Martin Lessner
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The movie Maestro is all about composer Leonard Bernstein. Lenny wrote the music to the 1944 musical On the Town, including the song “New York, New York” with that famous line: “New York, New York, a helluva town. The Bronx is up but The Battery’s down.”
Over the late December break, alternating between my foldable bike and a re-dockable Citi Bike, I lived out the lyrics to that Lenny B. song. One day it was biking to the pickleball courts on 30th St. for some paddle play with strangers before continuing downtown to an old-fashioned barber in the Battery, and ending with a return pedal up 6th Avenue from the Lower East Side to Central Park. Another day—living the lyrics—was cycling to Harlem to visit relatives, and another day was spent cycling to Washington Heights and west over the GW Bridge with Professor Eric T. along the New Jersey Palisades.
Having cycled the “down,” that left the “up” . . . The Bronx.
Milton’s epic poem, “Paradise Lost,” centers around Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. While not a perfect parallel, consider if you will the 20th century story of the Bronx—its rise, fall, and current comeback. All as told by an unreliable narrator from the saddle of a NYC Citi Bike.
The Rise:
The Grand Concourse in the Bronx, modeled on the Champs-Élysées in Paris but considerably larger in length (five miles), was constructed between 1894 and 1909 at a cost of $14 million (equivalent to $490 million today).
At 187th St. and the Grand Concourse, the Loew’s Paradise Theater opened on September 7, 1929, with the big screen showing of The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu. Constructed during the age of the grand movie theaters, the Paradise Theater had a seating capacity of over 3,500 and was second only to Radio City as the largest theater in New York.
Causally related to the opening of IRT subway stops (now the D train) starting in 1917, the opening of Yankee Stadium in 1923 on 161st St., and the opening of the Paradise Theater, the Grand Concourse was the foundation of a housing boom amongst predominantly Jewish and Italian families fleeing the crowded tenements of Manhattan. By the mid-1930s, hundreds of six-story apartment buildings, with wide-entrance courtyards bordered with grass and shrubs, lined the Grand Concourse. By 1939, the Grand Concourse was described as “the Park Avenue of middle-class Bronx residents.” According to the 1940 census, 50% of the Bronx population was Jewish.
The Fall:
And then the Bronx changed dramatically.
Numerous factors were at play and interplay. Manufacturing and other jobs left the Bronx in the 1950s and ’60s. The Cross Bronx Expressway displaced thousands of residents and many businesses. Rent control provided little incentive for landlords to maintain apartments and vacancy rates increased. Middle-class flight to the suburbs of Westchester County, Long Island, and New Jersey was fueled by a dramatic increase in crime and a dramatic decrease in the quality of the public schools. In this dystopian downward spiral, street gangs and large-scale drug dealing took over abandoned housing, as well as squatters, drug addicts, and the mentally ill. Unable to sell their buildings, landlords began to burn their buildings to collect insurance money, forcing subsidized tenants or squatters to move to other slums.
Between 1970 and 1980 alone, more than 300,000 people moved out of the South Bronx. 40% of the South Bronx, including entire city blocks of buildings, were destroyed, burned, or abandoned. According to a 1994 New York Times article, in 1980 Ronald Reagan made a campaign stop at an abandoned city block in the South Bronx and stated he had “not seen anything that looked like this since London after the Blitz.” In his 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe presented the South Bronx as a nightmare world, where even accidentally taking a wrong exit off the highway into the Bronx results in death.
By the 1970s, many of the features and fittings inside the Paradise Theater were stolen or vandalized. Even the large mechanical clock, hourly depicting St. George slaying a fire-breathing dragon, was stolen. By the late 1980s the formerly well-maintained middle-class apartments along the Grand Concourse were vacated by their longtime residents, and either abandoned or converted into federally funded low-income housing run by absentee slumlords. As of 2007, only about 2,500 Jews remained in the South Bronx (in addition to about 20,000 in Riverdale). In 1940, there were 800+ active synagogues in the South Bronx; by contrast, only one remains today. As of 2020, there were 182 commercial movie theaters in all of New York City, of which only two are in the Bronx.
The Comeback, as seen from a bicycle:
With the foregoing Bronx history in mind, Michael L. and I set forth to explore areas of the Bronx where our grandparents had lived decades ago. Correctly figuring on low Christmas Day vehicular traffic, we set off on one Brompton foldable bike and one Citi Bike from the dock at 67th and Broadway in Manhattan. We cycled up the East River, over to Randall’s Island, which currently has a temporary tent city of asylum seekers who have either been sent or made their way to New York. When we paused to inquire about the situation, the NYPD officers on the perimeter of the tents were careful to give only the official story, sort of like when checking the references of a job applicant and the only response from his former employer is a curt, “He used to work here, but now he doesn’t.”
We biked over the Triborough Bridge and then the 1st Avenue Willis Bridge into the Bronx. A sign of progress: both 138th St. and Gerard Avenue are striped for bikes, which we utilized for the ride up to Yankee Stadium at 161st St. From there we picked up the Grand Concourse and rode four miles until its end at Van Cortlandt Avenue. We passed the boarded-up Paradise Theater, and a fair number of discount shops and bodegas. No one seemed to pay us any mind, although we appeared to be the only cyclists on the Grand Concourse.
Many areas of the Bronx are cyclist-friendly: the Mosholu Parkway to the Botanical Garden, the Bronx River Park path, and the Pelham Parkway. Other areas, like Webster Avenue and East Gun Hill Road, not so much.
Eventually, we cycled the wrong way down Lydig Avenue to see the old apartment where my Grandma Sarah lived until the late 1970s. As a young boy, I had memories of Bronx visits, such as the time I used her rotary phone to call (toll-free 212 local call!) scores of exotic countries’ UN Consular offices to request pamphlets for support of some imaginary school project. My dad and I visited in the summer of 1977, and I have memories of listening to New York’s WOR (710 AM radio; first on the air in 1922, the year my dad was born) describe the July blackout/looting and August arrest of Son of Sam.
Michael L. and I waited outside the old apartment building until a teenage tenant wearing baggy pants well below his waist walked up, with a key in hand and a cellphone in ear. We followed right behind, rolling our bikes inside the vestibule. Buzz! I pushed the button on the apartment door where Grandma Sarah last lived 45 years ago. At a respectful distance, I explained to the Albanian lady cracking open the door about my grandmother once living there, and asked if I could possibly take a peek inside. Maybe it was the Christmas Day spirit, but she let us in to take a peek at the old kitchen and living room, which looked remarkably the same except for the hanging portrait of Mother Teresa.
Unlike the biblical spies Caleb and Joshua, we returned from our mission of scouting the old promised land—aka the Bronx—by lugging our bikes (no docking stations in these parts) up the steps of the elevated 2 train at the Pelham Parkway station, arriving not-too-late for a family lunch back on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. But, in sync with the biblical spies, I am here to report that the infamously perilous Bronx of recent past, while not yet the land of milk and honey, can be explored by bike without waiting and wandering other boroughs for 40 more years.
About The Author:
MARTIN “MARTY” LESSNER is an infrequent contributor to Jewish Living Delaware. He enjoys riding his bike to the Jersey Shore and taking a break at the Custard Ranch outside of Woodbine. Marty, along with his wife, Lisa, are currently involved with Jewish Federation of Delaware as Chairs of the Community Security Campaign.
