Growing Up Bank Street. Donna Florio
The singer had only one leg. He said he’d lost the other one in a place called Vietnam. When Josh died, we sat on his steps. His parents came out and we cried together.
Number 69 Bank Street housed the Bank Street College of Education, located there from 1930 until it moved uptown in 1971. The building had originally been a yeast factory, and its wide sidewalk was the best Double Dutch jump rope spot. Student teachers wearing peasant blouses and dirndl skirts climbed the steps, smiling at us.
Number 68 Bank Street, across the street from my building, was a boarding house. Bill, a burly retired truck driver who lived there, often sat on his stoop reading his Daily News. Bill and I watched, smiling, as city workers planted trees up and down Bank Street in 1962. He watered the delicate young honey locust in front of his place every day and grew irritated when people let their dogs pee on it. Finally, out of patience, Bill armed himself with a box of mothballs, and when dogs paused to sniff at the tree’s roots, he’d grab a handful and let fly. Dogs yelped and owners cussed, but Bill’s tree grew and still presides over the building.
Number 75 Bank Street, on the corner of Bleecker Street, was our block’s grandest apartment building, the one with an elevator. Gardens lined the entrance, and a doorman manned the Art Deco lobby. We liked to shimmy up the wrought-iron gate in front of number 75’s side alley. It was a daring climb since we had to watch out for Suzy, the live-in super’s boxer. If she heard us, she ran up, barking and snapping as we frantically slid down, fingernails scratching the glossy black paint. The alley was an enticing space and we wanted to play in it, but the gate was always locked and we were too afraid of Suzy, although nobody would admit it.
Number 78–80 Bank, the big tenement building on the opposite corner of Bank and Bleecker Streets, was home to tough, older teenagers back in the early 1960s. Girls wearing white or pale pink lipstick sat on the stoop snapping gum and teasing their hair into bouffant towers. Boys with slicked-back hair and black leather jackets nuzzled them, sliding their hands around until the girls slapped their wrists. They lit cigarettes in front of adults, which astounded me, casually flicking butts into the street with a bored flip of the finger. One of the girls bolted to my side when a disheveled man waved an address on a slip of paper and asked me to go into a hallway and help him read it. “Get atta heah, ya dirty creep! Kid, nevah, evah go wit’ one of them pervies! He’ll do nasty to yah!” I had no idea what she meant.
By 1969 the greasers were gone. I was 13, and I babysat there for a divorced mother who had moved from New Jersey to be a hippie. She was an affectionate mom but rarely cleaned the house. Rolling papers sat on a shelf above the dirty kitchen sink. Even though I searched diligently, I couldn’t find her dope stash. One day I couldn’t stand the mess anymore and cleaned it myself. The children’s dad, who still had a crew cut and wore skinny black ties, beamed when he came to the city to pick them up. “This looks great!” he said. His face fell when I told him that I had done it.
Weekend hippies were obvious; carefully beaded, asking directions to Washington Square Park in the 1960s and ’70s. If I was in a nasty mood, I either sent them uptown to Chelsea, then a boring slum unless girl gangs from the projects were chasing me as I ran to and from my junior high school, or down to the rotting Hudson River docks. Maybe, I snipped, they’d try to blend in at the Anvil, a longshoremen’s bar by day and a gay, druggy sex club by night: all customers serviced by roving hustlers and prostitutes.
Until the mid-1960s, a hulking spice warehouse sat on the corner of Bank and Bleecker Streets, wafting a delicious orangey aroma through the streets on warm days. A white Greek temple sat by itself in the middle of Hudson Street, opposite the warehouse. I thought the temple was an image from a childhood dream until I saw archival photographs of the city in my twenties. My temple was there, a hexagonal bandstand from the 1880s, its second story framed by fluted marble columns. By the 1940s, an older Villager told me, bums slept in it and kids set fires there. It was demolished in the late 1950s.
