one of the mistresses lived on 179th street in the Bronx?
this was in 1960-BOY did THAT Hood change Fast after that!
shareI lived at 176th and Andrews Avenue from 1955 (when I was born) to 1971.
179th Street has two sections, one in Morris Heights (my old neighborhood) and another section to the east in the central Bronx (East Tremont). I'm guessing, as of 1959-1960 the woman probably lived on the western, Morris Heights part of the street.
At that time it would have been on the border between a predominately Jewish neighborhood to the south and a heavily Irish area (Fordham) to the north. My parish church (Roman Catholic) was on University Avenue a block from 179th.
The West Bronx went through a very rapid racial/ethnic change between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s. My rough guess is that is went from about 90% white to about 90% black and Latino during that period.
I'm curious;was the East Tremont area of The Bronx predominantly "minority", as of the late 1950s?
Thanks for an interesting post.
For that period I have to rely on what I was told by family members and others. I don't know of any book that documented Bronx history in that kind of detail. (Harlem has that kind of book with Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto which was first published in 1963.) The neighborhoods further to the west I knew better from my own memories. Starting around 1969 I traveled around the city on my own.
I think East Tremont, which I might define as between the Cross-Bronx Expressway and Bronx Park, was mostly white around 1960.
Thanks. I might seek out the book on Harlem that you mentioned.
I've never even visited the NYC area, but I'm generally interested in the history of American cities.
Thanx for your reply. As for Harlem "The Making of a Ghetto" was ironically published a year before the 1964 riots there. Bed Stuy in Brooklyn as well as East Flatbush also changed racially during that timeframe.
I read "Down These Mean Streets" by the late Piri Thomas. East Harlem was already a slum when West Harlem was nice. It had poor Jews from the Lower East Side (see also the book "Your Entitle" for info. about that) and then became Puerto Rican. The El train came in around the 1880s, and the tenements followed soon after. West Harlem, like The Bronx, exploded in population after the subways came in. It became Black because a Realtor overspeculated, the property values went down, and the extant Blacks moved from Hell's Kitchen and San Juan Hill.
PS: I'm actually a Detroiter. Been a Michiganer most of my life.
We're sort of digressing from the movie, but oh well . . .
The area west of East Harlem is usually referred to as Central Harlem or just Harlem. "West Harlem" would be neighborhoods even further west, roughly between St. Nicholas Avenue and the Hudson River (Manhattanville, Hamilton Heights, Sugar Hill.)
East Harlem also had a large Italian population as well as a Jewish one. My grandmother, the daughter of Italian immigrants, lived in the 1910s on Lenox Avenue (actually central Harlem).
Yes, transit and real estate did have a big effect on these neighborhoods but that's for another post.
P.S.: Have you ever been to New York? The closest I've ever been to Michigan would be Indianapolis and Chicago.
Yup. I lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn for a year in 1989-1990. Safe Neighborhood but 1931 "Hotel Cucaracha" type building (DANG Garbage Chutes-lol) and the Wiseguy who leased me the room as an illegal sublet "tell the Little Old Ladies you're my Cousin) moved IN on me in the middle of the year, when his squeeze allegedly kicked him out (yet this same squeeze frequently visited and they kicked me out on those occasions for coital purposes-but I Digress.) I then moved to West/Orange Livingston New Jersey for Medical Resident training and practiced in that state for over five years. I visited New York periodically during those times (for plays, dances and chess matches.)
shareI lived in Sunset Park, 59th Street and Fourth Avenue, in the early 1980s.
Those garbage chutes used to drop into incinerators. That was made illegal in the 1970s, thus moving the dirt from the air back into the building. Now they require meticulous care of the garbage (it goes into a compactor) by the super and the management which of course they often don't get.
It went from Nordic to Puerto Rican there The Shipyards are long closed. But, now, I guess, there are Orientals, Indians, and others living there.
What I was driving at is that all that garbage sticking to the chute and at the bottom is a prime breeding ground for roaches.
I should go back and take a look around Sunset Park and Bay Ridge.
In the 1980s the avenues in Sunset Park (especially Fourth and Fifth) had a mostly Latino population. The side streets with row houses had a more diverse population. There were already the first signs of gentrification as people bought the houses and renovated them.
I rented the top floor of a row house that had just been purchased by a young couple starting a family. The guy was a social worker of some sort but even at that job level he was better off than many of the existing residents.
He bought the row house for $40,000. I don't know how long he stayed there but if he did he hit the once in a lifetime real estate jackpot. No one could imagine it then but housing prices far outpaced inflation everywhere in New York.