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

4. “Something That Everybody Had in Awe”

78 “I was living in ‘a modern Building’” stainless steel on the front doors suggested schools of fish, the half circles on the entablature resembled stylized waves, and a person peering long enough at the green glass slabs inset in the entry area had the momentary and not unpleasant sensation of being under water. The main event, however, was the mosaics themselves, a fantasia of marine life executed in chips of stone in every color of the rainbow. Wide-eyed jellyfish and other aquatic creatures swam lazily through a tropical sea of bubbles, wavy lines, and tendrils of exotic plants. The charming, slightly goofy images were certainly the last thing anyone expected on this solid, upper-middle-class street. And everyone adored them. 1 • 2 For the great majority of the families who lived in these forward-looking apartment houses, the main emotion they evoked was uncomplicated pride; how could a person not revel in lodgings that both reflected and magnified one’s own sense of worth and achievement? Yet among some residents, these structures inspired more complex feelings, a profound sense of partaking of a singular moment in history. The political scientist Marshall Berman, who grew up in the West Bronx in the 1940s and 1950s, felt these emotions intensely. “For most of my life,” Berman writes in All That Is Solid Melts into Air, his 1982 meditation on Modernism and its power, “since I learned that I was living in ‘a modern building’ and growing up as part of ‘a modern family,’ in the Bronx of thirty years ago, I have been fascinated with the meaning of modernity.” For Berman, the Art Deco buildings of the West Bronx represented the same thrust toward an urban future expressed in the great glittering boulevards with which Baron Haussmann, under the patronage of Napoleon III, had replaced the narrow streets that characterized medieval Paris. “I can remember standing above the construction site for the Cross-Bronx Expressway,” writes Berman, who lived on College Avenue, a few blocks east of the boulevard. The Grand Concourse, from whose heights I watched and thought, was our borough’s closest thing to a Parisian boulevard. Among its most striking features were rows of large, splendid 1930s apartment houses: simple and clear in their architectural forms, whether geometrically sharp or biomorphically curved; brightly colored in contrasting brick, offset with chrome, beautifully interplayed with large areas of glass; open to light and air as if to proclaim a good life that was open 79 The small gem of a lobby in the so-called Fish building, a Ginsbern creation at 1150 Grand Concourse. The floor was a terrazzo starburst of golds, greens, and reds, and the elevator doors were accented with red and metal inlay. (Carl Rosenstein) 80 The multicolored mosaics on the façade of the Fish building, depicting giant, wide-eyed fish and surreal aquatic plants, were unique on the Grand Concourse and probably in the city. (New York Times) “I was living in ‘a modern Building’” 81 not just to the elite residents but to us all. The style of these buildings, known as Art Deco today, was called “modern” in their prime. Berman was by no means blind to Modernism’s dark side; he was witnessing one of its fiercest manifestations that very day as he contemplated preparations for the expressway soon to plow through the valley atop which Louis Risse’s “Great Wall of China” had been erected. But neither was he immune to Modernism’s allure. “For my parents,” Berman continues , “who described our family proudly as a ‘modern’ family, the Concourse buildings represented a pinnacle of modernity. We couldn’t afford to live in them—though we did live in a small, modest, but still proudly ‘modern’ building down the hill—but they could be admired for free, like the rows of glamorous ocean liners in port downtown.” 1 • 2 The Art Deco apartment houses along the Grand Concourse were the most dramatic features of the West Bronx landscape. They did not, however , exist in isolation. Even on the boulevard proper, they did not form an unbroken row but rather sprouted in clumps, as if nourished by patches of especially fertile soil. Interspersed with them, and lining the side streets, were great stretches of more modest five-story and six-story apartment houses. These structures, occupied by legions of small shopkeepers, civil servants, and garment-center cutters and...