The Bronx

“ Ach! how I longed for a friend, a real American friend, some one to whom I could express the thoughts and feelings that choked me! In the Bronx, the uptown Ghetto, I felt myself farther away from the spirit of America than ever before. In the East Side the people had yet alive in their eyes the old, old dreams of America, the America that would release the age-old hunger to give; but in the prosperous Bronx good eating and good sleeping replaced the spiritual need for giving. The chase for dollars and diamonds deadened the dreams that had once brought them to America. ”

“ Left I for this thy shades, were none intrude,
To prison wandering thought and mar sweet solitude?
Yet I will look upon thy face again,
My own romantic Bronx, and it will be
A face more pleasant than the face of men. ”

“ The Bronx is different. The Bronx is beginning again, at a stage earlier than art, and beginning better. It is a place for those who have learnt that physical righteousness has got to be the basis of all future progress. It is a place to which the fit will be attracted, and where the fit will survive. It has rather a harsh quality. It reminded me of a phrase used by an American at the head of an enormous business. ”

“ But Brooklyn cannot be dismissed so easily. She is too big, too close, and, for all her timidity, too contented. Her people come under the head of those who ought to know better and do not try. Thus, while living in New Jersey is a matter of taste, and living in the Bronx is a matter of necessity, living in Brooklyn is a matter of habit.
And a fine, rich, ripe old habit it is, and a precious thing in a modern, shouting world that has no habits but only impulses and vices. Let me confess: I like Brooklyn, and I like to dream of going to live there some day. ”

“ The road leads up over a sort of plateau; a wide expanse of country can be viewed in all directions, but there are only more fields to see, more farm-houses and squatty barns, perhaps a village church steeple in the distance, a village that has its oldest inhabitant and a church with a church-yard. Away off to the north, across a gleaming strip of water, which the map shows to be Long Island Sound, lie the blue hills of the Bronx. They, too, are well within Greater New York. So is all that country to the southwest, far beyond the range of the eye, Jamaica, and Jamaica Bay and Coney Island. ”

“ He suffered a boorish confusion when Chalender said at last, as they returned to the house and the cocktails that Patty had waiting for them on the porch:
“I agree with you, David. The Bronx is not our river. I can honestly oppose its choice. But it’s a pretty country you have here. I love the sea and the Sound and the big Hudson, but there is a peculiar grace about these inland hills of Westchester. ”

“ However, much like the Thames embankment is the bit of East Fifty-ninth Street in a yellow fog, and however skilful you may be in making an occasional acre of the Bronx resemble the upper Seine, this big bridge of ours cannot very well remind anyone of anything abroad, because there aren't any others. ”

“ Chalender and his crowd might accuse the farmers of pettiness because they would not surrender their fields to the thirsty myriads of the city. But RoBards felt that this was only a new campaign in the eternal combat between town and country. He felt that if certain kinds of mankind had their way, every stream would be chained to a wheel, every field would contain a tenement or a shop. A snuff factory and a linen bleachery had all too long disgraced the lower stretches of the Bronx.
New York was pushing its beautiful wheatfields further and further north. ”

“ But in the offices of Clarence Sharrow & Co. he was merely a rather nice-looking civilian subordinate, whose duties were to aid clients in the selection and purchase of residences, advise them, consult with them, make appointments to show them dwelling houses, 56 vacant or still tenanted, and in every stage of repair or decrepitude.
On the wall beside his desk hung a tinted map of the metropolis. Upon a table at his elbow were piled ponderous tomes depicting the Bronx in all its beauty, and giving details of suburban sewers. ”

“ With his Broadway prejudice that the United States stopped somewhere just above the Bronx and behind the Jersey hills, he was astonished to find so much habitable country beyond these horizons and so many people in it who did not seem to depend upon New York City for their livelihood or happiness. At first he was so much preoccupied with his errand and himself in his surprising new rôle that he paid little attention to the scenes spread before his eyes. Chicago impressed him only as a dirtier and more provincial New York. ”

