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The Riverside Oval Association, an Audubon Park organization that builds community through landscaping and local-history programs, sponsored an oral history evening at the Grinnell on January 30, 2008, preserving a videotaped record of the conversation, as well as a transcript.
The Grinnell Centennial Planning Team is very grateful to the Riverside Oval Association for permission to publish the complete transcript of this oral history evening on our Centennial website; the conversation offers a detailed look at a difficult period in the Grinnell's life, told by people who were there and experienced it first-hand.
For information about the Riverside Oval Association and its projects, please contact co-chair Vivian Ducat .
RIVERSIDE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT: VOICES FROM THE GRINNELL
Jan. 30, 2008
CONNIE SUTTON
My thanks to Vivian Ducat for prodding me to get this project started.
I have long believed people living in Riverside Oval have witnessed and helped promote important social and political changes that have created a welcoming space for living together with racial, ethnic, and class diversity.
Their stories about their experiencing this happening are worth preserving for the future...
While the Grinnell was the first of the 3 pre-WWI large buildings in the oval, I look forward to hearing the stories from the Riveria and Audubon Terrace as well as from the buildings across the street.
We will begin the Grinnell oral histories with telling you when and why we moved into Grinnell, what it was like at the time, and what are key experiences we remember. After which we ask that you join in with your stories.
This event is being videotaped so that there can be follow-up and the material archived as a resource for historical analysis.
I will begin because I currently have lived here the longest, having moved into the rent-controlled Grinnell with my husband in the last month of March, 1963. I was pregnant, expecting in mid-April, but my son arrived early on April fool’s day, due to the move I believe. We moved into apartment7J, a 9-room apartment with wonderful views both north and south, and a rental of $179, having gone up from $135! I had lived in apartment buildings all of my previous life and but had never experienced anything like what happened when we moved in – namely neighbors whom I did not know came to our door with food and flowers — and to see what we had done to reconstruct the apartment which had not been touched for some 45 years, almost the same length of time I have lived in it now.
Why did we want to move into the Grinnell?? We had arrived in NYC in late 1954 and had lived since then on 163rd Street near upper Riverside Drive. My husband was working at Pyschiatric Institute as assistant director of research in the Bio-Psychology program and teaching at Columbia U. I was teaching anthropology at NYU. When I became pregnant we decided to remain in the city rather than move to the suburbs, as did most academic colleagues when they had children. I was determined to return to NYU the following semester. So I searched for a large apartment that would accommodate friends and family and a live-in student to help when we both had to go out.
I had my eye on the Grinnell and the Riviera and was tipped off that an elderly couple had died in apartment 7J and it would be vacant. I was also fascinated by the Grinnell because of its history: Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby love scene allegedly took place in the building; and Daddy Grace, a black evangelist preacher owned the building in the late 30s and40s when no colored people could rent. Moreover, I knew of George Bird Grinnell, a naturalist and anthropologist who wrote about the Cheyenne Indians, and learned that he was a member of the Grinnell family that owned the land on which the building was built. They had also built the famous Museum of the American Indian, located on Broadway and 155th until the mid-1990s [where my son would attend Indian craft classes in the summer].
My husband and I had been involved during the past nine years in trying to racially desegregate the buildings west of Broadway, the color line at the time. I was aware that the struggle was occurring in the Grinnell – my friend Alice Childress being the first black person to get an apartment in the building. She was the first black woman to get her plays professionally produced on stage in NYC, author of several books and the movie A Hero Ain’t Nothin’But A Sandwich.
I think that Ruth Johnson – director director of nursing services at Delafield Hospital, and her eight year-old daughter Robin moved in around the same time we did, making it the second non-white family in the building. Some six months or so after we moved in the Pimentels from the DR moved in and I recall Francia, who was about 10 years old at the time, and her younger brothers coming to the apartment to look at our new baby....afterwards they would all play together, with Francia overseeing the younger ones.
In the fall of 1965, my friend Maya Angelou moved in with us and stayed while she wrote her famous I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings. And in the same year I was able to help Julian Mayfield, African American playwright, author, and key actor in the movie Up Tight, get apartment 6H where he would sometimes hold meetings with members of the Black Power movement.
