Bronx Apartment building

I was born  in the south Bronx. We lived on Bergen Avenue on the 4th floor of a 5 floor walk up,  apartment (tenement) building. I was the 3rd of six children. An older brother, Johnny, died two years before I was born  at the age of 4.

We had a 3 room apartment.  How my mother kept it neat and clean with 4 kids is amazing, but she did.  We had a fire escape running up the front of the building. It was there we would sleep on occasion in the summer.  

We called the roof, Tar Beach. You would sun yourself up there, there were clothes lines for the summer. I don't know why we never slept up there.  I guess sleeping on a fire escape infront of your apartment would be more....private.

We were a block away of the 3rd Ave. train line.  When we moved to Queens it would be hard to sleep without hearing those trains. And we had to get used to the airplanes from LaGuardia Airport. 

This was not my apartment house, but you get the idea.  At this time, the only black people on our block were the custodians and their family. They lived in the basement. 

Those are the fire escapes we would sleep on in the summer. 

There were 3 or 4 (can't remember for sure) apartments on each floor.  My Aunt (mother's sister) and Uncle and cousins lived right next door to us. When we moved to Queens they lived downstairs in our two family house. 

The rooms by today's standards were pretty small.  Small kitchen.  A livingroom with a wide archway into the bedroom which was in front of the house. A tiny room off the bedroom was my bedroom that I shared with my brother. My sisters slept on a pull out sofa in the living room.

No elevators so we walked up and down, 8 flights of stairs.  It must have been a nightmare dragging the carriages  up and down and food shopping must have been fun. 

That is a dumbwaiter, every floor had one.  You would pull a cord to bring it to your floor and you put your garbage on it. Needless to say it smelled wonderful.  It always scared me a bit. 

Playing outside we would yell up if we wanted money or something and your mother would wrap the money in paper and throw it down. If we wanted to cross the street we would yell until mom came to the window and crossed us. 

We were NOT allowed to let any other mother cross us.  Sometimes to shut us up a mother would try to cross the kid, but we were not allowed to let them.

There were PLENTY of kids on the block and we always had something to do and someone to play with. 

A fond memory was when it rained hard enough we got our bathing suit on and floated popsicle  sailboats or just popsicle sticks along the gutter till it went into the sewer. Yep we would play in the rain in the dirty gutter in the summer time. lol

It was the best of times....it was the worst of times....

The Bronx

The Bronx is a borough of New York City. It's known for Yankee Stadium, the home field of the New York Yankees baseball team. Dating from 1899, the vast Bronx Zoo houses hundreds of species of animals. 

Nearby, the sprawling New York Botanical Garden features a landmark greenhouse with rainforest and cactus displays. 

I've been to theBotanical Gargens and Bronx Zoo many times. Although I was a big Yankee fan, I never went to Yankee Stadium.

This gives you an idea of the neighborhood. I will write about the building next time.

The south Bronx was the home of  Irish and German immigrants. At least our area was, I know they had Jewish, Italian, Black and Spanish sections too. 

Apartments lined the streets but the corners would have a store. Our corner had an Egg "factory". It was one German man  who had a conveyor belt he put eggs on and they would pass infront of a light. He would take it off if it was bad. He put the good ones into cartons.  If he was in a good mood he would let me sit near the door and watch, he would sometimes give me an egg to take home. 
When he was in a bad mood he would not let me in his shop. 

Around the corner were the Butchers. Trucks would come with Meat that were hung on big hooks,(like in the movie, Rocky) they were brought inside to be butchered. It did not smell good there, even when they were closed on Sunday. 
Across the street was the neighborhood Bar. I forgot the name of it.  Men and women hung out there. We kids could go in too and get a coke and snack and sit at a table if a parent was in there. 

Kitty Corner was the back of Woolworths. The older kids would hang out on the stairs there.

St.Ann's Park was nearby and St.Peter and Paul's was the  Catholic school my sisters and cousin went to and I was registered to start there, but we moved.

We had a TV but most people still did not have a phone. We got one in 1956, I think. 

At this time, the Bronx was a great place to live.  Everybody knew everybody, for better or worse. 

We moved in 1957 but I have many memories of our time spent there. 

The neighborhood was starting to turn bad. It was the Puerto Rican's  moving in, that destroyed it. I am not being racist. It's what happened.  

The movie, West Side Story depicts how it was back then.

Thank goodness my parents and cousins moved when they did because the gangs started to flourish. The movies, Fort Apache and The Bronx is Burning, shows what happened to the Bronx. Very sad, indeed. 

This is a 1981 short film about The Bronx, 24 years after we left, but you see the neighborhood I came from. 

My first Job

This is the building now. It was just a brick  building when I worked there.

