Habitats: Private Lives in the Big City

26 With Sky and the Weather for Neighbors: BARBARA McCALL AND HER FAMILY IN SOUNDVIEW, THE BRONX (August 30, 2009)

1 4 7 26 With Sky and the Weather for Neighbors Barbara McCall and Her Family in Soundview, the Bronx AUgUST 30, 2009 Barbara McCall with her daughter and grandson in their apartment in Soundview in the Bronx. (Rob Bennett for The New York Times) 1 4 8 From Barbara McCall’s 22nd-floor apartment in the Soundview section of the Bronx, she can see the world. From her living room window, she can take in the entire sweep of the Manhattan skyline, including the Empire State Building, where her daughter , Scherrie, works as a dental assistant. She can see three bridges—the George Washington, the Throgs Neck, and the Whitestone—along with the East River, Long Island Sound, and the Jersey Palisades. From her daughter’s bedroom, she can watch as planes land and take off from Kennedy and LaGuardia airports and sometimes circle endlessly, up to half a dozen at a time. In a tower somewhere, air traffic controllers are presumably chewing their nails, but Ms. McCall couldn’t be more entranced . “It’s interesting when the skies get crowded,” she says. Most spectacularly, she can watch the Macy’s Fourth of July fireworks while listening to the musical accompaniment on television. “Every year when they have the fireworks, I look forward to it,” she says. “I don’t have to go downtown. I can sit in my bedroom and look from the TV to what’s really happening.” Television, she acknowledges, doesn’t begin to capture the beauty. Ms. McCall, a retired nurse with a round face and a halo of curly dark hair, has lived in this building for over 40 years, nearly all of them in this three-bedroom apartment, which she shares with her daughter, her 9-year-old grandson, Marques, four cats, and a Shih Tzu named Thaddeus . Serendipity brought her here. Born in South Carolina in 1943, she moved to New York with her family the following year, grew up in Washington Heights, and in 1963 married a New York police officer named Tommy McCall. The photographs in this apartment suggest that Tommy must have been a heartbreaker, or as she says of their relationship, “Those eyes got me into trouble.” At 19, the couple decided to elope, but when they headed to Maryland to tie the knot—they had heard that the state was lenient in such matters—the would-be bridegroom was sent back home because he didn’t have his parents’ permission, and they had to return the following week. For four years, the McCalls lived in a tiny two-bedroom apartment on Nelson Avenue in the West Bronx. But Officer McCall had his father’s car, in which the couple used to explore other parts of town—the Polo Grounds, the local White Castle—and on one such drive they discovered w I T H S k y A N d T H E w E AT H E R f O R N E I g H B O R S 1 4 9 the Leland Houses, a pair of green-brick towers on Thieriot Avenue near the Bruckner Expressway. The complex had been constructed under the city’s Mitchell-Lama program, which keeps rents affordable for moderate -income families, and in 1967, two days before Christmas, the couple moved into a two-bedroom apartment for which the rent was just over $100.“We were paying $81 on Nelson Avenue,” Ms. McCall recalls.“We were a little nervous about paying the rent here.” A few years later, with a young son and daughter in residence, the McCalls moved to the three-bedroom apartment next door; the building manager who approved the arrangement had a soft spot in his heart for cops. The rent, originally about $300, is now about $1,150, and though the building is no longer part of the Mitchell-Lama program, costs are still kept modest. Ms. McCall, whose husband died in 2003 from injuries suffered in a fall, hasn’t had an easy life. In the late 1970s, she went back to school to study nursing and eventually ended up as a dialysis nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital. But in 1982 she had a stroke that left her paralyzed for nearly a year, and she regained her mobility only after months of rehabilitation. Even today, she still has stiffness on her left side and is slowed by arthritis in her knees...