Bronx Musings....

 For the pasts quarter of an hour or so, I have been using the google map site to look at different streets in different neighborhoods in the Bronx. I was born and raised in the,  Bronx, though I did not google my street (a three block street called Thwaites Place in the Pelham Parkway area) I checked out streets in three different areas: near Yankee Stadium; eastern Bronx, a little south of the Bronx Zoo, and the southern side of Pelham Parkway, not far from where I was raised, but not that relative to my life, either. When I look at those pictures I feel an incredible wave of....what? Passion, nostalgia, longing---what do I want to know?  These areas were all white when I was growing up---they changed, at different times, to mostly black and hispanic neighborhoods. In the spring of 1967, I read about an elderly white Jewish man who was killed when he was mugged, near his apartment,  which was very close to the stadium. I remember being shocked! I could not believe that someone living in that neighborhood---a neighborhood that when I was growing up was totally safe---and 95 percent white and Jewish---could be assaulted and lose his life. I was 24  at that time, and like many of my generation, had moved from my parents' apartment to Manhattan, two years earlier.

All of us--baby boomers or close to that had left those Bronx neighborhoods, the neighborhoods where we were raised,  never to return, leaving the inexpensive apartments to the elderly who had lived their all there life, and now had no means to move away. By the early seventies even they were mostly gone---and those who stayed turned their apartment houses into fortresses against intruders.  Those that could move were able to find apartments in the third neighborhod that i mentioned above---the one just south of Pelham Parkway--north of the Bronx Zoo which had remained stable as the other two neighborhoods changed. In the late nineties, early 00's, I had several students whom I tutored in that area---on the commercial streets there were still about three or four inexpensive restaurants with the counter in front and the tables behind--sometimes after a lesson I would have coffee or a tuna sandwich in these places before taking the subway back to the upper west side. By that time the neighborhood had become mostly middle class black and hispanic--the only white people I observed were elderly---but there were many of them. I would see them, sometimes alone or sometimes in groups,  sitting at the tables in these coffee shops; they seemed like visitors from another world---people left behind while the life moved forward. How long ago had they moved to this neighborhood---thirty, forty years before, when the children like myself were growing up? Were they teahers, social workers, secrataries--who could say? I never spoke to them, but wondered about their stories--to me they seemed like the last survivors of a very different era.

Time moves so quickly, it is probably ten or eleven years since I visited any part of the Bronx--what must that Pelham Parkway neighborhood be like now?  Before the pandemic and the illness, I prided myself on being a city traveler---in my leisure time I would leave the upper west side as much as I could, but almost all my trips were to Brooklyn, or the lower east side--where the theater community---a community where I was accepted and liked--lived and worked. A few trips to the Bronx on some abortive attempts to see a Yankee game at the Stadium were the only time I remember going to that area, once I wandered around the 138th street south Bronx neighborhood and stopped into one of the bars there, but that was it. When this is over, will I be able to make a trip back to the Bronx and look at what is going on there in the different neighborhoods. Who knows?

Meanwhile I google the different streets and try to put together what my feelings about these areas.  So much else is happening in the world that is important--why get involved with this nostalgia? But these neighborhoods represent my past, my generation's past, and my memories from my childhood are so strong, Where do we go from here...what is my next move...?