Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx

7. The Grand Concourse of the Imagination

152 “By the waters of the Grand Concourse” car would pull up almost the instant they set foot on the street. “The door would slam open and bang you right in your stomach,” Davidson recalled in an interview conducted by the Bronx African-American History Project at Fordham University, and “the term nigger would come out of a policeman in a minute.” Revolvers were drawn before any of the boys had uttered a word. Virtually every black child who grew up in the neighborhood could tell a similar story. “You know, it’s strange,” Leroi Archible, a Memphis-born boy who carried his shoeshine box up the step streets that led to the boulevard to earn spending money, told an oral historian at Fordham. “Going west, and you went up those steps, which was Clay Avenue, you was in trouble. Once you hit the first step, by the time you got to the top one, you was in serious trouble.” To test the boundaries that defined this world was to tempt disaster. Around 1942, a black man named Edward Jones who worked as the superintendent in a building on Grant Avenue, two blocks east of the Grand Concourse, was found murdered, his naked body left lying on a steaming radiator in his apartment. The word on the street was that he had been killed in retribution for having had a relationship with a local white woman remembered simply as Miss Bobby. Jones’s daughter, Dorothy, who had lived for a time in her father’s building but moved with her two young children to a more congenial street in the East Bronx, discovered his body when she came back to pay a visit. It was never determined who killed him. The starkest manifestations of the painful and complicated relationship between blacks and whites on those streets in those years was an outdoor job market that operated at various locations in the Bronx, including several near the Grand Concourse. There, black women seeking jobs cleaning apartments waited to be hired by women who were white and who were almost all Jewish. The market was born during the Great Depression, a period that had uneven impact around the city. For the Jews of the Grand Concourse, even the worst years of economic collapse did not bring automatic hardship. This is not to say that the West Bronx escaped unscathed. Even formerly well-situated families bounced about during those years, moving from one apartment to a slightly cheaper place to cash in on offers of a free month’s rent. While families remained largely intact, many adult sons and daughters were trapped in their childhood bedrooms long after college and even after marriage, an arrangement that at best proved confining and at worst claustrophobic. “By the waters of the Grand Concourse” 153 But the image of the evicted family huddled on the street, its pathetic belongings strewn on the sidewalk, was not part of the Depression-era iconography in this part of town. Although hardly as wealthy as Park Avenue or even Central Park West, this was a prosperous neighborhood, especially the portions on and near the boulevard, and Black Tuesday and its aftermath did not entirely or permanently erase that prosperity. Even among less well-to-do households, the fact that so many Jewish wives and mothers were comfortable working outside the home did much to cushion the impact if a husband or father lost a job. Many families, and not just the truly wealthy, kept their heads above water economically. They hired housekeepers, they took vacations, and their offspring remained in school, especially at the city’s extensive network of free colleges. Although The institution known as the Bronx Slave Market, a street-corner job mart that operated at various locations not far from the Grand Concourse, at which African American women waited to be hired by the white, mostly Jewish matrons of the West Bronx. The institution, immortalized in a series of photographs taken in 1937 by Robert H. McNeill, endured into the 1950s and became a symbol of the racism and inequality that ultimately exploded onto the boulevard itself. (Estate of Robert H. McNeill) 154 “By the waters of the Grand Concourse” residential construction along the boulevard ground to a halt after the market crashed, development roared back long before the Second World War brought an official end to hard times. For the great majority of the...