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6 Introduction newcomers themselves rarely made their way to the boulevard proper. But with increasing force and velocity, the generations that came after them escaped the congestion and squalor of the Lower East Side, heading first to the tenement apartments of the East Bronx and finally to the smart and spacious precincts of the West Bronx. As was the case with other important New York City thoroughfares— West End Avenue in Manhattan is a notable example—the very name Grand Concourse was synonymous with the idea of making it in America. Over and over, the American Dream was reenacted along its broad flanks, so often that the words Grand Concourse came to embrace not just a street but a way of life. It was no accident that novelists such as Avery Corman and E.L. Doctorow, two notable sons of the West Bronx, portrayed both the street and its world so eloquently in their fiction and that celebrated Bronxites ranging from director Stanley Kubrick to pop singer Eydie Gorme were forever linked to the geography of their childhoods. “My dear, it was Paradise!” the film critic Judith Crist once said a bit breathlessly in a conversation about coming of age in the neighborhood. She was speaking about the borough’s celebrated movie theater, of course, but in a very real sense her words embraced the whole of her West Bronx girlhood. The Concourse, as it was affectionately known, represented for many people a true street of dreams, an unblemished symbol of having unequivocally arrived. Those who could not make it to the street itself lived proudly nearby in its reflected glory, sometimes literally in its shadow, because the boulevard sat atop a steep ridge, and the sleek Art Deco apartment houses along its edges towered over the lower-lying structures on the side streets. Although the planning and architectural accomplishments that defined this part of the city often received short shrift by virtue of their location far from Manhattan, these achievements were nonetheless considerable. With their sunken living rooms, airy corner windows, and stylishly attired doormen, the Art Deco buildings of the West Bronx represented the ultimate in both urbanity and modernity. Nor were they the neighborhood ’s only jewels. At the famed Concourse Plaza Hotel, on the boulevard at 161st Street, the powerful Bronx Democratic organization feted senators and presidents, and the best bar mitzvahs and wedding receptions were held in lavish ballrooms adorned with flocked crimson wallpaper and hung with crystal chandeliers. At Loew’s Paradise, a populist palace erected at a moment when Hollywood reigned as the ultimate dream factory, real goldfish swam in a marble fountain, and décor included ten Introduction 7 thousand dollars’ worth of artificial birds and a ceiling ablaze with twinkling stars and drifting clouds. At Temple Adath Israel, at the corner of 169th Street, one of the majestic Jewish houses of worship along the Grand Concourse, prayers were sung for a time by a silvery-voiced young cantor named Richard Tucker, who became a leading operatic tenor of his era. Fordham Road, which bisected the Grand Concourse midway, was the Bronx’s answer to Fifth Avenue. At 161st Street, just steps to the west of the boulevard and so close that you could hear the cheering when Babe Ruth or DiMaggio hit a home run, sat the fabled Yankee Stadium, home of the powerhouse team whose members roamed the neighborhood like gods. Like many memory-glazed places, this one had its nightmare elements. Although it is easy to romanticize the life lived on and near the boulevard, that life had a darker side. It could suffocate as powerfully as it could nurture . The passage to adulthood, never uncomplicated, was no less treacherous for a young person living in a handsome apartment building on a prestigious street. For every garment-factory owner who basked in the attainment of his bourgeois dreams, a budding poet was suffocated by the relentlessly middle-class values that engulfed him. The emphasis on material success that pervaded this world left little room for the eccentric, the nonconformist, the late bloomer, or the overly sensitive. “If you admired a sunset,” said the Bronx-born cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer, who escaped the borough of his birth as fast as he could, “everyone assumed you were gay.” If you wanted to write sonnets rather than practice medicine, you were probably in the wrong place. Many people wouldn’t have lived there for the world. Others spent a lifetime trying...

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