Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition

Prologue

Prologue I ∞ The bright Sunday-in-May dawn breaks over the Bronx. It is 6:30, but much of the campus has been up all night, and some who would have liked to sleep later had been awakened at 4:30 by the mad clanging of the old ship’s bell of the aircraft carrier Junyo. Presented by Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, blessed by Cardinal Francis Spellman, and first rung by Harry S. Truman in 1946, it hangs in front of the gym. Exuberant seniors coming home high on the beer at Clarke’s Bar near the corner of Fordham Road and Webster Avenue and on the thrill of their impending graduation thought it would be fun to wake up the world. Outside the gates, cars and buses cough, groan, and rumble past the Bronx Botanical Gardens on one side and, a little farther up Fordham Road on the other side, the Bronx Zoo. It is a bustling, graffiti-spattered Spanish neighborhood of 150,000 people, where any one of us could climb the hill on a Saturday afternoon through the chattering crowds to the subway station and never hear the English language once. A few blocks to the south is Belmont, or Little Italy, a tight, colorful enclave surrounded by Spanish and black neighborhoods, a remnant of thirty years ago when it seemed the whole world made the Bronx its home. It is a neighborhood I have struggled to comprehend in long walks, runs, and bike rides, especially the bike ride that winds through the entire borough and is led by Bronx Borough president Fernando Ferrer. I am left rationally though not yet emotionally convinced that this is my home, this sprawling complex of boom boxers, laborers, xii 16950-00_Fordham_FM 6/4/08 11:47 AM Page xii Sunday park picnickers, violent criminals, vandals, Fordham students and their long-suffering families, street hawkers, idealistic teachers and school principals, and street litterers who transform Fordham Road on weekends into the filthiest street in New York. This neighborhood has also been the home of some of Fordham’s best students. As children they gazed from their bedroom windows at the gothic tower of Keating Hall; as young men and women, the campus gate became their door to the world. It is the campus’s loveliest time of the year. The lush green canopy of its elms, oaks, and maples has formed. The flower beds are replanted for the graduation, alumni reunion, and priestly ordination weekends; four new bowers for rose bushes have been set up in the quadrangle across from the 1838 Administration Building and between the late-nineteenth-century Dealy and Hughes Halls. The black and gray squirrels with eyes like cocker spaniels scamper up to visitors as if they have a right to special attention, and even the family of skunks that freely roam the campus at dusk have no idea that they are only 95 percent welcome. In gray shorts and a gold Loyola University New Orleans sweatshirt, I start a long-planned morning run around the campus. I am operating on four and a half hours of sleep, having been up till 1:00 A.M. with Mary Higgins Clark’s All around the Town, a quick-read thriller about a little girl, abducted and abused at four, who develops multiple personalities to suppress the memory of her abuse and who may or may not have stabbed her college teacher to death in bed. Ms. Clark, a Fordham graduate, is giving the commencement address today, and it would be bad manners to meet her without having read at least one of her books. I start from the steps of Hughes Hall, once Fordham Prep and now a residence hall. To the right is Loyola Hall, built in 1928, now home to forty-eight mostly retired Jesuits, a good number struggling with cancer or heart disease, or maneuvering the halls with walkers, five of whom were here when I was a student over forty years ago. Nearby, between the Jesuit residence and the University Church and surrounded by a hedge, is an old graveyard, the resting place of the original nineteenth-century Jesuits, diocesan seminarians, students, and workmen whose few remains were moved in 1890 from the New XIII P R O L O G U E 16950-00_Fordham_FM 6/4/08 11:47 AM Page xiii York Botanical Garden property that Fordham originally owned. Here...