Growing Up Bank Street. Donna Florio
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nothing of it. Katherine Anthony, the elderly biographer at 23 Bank who introduced me to books like Johnny Tremain, had openly lived here with her female partner since 1912. They’d both had high-profile careers and raised their adopted children a century before gay marriage was legalized. The mixed-race couple in apartment 1C, whose son was eight when I was born, were just more 63 Bank grownups, frowning as I chained my bike to the hallway radiator. I didn’t know that they might well have been jailed or even killed had they lived elsewhere.
• • •
Bank Street is a six-block-long strip south of West Fourteenth Street that starts at Greenwich Avenue and ends at the Hudson River. In the 1950s and ’60s, as I looked left to Greenwich Avenue, I saw a gloomy side wall of the Loew’s Sheridan movie house, built in the 1920s, its gilded rococo splendors hidden inside. To the right I saw nineteenth-century tenements like my own building, a teacher-training school, a spice warehouse fragrant with aromas, a General Electric factory, and, further down, abandoned elevated railroad tracks crossing high above the street, past a hulking old science laboratory. The street ended at our rotting Hudson River pier.
In those years, as I walked and played from one end of Bank Street to the other, I passed through every social, cultural, and economic layer of American life. Bank Street put its wealthy best foot forward on the first block off Greenwich Avenue. This is where Harvey, a nuclear physicist, and his wife, Yeffe, an artist, lived at 11 Bank Street, in a brownstone with a front garden where Yeffe and I planted bulbs. Their neighbor at number 15 was my friend Jack, scion of a prominent German Jewish family. As I passed other townhouses on that block I saw crystal chandeliers and gleaming silver candlesticks through the windows.
One brownstone owner was Miss Clark, heiress to the Coats & Clark sewing thread fortune. Still others were actors like Alan Arkin and Theodore Bikel. Bikel, who painted his building blue in honor of the state of Israel, founded in 1948, nodded hello in his dressing gown as he collected his New York Times from the front steps. TV personality Charles Kuralt, of 34 Bank Street, was on CBS every week with his show On the Road with Charles Kuralt. He smiled at me as he passed, looking more like a junior-high-school gym teacher than a celebrated broadcaster.
Around the corner from Bank Street, on Greenwich Avenue, stood a row of small shops, including Heller’s Liquors, which had an imposing “Liquor Store” neon sign with a clock above the door. Mr. Heller was particularly proud of that sign because his father had scraped up the money to have it made back in the 1930s. Neatly stacked crates of wine covered the splintered wooden floor in one aisle, with liqueurs in another and hard liquor in a third. The counter was layered with customers’ postcards and family photos, including ours.
Next to Heller’s was the Casa Di Pre, a small restaurant with candles in Chianti bottles and soft peach walls. When the evening rush died down, the owner joined us for espresso, bringing sesame cookies, to chat about theater and opera. Next to Casa Di Pre, Saul and Min Feldman kept their five-and-dime notions store as they’d bought it from the 1920s owner. Worn wooden bins brimming with envelopes, packets of glitter, straws, bathing caps, shoe polish, sewing kits, and pink rubber Spaldeens filled the middle of the shop. If my parents and I didn’t find what we were looking for, Saul or Min rummaged through the drawers below the bins. We seldom left empty-handed.
On one corner of Bank and Greenwich Avenue stood a grocery store with green-and-white-striped awnings and signs advertising freshly butchered meat. I waited outside for my parents, looking anywhere but at the poor skinned lambs hanging on metal hooks in the window. The smell of blood and sawdust inside upset me too. On another corner stood an old pharmacy with marble counters and globes of colored liquids in ornate cast-iron fixtures hanging in the windows. The elderly counterman always put two maraschino cherries on my ice cream, winking at me as he did.
The Waverly Inn, at the corner of Bank and Waverly Place, now a glossy haunt for celebrities, was an inexpensive, casual place back then, with wooden benches, Dutch tiles framing small brick fireplaces, and an open-air garden behind a low stone wall. On summer evenings, my friends and I sometimes tiptoed down the sidewalk with water balloons, counted to three, and threw them into the garden, diving behind parked cars before the cooks ran, swearing, from the kitchen.
