I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [15]
Somewhere between 153rd and 158th streets, near Riverside Drive, Jimmy told me there had been an old lady who sat on the porch of a dilapidated wooden house located in a large crater devoid of greenery, just dirt. “It looked like a meteor crater.” The old lady screamed invectives and curses and threw stones at Jimmy and his crony, Martin Shevlan, as they walked by. Kindergartners, they were already fearless, wild adventurers. They threw stones back at her. Jimmy believes that the house she lived in was the last vestige of John James Audubon’s farm, one that originally encompassed most of the area down to the Hudson River. The farm was called Minnie’s Land, after Audubon’s wife. Within six months, both old lady and house were gone, and an apartment complex was built in its place. Probably they still exist as part of the rubble and landfill, dumped there to form a foundation for the new building.
The Hudson—a great stretch of swirling currents, always moving, always unpredictable. In summer, under the George Washington Bridge, the daring older boys went swimming. Winters were cold enough that the ponds in the parks would freeze over and become public skating rinks. Under the George Washington, near the Little Red Lighthouse, giant slabs of ice would form, shrinking the almost-mile-wide river flow to the width of some hundred yards. We would jump from one ice slab to another to try and reach the water that flowed freely in the middle, and throw snowballs to the ice forming on the New Jersey side. Occasionally, a giant chunk of ice would break apart and kids who started on a slab of ice at 178th Street would end up floating south to around Twenty-fifth Street, some six miles down. This gave the harbor police plenty to do.
The rail tracks bordering the Hudson, with their iron trestles bridging the tracks, became for us the battle deck of a frigate. Dueling with fate as well as pirates, I would run along the trestle, a sailor at home on the upper spars of a clipper ship. On the tracks, my buddies and I would play tag, tempting death as we jumped over the electrified third rail. Occasionally, we were pursued by railroad dicks. We baited them to a fury, scurrying up and down the trestles like miniature spider men and easily flipping over the bordering chain-link fences up and out of their reach. Big, mean, and brandishing clubs, often drunk, these guys weren’t fooling. They were thugs and not interested in complaining to our mothers.
In the museums of the neighborhood, our street life carried on indoors, to more elegant settings.
There was Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters, a world-class repository of medieval art, where we challenged one another to swordfights on the battlements, were chased by the guards, and, I believe, knew every item in the building better than the curators.
There was the block of museums at 155th Street and Broadway, the most mysterious being the Museum of the American Indian. Filled with sad-looking fetal-like mummies, shrunken heads, little shrunken men, evil-looking gold idols, and Pacific Northwest totem poles, it was wonderful, better than any horror movie, because it was real.2
Next to the Museum of the American Indian, the Hispanic Society of America, a museum devoted to Iberian culture, shared the compound (conquistadors still threatening Native Americans). In its courtyard stands a giant bronze statue of the Spanish national hero El Cid on horseback. Checking, in our pilfered encyclopedias, we learned who El Cid was, and adopted him into our boyhood pantheon.
Also in this museum group stood (and still stands today) the American Academy of Arts and Letters—a massive building, closed to us, impregnable. We actually managed to climb up its sides to the roof in an attempt to break in. Fifty years later, I was installed