Back Then by Anne Bernays Page A

Street to Riverside Drive in 1957, the Upper West Side had already entered a cycle of decline that lasted for about two decades, during which the city itself nearly went bust. We knew people who claimed as a matter of pride never to have gone to the West Side except to visit their skin doctors and psychoanalysts or—repeating an old quip—to get to Pier 90 on their way to Europe. Riverside Drive was almost as remote as Canarsie from our old apartment. To get there involved a long taxi ride or a combination of subway and crosstown bus. You arrived in what felt like a different city.
    Upper Broadway, a gilded ghetto in the years before the end of World War II, had been like a main shopping street in Warsaw, Berlin, or Budapest, its population and collective accent shaped by refugees from Hitler’s Europe. On weekends and Jewish holidays family groups in their best, the women in fur coats, promenaded Broadway’s golden mile of haberdasheries selling silk ties, “white-on-white” dress shirts, and expensive fedoras, movie houses (about a dozen), bakeries, restaurants, cafeterias, and delicatessens, liquor stores displaying top-of-the-line brands like Johnnie Walker Black Label, Courvoisier, and Hennessey, candy and nut shops, shoe stores enough for a city of centipedes with bunions and fallen arches, and showrooms of vases, lamps, mirrors, overstuffed sofas, and bedroom suites that belonged in a sultan’s harem. By 1957 the lights along upper Broadway had begun to darken. Except for the newly arrived Puerto Ricans, the promenaders were less exuberant. This was the sad, lonely, and striving avenue of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s cafeteria encounters. Popular restaurants like Tiptoe Inn and the relatively down-market C & L (known as the Cheap and Lousy) were about to go under. Other local fixtures—Barney Greengrass, Zabar’s, Murray’s Sturgeon Shop—hoped to wait out the neighborhood’s transformation into streets of bodegas, pizza parlors, and Chinese takeout.
    The landmark Ansonia, a seventeen-story Beaux Arts apartment palace once tenanted by celebrities like Babe Ruth and Lily Pons, Enrico Caruso and Igor Stravinsky, had grown shabby. So had the Endicott, on Columbus Avenue at Eighty-first, where decades earlier guests took tea in the palm court to the music of a string and piano ensemble. The side streets were being taken over by junkies, drunks, and prostitutes. They lounged on the stoops of decaying brownstones—passing citizens walked faster and looked straight ahead. By night the open spaces of grass and wooden benches along Broadway became Needle Park. By day elderly men and women still sunned themselves there, aired their medical complaints and offspring problems, and traded neighborhood gossip. “You know who Phil Spitalny—that All-Girl Orchestra he used to lead—is? Well, his mother-in-law slipped on some cabbage leaves in Waldbaum’s and broke her arm.”
    All the same, despite creeping seediness, the Upper West Side was still a neighborhood, in a way the corresponding area on the other side of Central Park was not. It had kept some of its old character—polyglot street life, joy in food and the senses, legacy of disputation, array of institutions like Columbia and Barnard, Juilliard, City College, and two theological seminaries, and a distinctive population of musicians, psychoanalysts and analysands, students, and refugee intellectuals. I felt as much at home there as I had in the 1930s, when I lived in a ninth-floor apartment at Central Park West and Ninety-sixth Street. This was still the northern boundary of a district of big apartment buildings with canopies, uniformed doormen, bordering privet hedges, and first-floor doctor and dentist offices. Its terminus was the stubby granite steeple of the First Church of Christ, Scientist on the corner, built in 1903, when Mary Baker Eddy’s home-brewed