“ The officers of the prize hailed the Bronx coming from that direction, and that indicates that she was expected from that quarter. Our coming from that way seems to have made Captain Dinsmore confident that the Bronx was the Arran. I shall lay the course of my ship to the northeast, while you will proceed to the southwest. After you have gone fifty miles in that direction, you will make a course due east, as I shall also after I have made the same distance. Having run 190 due east twenty miles, you will run to the northeast, as I shall to the southwest. ”

“ The question is really a complicated one. Harlem's disapproval of Brooklyn is not of a piece with Harlem's disapproval of localities outside itself. Living in Brooklyn is something utterly different from living in New Jersey or the Bronx. New Jersey and the Bronx are so entirely out of the ordinary that they call for no explanation. Living there has at least the merit of originality. A great poet might choose to live in the Bronx. ”

“ The population of the city in 1910 was 4,785,000 (in 1927, 5,970,000) , of whom 2,330,000 resided within Manhattan, in the southern portion of which are located the great business centers of the metropolitan district. The Bronx, on the mainland north of Harlem River, and Queens and Brooklyn on Long Island, have undergone very rapid development and increased greatly in population since 1900. ”

“ I suppose it is some little snapping gunboat like the Bronx; but I don't object to her on that account."
"She is nothing like the Bronx, for she is more than twice as large; and you have already seen some service on her deck."
"Some steamer that has had her name changed. But I have served regularly only on board of the Bellevite and the Bronx, and it cannot be either of them," said Christy, with a puzzled expression.
283 "She is neither the one nor the other. She has had three names: the first was the Trafalgar, the second the Tallahatchie, and the third the St. Regis," continued the captain. ”

“ The Trail Gets Warmer The Bronx yielded no better success. It took several hours to exhaust its possibilities, but finally the seekers after Pomeroys were obliged to concede that if Jessica Pomeroy lived in the Bronx, she was not in the telephone book, anyway, nor was she known by her name to any of the Pomeroys they interviewed. ”

“ When you were sent to look out for a small steamer, simply to obtain information in regard to her, in Pensacola Bay, you went on your mission, and brought out the Teaser, which afterwards became the Bronx, and rendered very valuable service to the country under your command. ”

“ Because of uncertain and seasonal employment, machine operatives in the New York sewing industries frequently change from one trade to another. This had been the experience of Yeddie Bruker, a young Hungarian white-goods worker living in the Bronx.
The tenements of the Bronx appear as crowded as those of the longer-settled neighborhoods of Manhattan, the lower East Side, Harlem, Chelsea, and the cross streets off the Bowery, where so many self-supporting factory workers live. ”

“ There must have been thirty or forty people in the car when it happened.
I’d been thinking that, if nothing else, these New Yorkers were pretty neat—I mean if you don’t count the Bronx. But here were thirty or forty skeletons that nobody had even bothered to clear away.
You call that neat? Right in plain view on the ground floor, where everybody who came into the place would be sure to go—I mean if it had been on one of the upper floors, what difference would it have made? ”

“ And when you’ve nailed another crowd of treasure-hunters and got the ship ready, you’ll just ship me along as steward, with Kwaque, and Killeny Boy, and the rest of our family. You’ve adopted me, now, an’ I’m your grown-up son, an’ you’ve got to listen to me. The Bronx is the hotel for you—fine-soundin’ name, ain’t it? That’s atmosphere. Folk’ll listen half to you an’ more to your hotel. I tell you, you leaning back in a big leather chair talkin’ treasure with a two-bit cigar in your mouth an’ a twenty-cent drink beside you, why that’s like treasure. They just got to believe. ”

