Growing Up Bank Street. Donna Florio
bank started the whole thing.
A lady scrambles across her muddy lane as wagonloads of panicked colonists from downtown crash by. She glares at the new Bank of New York mansion, an unwanted intruder in the peaceful woods of her sleepy 1798 Greenwich Village. That bank started it, she huffs. They want to escape their yellow fever quarantine, and now we have all the dirty downtowners moving here, bringing the disease to us.
A 1920s scientist strides towards his laboratory near the Hudson River, seeing nothing around him, his mind on his new idea for talking pictures. He passes John Dos Passos, sitting on the steps of his boardinghouse at 11 Bank Street. Dos Passos’s new novel, Manhattan Transfer, is attracting attention. Young socialite Marion Tanner, decades from stardom as Auntie Mame, hurries to the bootlegger across the street. She needs gin for the salons she holds in her elegant new brownstone.
In the 1930s, everyone broke because of the Great Depression, the poet Langston Hughes climbs the steps to his 23 Bank Street illustrator’s studio carrying his latest work. A block down, young John Kemmerer, an aspiring writer from Iowa, admires the pear trees and cityscape from the roof of his new building at 63 Bank Street. Three stories below John, the Swansons practice the tango for their vaudeville act at the Paramount Theater. Above the Swansons, Alice Zecher, newly arrived from California, winks at herself as she applies a bit of rouge for a job interview. Her plan is to be a secretary by day and a Village bohemian by night.
In 1942, a leader of the American Communist Party climbs the steps to his place at 63 Bank as FBI agents eye him from the Swansons’ windows.
In the 1950s, Tish Touchette, a female impersonator with a popular nightclub act, hangs his sequined gowns in his new place at 51 Bank and takes his poodle for a walk. He passes the actor Jack Gilford from number 75. Jack, blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, the government agency that implemented the Red Scare tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy, is desperate to line up a job—any job.
In the 1970s, when John Lennon and Yoko Ono don’t respond to their knocks, FBI agents push deportation orders under the door of their 105 Bank Street home. Photographers shove one other aside seeking shots of the corpse of Sid Vicious, the Sex Pistols bassist, who is being carried away after his overdose at 63 Bank Street.
Today, young transplants from California living in Sid’s former apartment pump their fists and high-five as their dream of establishing a taco stand in Chelsea Market comes true. Tish, now an elderly fixture on Bank Street, holds court on his stoop, talking about the 1969 Stonewall Inn uprising on nearby Christopher Street, the night that gay New Yorkers first fought for the right to socialize like anyone else. Down the street, film producer Harvey Weinstein, reputation and career in ruins, pushes through reporters on his townhouse steps.
That’s how I see Bank Street, my home in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, and its people. I was born here, arriving from the hospital in 1955 to 63 Bank Street, apartment 2B, next door to Mrs. Swanson, the vaudeville dancer. My small apartment has about 325 square feet. The layout resembles a barbell; bedroom on one end, living room on the other, with a narrow hallway in the middle. The front door opens onto the hall, off of which is a shallow coat closet, a galley kitchen, and a bathroom. The kitchen and bathroom each have a window, both facing the wall of a dark, shallow alley. The apartment doors are solid old wood with raised panels and brass keyhole locks. The living room has three windows, one facing the alley. The other two face Bank Street. One front window opens onto an iron fire escape, which has done duty as a drying rack, an herb garden, a place to set parakeet cages in the sun, and storage for party beer.
Walking back, away from Bank Street, you reach the bedroom. One bedroom window faces the end of the alley. Another looks out at a small carriage house and garden nestled behind the brownstone next door. The bedroom has a walk-in closet with an incongruous, fancy old window of its own. As a baby in a crib, I shared the bedroom with my parents. I threw toys at them when I was ready to be entertained, hastening their decision to give the bedroom to me, like many Village parents of the era, and sleep on a pull-out couch in the living room.