My first job was being a file clerk at Bestform Foundations. They made bras, girdles and tights. 
Girls/women were not allowed to wear pants to work. It had to be a skirt or a dress.  If you wore pants because of the weather or you got a ride from someone who had a motorcycle (like I did) you had to change into your skirt/dress as soon as you got into work. 
You had to punch a time card when you arrived and left. 

The bathroom was HUGE and it had a fountain in the middle that did not work.
 One wall was toilet stalls and the opposite wall were sinks. There was also a Matron. She was an old woman named Margaret and her job was making sure the bathroom was clean and if any body needed help. (If you needed a pin or a kotex etc.)  She retired a few months later and they did not hire another matron. 

When I was there, we got our first copy machine! No more putting a piece of carbon paper between two pieces of paper and then trying to get them all into the manual (no electric) typewriter, straight!   I am proud to say I was the first to copy a body part. My Hand. LOL 

Our machine looked like this.  

I worked in the File department  which was  where you started. You got to know the companies that buy from us. There were 3 other girls plus our manager.  I made some good friends. Sharon and Diane were my best friends. 

Upstairs was the computer room. Yes, computers were starting to enter into businesses. It will be years before pc's come around.  This is what our computer room looked like.

I know, hard to believe.  But we thought it was amazing!

This company was run by a jewish family. You were not going to get any higher than a secretary in this company.  Being Catholic and female were two strikes.   

Men were allowed to smoke at their desk we had to smoke in the bathroom. 

I soon worked in the order department which was in the same area but we had desks. lol

I think that's enough for now about Bestform. 

Me at 16. 

Getting to my first job

I had to get up early to get to my job in Long Island City.  I had to take the Queens Transit Q65 bus to Flushing. The bus stop was 3 block from home.  I had to leave about 7:30am to get to work before 9am. 

This is what the bus looked like back in 1967. 

I usually did not have to wait more than 15 minutes for a bus. In school, I had a bus pass but now I paid with change and if I only had a dollar bill, the bus driver would make change for me.

Since I left and came home at rush hour, I was lucky if I got a seat.  Even back then, there were not many gentlemen who got up to give a woman a seat.  The trip to my stop in Flushing took about 10 minutes.

After the bus it was a quick trip around the corner to go downstairs for the train. If I had no tokens I had to stand in line at the token booth to get some.

How many times I stood on this line and heard my train come in and leave! That was frustrating.

 After getting the tokens (I still have a train token somewhere) I had to go through the turnstile and head downstairs.

My train the No.7

It was always crowded at rush hour, sometime you could not squeeze in to a car and had to wait for the next train. It was about a 20-30 minute ride unless I took the express train that skipped some stops. Most of the time I had to stand and hold onto a pole or over head straps.  

This was my train stop Lowery Street.

I had nice views of the city from the train and train stop. From here I would go downstairs and walk 3 blocks to my job.  Sometimes, if I had time I'd stop at a store to pick up cigarettes or anything else I needed on the way to work.  

Next I'll talk about my job. 

One day I will give more details about traveling on the buses and trains of NY.

Here is the 7 line, obviously much newer than what I traveled in back in the day. 

Getting a Job

I had my working papers I was ready to go! 
There was a Sears two blocks from home. I went to interview there. They were all set to hire me until they saw I was 16. It's seems there was a 16 year old that screwed things up so bad, they made it a policy never to hire another one. 
I was upset, this was so close to home. 

Next I took the bus to Flushing to the store, W.T.Grants. 

I was hired and I was to work at the lunch counter.  My school friend, Patricia (I am still friends with her on FB) worked there.  I was to start the following week. I was not thrilled about working at the lunch counter. But it was a job.

Friends I hung around with told me to go to Bestform Foundations in L.I.C.  Four of them worked there already. 
So I went for an interview with Mr.Bortnik  He hired me.  While doing the paper work he asked who my beneficiary was. I said my mother,  he said do you know what beneficiary means? I said yes. But for the life of me I could not remember what it meant!  He hired me any way.  YAY

Me at 16 years old

Required for getting a job in the '60s

I quit school at 16, in 1967.  It was not unusual back then for kids to leave school at a young age. 
I had two older sisters, one quit at 16 and got a job working for the telephone company. The other one, Barbara, was the first person to graduate high school in my family(I was the second one, but that's in the future). Barbara got a job working in the local Woolworths. 

You needed your parents permission to quit.  My mother had to take me, by bus to Jamaica to get a workers permit at the Board of Health, which you needed at 16. 

The woman doctor took a chest x-ray, she was old. She told me she was the first female to graduate from her medical school. I believed her.

This is me at 16 years old.