“ In the year 1798, Doctor Joseph Brown addressed a58 communication to the Common Council, strongly recommending the Bronx River as a source from which to obtain a supply of good water for the use of the citizens. This recommendation induced the Common Council to employ William Weston, Esquire, a Civil Engineer, to examine the subject, and he reported on the 16th of March, 1799, in favor of the practicability of introducing the water of the Bronx into the city. ”

“ There are workers here and there and everywhere in the City of the Sleepless Eye.
But before the dawn, New York becomes actively astir. Lights flash into dull radiance in the rows of side-street tenement and apartment houses all the way from Brooklyn bridge to Bronx Park. New York is beginning to dress. Other lights flash into short brilliancy before the coming of the dawn. New York is beginning to eat its breakfast. ”

“ I went to my rooms, changed, had dinner at a quiet restaurant, and then took the elevated for the long trip to the Bronx. It was after eight o'clock when I pulled the bell beside the tall gates to Elmhurst. The gardener was evidently expecting me, for he appeared almost at once and admitted me. Without waiting for him, I walked up the drive toward the house. The lights were on in the library, and I stepped up to the open door.
Then I stopped, and my heart fell. For there were two white-robed figures in the room. One was Miss Vaughan and the other was Francisco Silva. ”

“ It is the addresses, however, which attract the eyes of the genii of the "revolving-ring." In their minds these fall into four great categories: City, meaning those portions of Manhattan Island south of Seventy-second Street on the east side and Ninety-ninth Street on the west; Harlem and the Bronx, the incorporated city of New York north of those two streets; Brooklyn and New Jersey—self-explanatory; and Suburban: all the rest of the territory within the far-flung limits of Macy's own generously wide delivery service. ”

“ Riverdale, as everybody knows, is not a “dale” at all, but a bold hill on the mainland, just to the north of Manhattan Island. On the one side it overlooks the Hudson river; on the other the flat expanse of the Bronx with Van Cortlandt Park. ”

“ So the interiors of colored homes in New York would reveal nothing to mark them from the homes of their neighbors, save perhaps the universal presence of some musical instrument. In Brooklyn, the Bronx, and in the Jersey suburbs, Negroes buy and rent houses, sometimes with a few of their race in close proximity, sometimes with white neigh [Pg 173] bors only on the block. ”

“ And I don't sit and blink in the dark, and moon around on a shelf and wear out books. I go outdoors. I walk around and look at things—shop windows and all that, when the merchants leave their curtains up. I walk across the bridges and spit off. Then there's the Bronx and the Battery, with benches where one may make acquaintances. People are always more communicative when they look out on the water. The last time I sat there an old fellow told me about himself, his wife, his victrola and his saloon. I talk to a good many persons, first and last, or I stand around until they talk to me. ”

“ These places are far more colorful and more full of spontaneous joy than the larger places to which one has ready access. They also furnish more thrills to the spectator. This is possible because the crowd is more select, the liquor more fiery, the atmosphere more intimate and the activities of the patrons not subject to be watched by open-mouthed white people from downtown and the Bronx. ”

“ On the Bronx Park branch there are two tracks to Brook Avenue and from that point to Bronx Park there are three tracks. On the Lenox Avenue spur to 148th Street there are two tracks, on the City Hall loop one track, on the Battery Park loop two tracks. The Brooklyn Extension is a two-track line.
There is a storage yard under Broadway between 137th Street and 145th Street on the Fort George branch, another on the surface at the end of the Lenox Avenue spur, Lenox Avenue and 148th Street, and a third on an elevated structure at the Boston Road and 178th Street. ”

“ The yell was given with a will and caused many a head to turn in the hurrying throng, and many a smile, for the trim uniformed youngsters, faces alight with eagerness for their afternoon outing, were good to see. Laughing and joking the patrol squeezed into the crowded subway express and they were off for Bronx Park, the wonderful great playground where for a five cent fare one is lifted as by magic from the heart of the city to the heart of the country.
As the train roared through the great tunnel Pat scanned the individual members of the patrol with manifest approval. ”