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....