Leonard Kriegel
GOING HOME
Ultimately, the boundaries expanded. But I always find myself
beginning with Bainbridge Avenue. To the east, Rochambeau Avenue; west
of Bainbridge , 206th Street . On one side, friends; on the other, strangers. A
line of demarcation berween them. Bainbridge Avenue was my no man's
land. Maps are drawn that way berween nations, too . And it was Bainbridge
Avenue that stood berween the block-long apartment house called Niles
Gardens and the small apartment house on 206th Street to which we moved
when I was eight .
The house on 206th Street had no name, only a number. It didn't have
an elevator either. The apartment houses with names had elevators. Legions of
contractors descended on the North Bronx after the First World War and
endowed their work with names-names carved into cornerstones, names
boldly lettered forth from entrance awnings , names cut into the iron
grillwork, names fingered into cement walks. Some of the houses had
carefully tended shrubbery guarded by plaster of paris lions in their
"courtyard" entrances. On Mosholu Parkway, there was even a house which
boasted a large circular pond in which fat goldfish indifferently swam. Not
even watching the fish could make me comfortable on the Parkway . The
Parkway offended my sense of history. Too much grasping there .
I was four when we moved from the East Bronx to Niles Gardens. And I
loved it from the fust . I loved the long lobby that seemed to run on
interminably . Whooping like an Indian, I would run its length, then
vault the bannister by the flight of stairs that fed into the center hall . I prac–
ticed hook sliding in my socks on the marble floor, alert for the ever-present
threat of the superintendent-owner or his black handyman , Joe.
A working-class tenantry in a working-class building. But all of us,
fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, filled with a sense ofmoving up , our
futures ripe with expectations. What we needed was opulence . We needed
the holiday darkness of the Loew's Paradise on the Grand Concourse-its
painted star-lit sky and stuffed baroque toilets posing as refined a splendor as
