Peaceful Coexistence

Trying to explain to one of my daughters what the streets of New York were like in the thirties and forties is difficult at the best of times although I am a writer and long standing reporter of the passing scene. She tries to raise two energetic boys in Brooklyn paying a monthly rent that was considered a wonderful year’s pay fifty years ago.

We ran the streets, specifically Twentieth Street in Chelsea, where there was one derelict car rusting away between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. We played stick ball, and got very good, I could catch just about everything. We played stoop ball, box ball, street hockey, “kick the can,” and rode bicycles all over lower Manhattan in very light traffic, and Central Park was a nickel away on the subway. The streets were our hanging out place, our playground and above all, our block. Other kids just weren’t welcome and if they came in a group, there could be fights. curses, fists, potatoes thrown, that was usually about it. It sounds almost innocent by today’s pornographic standards.

Then came the war to make us, and democracy, safe forever more. That was about half a dozen wars ago. Anyhow adult men were suddenly gone. My fifty something father joined the Merchant Marines and my mother’s brother was drafted. All of us underage secretly prayed that it wouldn’t pass us by, this test of manhood, this ultimate adventure. Bobby Anderson and I got quietly pissed on a quart of beer the night Japan surrendered.

The neighborhood was changing. There were more cars on the streets, some few local guys started going to college on the G.I. Bill which probably was the most important influence on this emerging giant of a nation, an educated middle class. For most of us depression era kids it was school, thinking about sex, smoking, drinking beer and hanging on the verge of trouble. Things were changing and none more so that Twentieth Street between Eight and Ninth Avenues. Puerto Ricans started taking over the cheapest rooming houses and apartments. They hung out by themselves, spoke “spic” and were usually ignored by the predominately Irish kids in the neighborhood.

We were growing up and ranging further field in our adventures. Some of the bolder, started making forays into Little Italy, making inroads with some of the lovelies to the chagrin and finally anger of the young Italian “bloods.” One of us got too close and intimate with one of their girls and soon there were sporadic raids into Chelsea. They were tough young guys, there were too many of them and we were taking poundings which became progressively more violent. Then the unwelcome visitors made a mistake, they beat the hell out of one of the Puerto Rican guys who didn’t even speak English.

These were young men from the barrios of San Juan and Ponce and they were explosive in their response. More than once the Tenth Precinct was emptied out breaking up fights everywhere. As a kid in New York City in those days you not only knew the streets, you knew the cellars and the roofs. The later became escape routes when it hit the fan and I can vividly remember climbing down a fire escape into our $20 a month cold water apartment and crouching low as the fighting moved up and down the street. Some of the combatants were in their twenties and gunfire was heard but the Puerto Rican guys slugged it out and eventually the intruders withdrew. We had allies who weren’t afraid of fighting, who had defended their turf in Puerto Rico and they were not about to be dispossessed because other young guys were showing their muscle. Nothing was ever said about this strange turn of events but the remarks about the “P.R.’s” were muted. Eventually we went to high school, another war came along, many of us enlisted, got our own meager GI Bill, and we moved on.

Now the Puerto Ricans are largely gone from Chelsea which has a rather affluent gay population and has been gentrified to the wall. But is was ours for those tender, forming years before the great war. Twentieth Street left us with an impression which we find hard to explain to those who profess to live in “neighborhoods,” but ours was the real thing.

Sometimes when in New York I drive through the old neighborhood but know better than to stop.

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