A few years later the warehouse was knocked down too, and a new playground went up over both sites. Whoever designed that park either didn’t know kids or had it in for them. It had lunacies like a fifteen-foot concrete column with a climbing ladder, topped with a platform, set invitingly next to a sandbox. Luckily I’d just turned ten, a magic age when my parents decided that I was streetwise enough to play in other parts of the Village. I scorned the new kiddie park and met my friends in rowdy Washington Square Park. One kid, still grounded on Bank Street, jumped off the platform and broke his leg. Parents rushed kids to emergency rooms and yelled at politicians. Eventually the column was torn down.
I could also, at ten, walk down the other four blocks of Bank Street to the end, at the Hudson River. There weren’t many attractions. The Westinghouse Electric factory that took up an entire block was still open, although after a fire in the 1960s the factory closed and the building became a doorman co-op. Locals snickered at the idea of fancy living in an old factory.
I kept exploring, savoring my independence, passing the factory and walking towards the river, past dilapidated bars, the sour smell of stale beer wafting onto the sidewalk. Our block was tarred, but lumpy Colonial-era cobblestones on those last blocks made for a roller-coaster ride and still do. My father cursed and gripped the wheel as our Plymouth Valiant bumped and lurched.
The block between Greenwich Street and Washington Street was a mix of boxy 1950s brick apartment buildings, 1800s tenements, and small, run-down houses, with a few fine exceptions tossed in. My friend Billy Joyce, a live-in butler for Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis, the renowned dance couple who owned number 113–115, sunned himself in a beach chair in front of their house and chatted with passersby. Opposite Billy stood HB Acting Studio’s three adjoining buildings. Young actors hung around the front, practicing lines, oblivious to the tenement dwellers who lounged in their doorways, drinking beer.
By the time I reached our last block, in 1966, the one that ran to our Hudson River dock, I was in a completely different Bank Street, many social classes removed from the wealthy brownstones at the other end. This block reflected the sad changes that were going on throughout New York City in the mid- to late 1960s. Middle-class families were fleeing to the suburbs. We’d lost the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Brooklyn Navy Yard shut down, taking with it thousands of jobs. A garbage workers’ strike left rotting bags, thrashing with rats, on the streets for nine days. Prostitutes and strip joints took over Times Square. The city’s crime rate soared.
The traditional longshoreman jobs of the Hudson River piers, once crowded with passenger and cargo ships, were drying up as airplanes took over the transport industry. Those jobs had been the livelihood of many Bank Street families for generations. A hulking cluster of dark, deserted buildings, which had been a famous Bell Telephone research laboratory for a hundred years until it closed in 1966, loomed over one side of our last block. Decayed tenements and boarded-up shops leaned like rotted teeth on the other. One grocery store was all that was left of the small shops that had once flourished by the river. Furtive, hard-faced men lounged against peeling billboards advertising 7 Up and Pall Malls. Heroin addicts swayed slowly in doorways, their limbs twitching.
An abandoned elevated railroad track ran through the Bell Lab building, continuing south on rusty iron pillars along Washington Street. A second derelict elevated track darkened the air along West Street, letting small pockets of dirty dusty sunlight filter down to the sidewalk. Packs of shrill hookers—male, female, and I wasn’t sure—swarmed passersby and cars, leading johns to unlocked trucks or the pier. Trolley tracks ran next to the river, but by then there hadn’t been any trolleys for decades. Except for the grocery store, the only business still open down there then was a prison. Dad, who spent hours looking for parking spots near our apartment, wouldn’t even slow down on that block, let alone park there.
We still had a pier, although it wasn’t a smart place to play. Even if I didn’t fall through the broken planks or drive a rusty nail through my foot, being there during the week, at any time of day or night, was usually asking for a mugging in the 1960s and ’70s. I kicked a junkie who tried to pull my bike from underneath me, but had no answer when one of the watching hookers said to me, “Well, what the hell do you think this is? Central Park? Go play somewhere else.” She was right.
By fourteen I’d learned how to handle blocks like this one. I’d