Down the street, on the corner of Bank and West Fourth Street, was the Shanvilla Market Grocer. In the early morning, Pat Mulligan, the white-haired Irish owner, put out baskets of lettuce, peppers, apples, and bananas. Chipped freezers with wheezing motors were stocked with eggs, milk, and cheese. Cans and boxes stacked the old wooden shelves, which Pat reached using a pole with a metal claw.
Next to Shanvilla was the venerable Marseilles French Bakery. Wicker baskets lined with waxed paper sat on shelves behind the old glass counters, holding fragrant baguettes, rolls, and thick loaves dotted with salt or sesame seeds, fresh from the ovens in the back. Marie, a thin Frenchwoman with no front teeth who lived down by the river, was usually behind the counter.
Mr. and Mrs. Lee operated their Lee Hand Laundry around the corner, next to a shoe repair shop and Mr. Helping Exterminator. I had a hard time understanding the Lees’ broken English, but they were smiling and polite behind their worn Formica counter. Paint peeled from the cracked plaster walls, bare except for photographs of their kids and curling Chinese good-luck signs and calendars. Cast-iron rods filled with shirts and pants on wire hangers stretched along the ceiling. The place smelled like steam and fresh fabric. The dented laundry scale squeaked. One day a kid wrote “No tickee, no shirtee” on a piece of paper and handed it to Mr. Lee, grinning and stretching her eyes to slants. When my father yelled at her, she stuck out her tongue at him and ran off.
• • •
My block, between West Fourth and Bleecker Streets, had a few elegant brownstones, but it had tenements and factories too, making it more of a mix than the block between West Fourth Street and Greenwich Avenue. The stoop at 51 Bank Street, a grayish brick walk-up apartment building on the corner of West Fourth Street, was an informal old men’s club. Club regulars included Tom, an elderly Italian who drove a small, battered gray truck with the words “Tom’s Ice” written on the sides in big black letters. I sometimes saw Tom, wearing cracked leather gloves, pull out blocks of ice with metal tongs and carry them into Shanvilla’s basement or the fish store around the corner. We had an electric refrigerator and so did everyone else I knew. I’d never seen an icebox, the wooden kind that everyone, my parents told me, used when they were kids. Icemen like Tom were becoming things of the past, they said, and I worried that Tom would soon be out of a job.
Tom and other grizzled Bank Street men leaned against number 51’s concrete stoop, passing the time. Regulars included Joe, a retired dockworker, and Mr. Hanks, who had been a fireman. They nodded to their neighbor, Tish, the nightclub performer, but rolled their eyes behind his back as he walked away. The commercial space on that corner was a tie-dyed clothing store in the 1960s and later a vegetarian restaurant. The old men disapproved of both businesses. Those dirty hippies do drugs, they fumed to my father. The old men didn’t want us bothering them, so they’d shoo us down to play spots like in front of the wallpaper factory at 59 Bank.
Since most Village kids under ten weren’t allowed off their block, after-school play groups were arbitrarily defined by address. We got excited when coal trucks pulled up to deliver their wares or when horse-mounted police officers rode by from the stable a few blocks away. We’d pet the horses, and sometimes I’d ask if I could sit on one, but the policeman always said no.
We were careful in front of 60 Bank Street because little Josh lived there. Although Josh was wasting away from an illness that eventually killed him, he usually wanted to join us. His parents looked sad when they had to say no, which was most of the time. We tried to make it up to Josh, making him the referee if he was watching when we played tag or statues. He’d squeak “You’re out!” in his tinny voice, perched in his window, pointing to the jail garden below his window.
On his rare good days Josh was allowed out for a little while, his eyes bright with excitement. He was bald and as tiny-boned as a bird. I let him grip my arm, carefully swinging him in circles while his parents smiled anxiously, trying not to hover. Rudy let Josh pummel him to the ground with his little fists. Ginny sat him on her bike and delicately wheeled him to the corner and back.