our last block, in 1966, the one that ran to our Hudson River dock, I was in a completely different Bank Street, many social classes removed from the wealthy brownstones at the other end. This block reflected the sad changes that were going on throughout New York City in the mid- to late 1960s. Middle-class families were fleeing to the suburbs. We’d lost the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Brooklyn Navy Yard shut down, taking with it thousands of jobs. A garbage workers’ strike left rotting bags, thrashing with rats, on the streets for nine days. Prostitutes and strip joints took over Times Square. The city’s crime rate soared.
The traditional longshoreman jobs of the Hudson River piers, once crowded with passenger and cargo ships, were drying up as airplanes took over the transport industry. Those jobs had been the livelihood of many Bank Street families for generations. A hulking cluster of dark, deserted buildings, which had been a famous Bell Telephone research laboratory for a hundred years until it closed in 1966, loomed over one side of our last block. Decayed tenements and boarded-up shops leaned like rotted teeth on the other. One grocery store was all that was left of the small shops that had once flourished by the river. Furtive, hard-faced men lounged against peeling billboards advertising 7 Up and Pall Malls. Heroin addicts swayed slowly in doorways, their limbs twitching.
An abandoned elevated railroad track ran through the Bell Lab building, continuing south on rusty iron pillars along Washington Street. A second derelict elevated track darkened the air along West Street, letting small pockets of dirty dusty sunlight filter down to the sidewalk. Packs of shrill hookers—male, female, and I wasn’t sure—swarmed passersby and cars, leading johns to unlocked trucks or the pier. Trolley tracks ran next to the river, but by then there hadn’t been any trolleys for decades. Except for the grocery store, the only business still open down there then was a prison. Dad, who spent hours looking for parking spots near our apartment, wouldn’t even slow down on that block, let alone park there.
We still had a pier, although it wasn’t a smart place to play. Even if I didn’t fall through the broken planks or drive a rusty nail through my foot, being there during the week, at any time of day or night, was usually asking for a mugging in the 1960s and ’70s. I kicked a junkie who tried to pull my bike from underneath me, but had no answer when one of the watching hookers said to me, “Well, what the hell do you think this is? Central Park? Go play somewhere else.” She was right.
By fourteen I’d learned how to handle blocks like this one. I’d walk down the middle of the cobblestones, stepping aside for passing cars, so shifty guys couldn’t grab me and drag me into an empty hallway. A nodding heroin junkie was a harmless obstacle to avoid. Roaches ran down the grocery store’s walls. I bought my Hostess cupcakes elsewhere.
I needed those new street smarts. My girlfriends and I were hitting puberty, and our young breasts and hips suddenly made us walking targets. Men shouted from cars, licking their lips, or blocked us on the sidewalk. One jazz musician mother, realizing that we’d caught on to her recipe, now boiled chamomile instead of marijuana to make tummy tea for our new ailment, menstrual cramps.
The rotting Bank Street pier changed completely on summer weekends in the late 1960s and ’70s. It became a noisy, laughing party, packed with gay men reclining on beach towels, rubbing baby oil on their sculpted bodies. My girlfriends and I quickly learned that the men were safe to be around and far more fun to boot. We joined them, pulling down the shoulder straps of our bikinis and gossiping, playing our transistor radios in peace.
• • •
Bank Street had its share of grumps and jerks, but many others were wonderful. Sabine, the artist who lived in 5C of our building, collected money and furniture for our teenaged black super and his pregnant wife, recent arrivals from rural Mississippi, who were too poor to furnish their basement apartment or pay for prenatal care.
When they moved to a bigger building, we got feisty little Ramiro, a retired merchant marine who could fix any leaky pipe or worn lock and kept the halls hospital clean. As my grandmother in apartment 1A started weakening with what eventually turned out to be brain cancer, Ramiro looked in on her several times a day. When I stayed with Grandma, I did homework with cotton in my ears as the primal therapy group next door in 65 Bank screamed themselves to release. Blocked chakras sometimes kept them howling long after New York’s 10 p.m. quiet curfew. Ramiro, obscenely fluent in several languages, reserved some of his best cursing for them.
Charles Kuralt traveled the country doing his On the Road TV shows, which profiled Americans from all walks of life with respect and dignity. Marion “Auntie Mame” Tanner broke the locks on her brownstone doors so that anyone who needed shelter could walk in at any time. Lawyer/politician Bella Abzug of 37 Bank Street spent a night hiding from the Ku Klux Klan in a Mississippi bus stop bathroom to plead with the state’s governor to spare the life of a black inmate on death row.
In college, I thought about the many artists and social idealists on my street who rejected day jobs. If they’d come from money, or married a worker bee, like Roger, the artist whose wife was a secretary, they got to pursue their passions full time. If not, they scraped by, waiting tables or driving cabs and their older years often brought hard choices between buying food and paying the rent. Their plight was what made me grit my teeth, bypass the writing and philosophy departments I longed to join, and endure boring education courses until I got teaching degrees and grimly took a job in a New York City public school.
I didn’t have the self-confidence to chase my artistic dreams like they did. Plodding on, I ignored my doubts and married my high-school sweetheart at a ridiculously immature twenty-four years old because it seemed inevitable. My parents were moving out, and we took their 2B apartment. As teenagers we’d been crazy stupid in love, but we’d already grown apart. Bank Street life together became a jail for some crime we’d unknowingly committed.
When we divorced two years later, I used the teaching degrees and fled, taking a job in a Thai university in the 1980s while a musician friend sublet the apartment. Although I was never going to fall in love again, I eventually did, this time with a Thai-born Dane, a Thai TV celebrity. I spent six magical years as a TV producer expatriate with a teak house, mango trees in the lush garden, and live-in servants. I thought I was done with Bank Street, but the magic died when his hidden alcoholism resurfaced and wrecked our lives. I flew home, crying, to divorce a second time and be a New Yorker again. Teaching again was the fast solution and it worked. I had friends, traveled for months every summer, and even touched some kids’ lives. I got an administrative degree. Life on Bank Street was OK.
Still later, on 9/11, when I’d been at work in a small downtown school with devastatingly clear views of the World Trade Center towers, Bank Street became both refuge and mental ward. I fought to regain my sanity, screaming myself awake over and over as the victims I’d seen clawed at my windows, pleading for rescue. Bank Streeters and Village friends saved me with meals, walks to doctors, and soothing words when I panicked, sure every time I heard a siren wail that another attack was underway.
For many years after that I shared the apartment with my late husband Richard, in a wholly unexpected later-life marriage. We met when a mutual friend asked me to help Richard, who had been practicing medicine in Africa, find a New York apartment. We kayaked and grew vegetables at our weekend place and trekked through foreign countries. Children, we agreed, might have been wonderful, but we weren’t together when that might have happened and that’s OK.
And I still have Bank Street, past, present, and future.
2
Opera on Bank Street
A squib in The Villager for October 1955 bore the headline “Opera Baby Arrives.” We were opera people. Like a child of the circus or a farm, I couldn’t imagine any other life. New York has had live theater since the 1700s, when a downtown theater entertained General George Washington
