The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [9]
North of the Harlem River, in the Bronx, a butcher sweeps the sidewalk in front of his store on the Boston Post Road. I ask him directions to Charlotte Street. “That’s easy,” he says. “You can’t miss it. You just drive until you see nothing. Then you know you’re there.” In much of Manhattan, it’s hard to find a vacant apartment. In the South Bronx, it’s sometimes hard to find a building. More than 2,000 square blocks are devastated. Fifty-one apartment buildings, housing 3,000 people, once stood on Charlotte Street and its adjoining blocks—just seven miles from Régine’s. Today, only nine remain standing, eight of them sealed shut by brick or ruined by fire. Amid the hills of rubble and discarded garbage, 100 people still reside at 1500 Boston Post Road and Wilkins Avenue. Their rents range from $140 to $160 a month for the 39 one- or two-bedroom apartments.
Once, not long ago, this neighborhood was different. There were tennis courts; the local synagogue sported Moorish columns; people darted in and out of Solly Sherman’s vegetable and deli market. There was a Rumanian restaurant where a meal of chopped calves’ liver, kosher broiled steak, white radishes, pickles and free seltzer came to $1.35. Today, there are no tennis courts, and the synagogue, its columns painted gray, houses the Tremont Crotona Day Care Center. Solly Sherman’s and the Rumanian restaurant are gone, destroyed years ago by fire.
There are other Charlotte Streets in the South Bronx. Between 1970 and 1975, the South Bronx lost 16 percent of its housing, or 43,000 apartments, and over the last twelve years 80,000 apartments have been abandoned. Forty percent of all its manufacturing jobs have disappeared. Each day, there are ten fires. Each week, an estimated four blocks succumb to physical decay. The per capita income is 40 percent of the national average; one of three residents is on welfare; only one of four students entering an academic high school actually graduates; the area has lost 10,000 jobs in the last four years.
According to the City Department of Health, the two health districts on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, between Park and Fifth avenues, contain 2,063 doctors. In two comparable South Bronx health districts, Tremont and Morrisania, there are no doctors.
Nothing prepares the eye or ear for such statistics, for the first sight of the “nothing” that is Charlotte Street, for the youth gangs who use moving police vans for target practice. And only a military war prepares the mind for the massive evacuation from the area. Were the Bronx a city, its population of 1.5 million would make it the nation’s fifth largest. Yet in fifteen years half its white residents—mostly middle-income taxpayers—have fled, with the contagion spreading even to the once-glorious Grand Concourse that marches north through the borough.
Brooklyn would qualify as the fourth largest city. Six miles south of Régine’s, not far from the water separating the borough from Manhattan, one enters Bushwick. The name derives from the Dutch word Boswijk, meaning “town of woods.” In the 1800’s, Bushwick was primarily an agricultural community. As late as the 1930’s, its then-famed Claridge Hotel advertised a “country-like setting”; guests could walk to the Bushwick Theatre, which rivaled the Palace for vaudeville. Immigrants from Northern Europe, and later from Italy, settled here; by 1950, neat one- and two-family wooden houses with small gardens were home for Brooklyn’s second largest Italo-American community. In 1960, 77 percent of the residents were white working-class.
Today, 75 percent of Bushwick’s residents are black or Hispanic, and nearly half the population is on welfare. The Claridge Hotel is gone, as is the Bushwick Theatre. The South Bronx used to rank number one in fires. No more. Bushwick now claims that distinction because it still has buildings to burn; it averages 6,000 fires a year. In the arson and looting following New York’s blackout in the summer of 1977, ninety-two stores on Broadway and Bushwick avenues were razed. The owners of sixty-six of them