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Elderly neighbors sat with my parents in shabby little Abingdon Square Park around the corner as I toddled in the sandbox. Some, like the journalist who had played chess with Mark Twain, had lived here since the early 1900s. The Bank Street of their youth had cast-iron gaslights and a stately band shell with marble columns. Icemen hawked thick blocks of ice coated in straw. Milk wagons rumbled over the cobblestones at dawn. Peddlers jingled bells as they wheeled hand-carts loaded with fruits and vegetables or offered to buy rags and scrap metal. Horse-drawn trolleys lurched along bustling West Fourth Street. Hand trucks with whetstones clanged, the owners seeking knives and scissors to sharpen. Street musicians performed under windows, hoping for coins tossed down by kind-hearted listeners.
As kids, some of those neighbors watched trees chopped down as 63 Bank, the only building ever to stand on this lot, went up in 1889, providing yet more cheap housing for the immigrants that were flooding turn-of-the-century New York.
Cheap or not, 63 Bank Street, five stories high and with three apartments per floor, had been built with a bit of style. Stubby marble columns rising above lion heads and wrought-iron fencing adorn the entrance while whimsical angels grin beneath the two front windows. Two painted wood doors with panes of beveled glass, flanked by lamps, open to the hallway as a gargoyle glares down from the ceiling. Small, festively patterned red, green, and orange tiles cover the floors. At the end of the front hall, a cast-iron stairwell with smooth wood banisters and gray marble steps leads upstairs, past hall windows that overlook the little garden next door.
A rope-and-pulley dumbwaiter once opened on each hall landing, making it possible to haul coal from the basement for heat braziers and cooking stoves. Rickety wooden steps led down to the basement from the back of the first floor hallway and, on the fifth floor, up to the roof. Cast-iron steps below the stone entrance still lead past the brick coal chute embedded in the sidewalk to the exterior door of the basement, a low-ceilinged maze with cast-iron pipes and wires overhead. In the back of the basement, a heavy metal door leads to a tiny cement backyard and side alley. Fire escapes run down the front and back of the building.
Inside our apartment, in 1889, privacy was nonexistent. Archways led from one dark, narrow room to another, arranged shotgun style. The kitchen, with its heavy cast-iron coal stove, sat at the back end. A privy toilet, off the kitchen, had an incongruously fancy window. Near one front window, a shallow brick alcove held a coal brazier for heat.
The 1920 census for 63 Bank Street reported a mix of Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and German tenants. They were shirt pressers, dockworkers, machinists, market workers, saleswomen, bank note printers, mailmen, and factory workers. Virtually everyone over eighteen went to work.
The Italian American family that bought the building in 1925 and still owns it upgraded the place in 1937. Cast-iron steam radiators replaced the coal braziers, and the shallow alcoves that held the braziers were cemented and plastered over. The kitchen of 2B became a bedroom and the privy toilet became the bedroom closet, fancy window and all. A galley kitchen with a gas stove, a ceramic double sink, and a wall of wood cabinets went into the middle of the apartment next to a new private bathroom, complete with “flushometer” and bathtub.
The improvements attracted college-educated John Kemmerer and artists like Mrs. Swanson, who moved in and stayed for the rest of their lives. But number 63 kept some of the old ways. When I was little, the milkman still clanked upstairs at dawn with his wooden basket of glass bottles, leaving ours by the door and taking away the empties. We didn’t use coal, but the hallway dumbwaiter was still used to collect the trash we put outside of our doors at night by the super who lived in the basement. It stayed in use until the late 1950s, when we kids played in it once too often.
My childhood neighbors were painters, social activists, writers, longshoremen, actors, postmen, musicians, trust-fund bohemians, and office workers. Some were born here; others came because our street let them live and think as they liked. I listened to debates on socialism, reincarnation, vegetarianism, and politics on stoops and in grocery stores.
I didn’t know that our ways had little to do with the rest of America. People lived as they pleased