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By Root 1024 0

branded as “queers.” I shall always be grateful to Oswego State Teachers College, it being the only university generous enough to ignore an unpromising high school record for the sake of my then-promising fastball. But one cannot forget the 1963 civil rights protest march into downtown Oswego, when the local Palladium Times actually wrote that we were “a bunch of communists”; or Syracuse University, where I completed graduate studies, when the chancellor whacked a peaceful Vietnam war protester with his cane, only to be cheered, not jeered, by student and community leaders. In small towns, protesters were Enemies of the People. They threatened the existing order of things. By comparison, New York had no clearly defined existing order of things to threaten. Strangers, change, growth, waves of migration in and out, rigorous competition—all were normal here.

Yet New York is changing. As kids, we equated New York City with Manhattan. The signs along Shore Parkway in Brooklyn or Grand Central Parkway in Queens pointed to Manhattan yet read, TO NEW YORK CITY, as if the four other boroughs weren’t part of the city. Sometimes, on weekends, we would take the BMT to “the City” for a day or night out to see the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, to catch a movie six months before it came to our neighborhood theater, to watch the Knicks play basketball on a portable court in the Armory. If I was paying, dinner would be at the Automat—45¢ for a delicious chopped sirloin, 5¢ extra for mashed potatoes. If my parents were paying, we went to the House of Chan, which offered chow mein that wasn’t smothered in onions, unlike Taeng Fong’s on Bay Parkway. We had annual feasts at our local Lady of Solace church, which was nothing like the Casbah that was Greenwich Village. All of Manhattan seemed to be a feast. Aside from a handful of rich Protestants who we knew lived in Fifth and Park Avenue penthouses, we never assumed people actually lived in Manhattan from the Battery to 96th Street. We didn’t think of it as a place with neighborhoods, kids playing stickball or johnny-on-the-pony, knuckles, kick-the-can, ring-a-leaveo; we never imagined there were pool halls or luncheonettes where other kids hung out. What did we know? We were tourists.

As we grew older, many of us gravitated to suburban homes or to apartments in Manhattan. As Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens stopped growing, as people and jobs fled the outer boroughs, as blight spread there, it came more and more to be true that Manhattan was the city. Those living in Manhattan or outside the other four boroughs came to view the other boroughs as we once viewed Manhattan—it was assumed there were no neighborhoods, no stickball, no culture out there. Staten Island was not only close to New Jersey, but its one- and two-family homes made it look the same. Queens was a poor suburb of neighboring Nassau County. The Bronx was no longer renowned for its Grand Concourse boulevard or vast zoo and Botanical Gardens, but for the cancer sweeping north. Brooklyn seemed to die about the same time the Dodgers left. The Hamptons replaced Coney Island as a weekend retreat.

Of course, neither tourist vision represents reality. Manhattan always had street life and neighborhoods, just as the other four boroughs do today. Walk under the El in Corona, Queens, and you’ll see a procession of ma-and-pa stores, most owned by Haitians and Dominicans and other immigrants, many of whom probably entered this country illegally. They found that the American Dream still works. Bedford-Stuyvesant is not just abandoned housing or youth gangs. It also contains some of the finest row houses in New York, and one of the most spirited organizations—the Bedford-Stuyvesant Redevelopment Corporation—struggling to transform a neighborhood. Brooklyn is not just the fires of Bushwick, the abandonment of Brownsville; it is also the brownstone revival of Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, the pluck and determination of Northside residents to save their firehouse, the Russian Jews who now find refuge in Brighton Beach, the tree-lined streets