was born, but this place had such a familiarity about it ~ just based on all of dad’s stories ~ that it was easily imagined. I could “smell” her cooking ~ possibly bratwurst and sauerkraut. My mother had Grandma’s old recipe tin and would often try her hardest to replicate these fine German meals.

The most touching and personal part of my visit was revealed in a simple mug which had been left on a table. It was an exact copy of the very mugs my father would sip his tea from night after night following dinner each night of my own youth. No designs, no print, no color… just this ceramic off-white mug. There it sat on a small, kitchen table ~ and it was able to sweep me directly into my father’s youth. Imagine this? Great, great stuff.

Walking through the rooms I could sense what it must have been like for him to look out the front window and have his friends calling on him for a game of stick ball before dinner. I leaned out the kitchen window visualizing the ice man … and “hearing” the cowbell on the knife-sharpening truck as it crept past the building. Crude fixtures and sconces on the walls made me wish like hell that I had been born in that era.

I, too, like to reminisce about my youth, my teens, my life. For me it’s a means to recapture some of the magic of days past. Oh there’s magic in days present as well, but not to the extent that this walk through history provided.

(I will gladly provide the web address for the museum, though a Google search on “Lower East Side Tenement Museum” will get you there if you’re interested – they even provide a virtual tour)