The building was not only diversifying racially and ethnically during the late 1960s but the people it was attracting were writers, artists, educators, etc. It was a place humming with creative people. Many of us living in the building would have dinners together, go to city events together, including protest marches of the time. Grinnell was acquiring a distinct character and becoming a kind of an enclosed village.
I recently asked my son David what he remembers about living in the Grinnell. His first answer was like that of all other friends I asked: the elevators often didn’t work and it was scary getting stuck in them; but he then went on to recall that he felt the building was like an extension of his own home apartment....you could go visit neighbors in the building, the kids would play games in the open spaces and across the basement space of the two wings. He remembers the games going up and down the stairs to the Morgan Place exit, and the fun of going to the roof of the Grinnell and looking around. The Grinnell building was safe space he said compared to what was becoming less safe on the streets from the ‘70s on. It was like your own community! This is also what Robin Johnson who lives on the lobby floor of the west side also said when I recently asked her the same question.
As an anthropologist, I concur with this...the Grinnell is a community -- a special and changing kind of a community with many ups and down but a community that has been significant to how we have lived our lives.
I turn now to Richard James to tell his story. Richard became a resident in 1972, 9 years after we moved in.
RICHARD JAMES
I don’t have prepared notes. I’ve thought over these past three weeks, we met and talked, should I prepare notes or should I not prepare notes? I decided not to for a variety of reasons that I won’t share, it’s not necessary to share with you.
When I moved in in 1972 I was married, I am not now. My wife and I then had a young child, one, who is now thirty-five, who’s a wonderful, wonderful son. And so for these - I’ve moved out and moved back in and I’ve had a wonderful affair with The Grinnell. And the reason I describe it as an affair is because what we’ve done with The Grinnell has been a remarkable story, an incredible story. And by the same token it has been an incredible dialogue of the McCoys and the Hatfields; it’s been so difficult and so tough. And I’d like to share some vignettes with you and some personal experiences with you, and then have you ask questions.
But before I do that there are just two gentlemen sitting in the audience who are personal to me, actually three people in the audience who are personal to me in terms of what I experience. One is Joel Rothschild, sitting right here, if the camera could swing to him. The other is Manny Gilyard, this gentleman right here in the front. And Doris Innes right up here. And the reason I do that is because we pass each other in the neighborhood, some of us are recent visitors and persons who live in the neighborhood and others of us pass each other and we don’t know who we are.
So let me begin with Joel. This building could not have come on board and done what we’ve done in terms of developing it in terms of Joel. But the irony of life, the irony of life, in terms of our expectations and our politics, our philosophies, our racial identity, is that Joel and I used to be, thirty years ago, bitter enemies, bitter enemies. Joel and I did everything that we could do to each other to destroy each other, almost everything. I’m exaggerating to make a point, I am, I’m exaggerating to make a point. I don’t know what it is, but I can go over to his house, have a glass of wine, sit and talk with him, commiserate, reflect, talk. He’d come over to my house, he has many times, reflect, and that’s been a healing experience for me and a learning experience in terms of how to get something done, it really has. It’s remarkable. The same thing with Manny, with Doris. No, no, not [an] enemy, Doris, [but] just in terms of understanding the dynamics of what’s going on and sharing and participating. We’ve had our differences and we’ve had similarities.
I don’t know about all of you – I’m sixty-four, I grew up in this neighborhood, I have left this neighborhood a couple of times. The first time I left this neighborhood [was] when I was seventeen and a half, eighteen, I moved down to the Village - I’m a graduate of NYU. I never took any of Connie’s courses, [I] didn’t know Connie was a professor at NYU. I’m a graduate of NYU, I have an English degree from NYU, and I’m also an attorney. But the first time I came into this building was around 1955-56, maybe ’57. I was a Boy Scout, I was thirteen, fourteen years old, and I was afraid to come to the west side - I was afraid to come to this building in particular, but I was afraid to cross Broadway. That is not an exaggeration.
So before what I was saying, I was exaggerating in terms of Joel, but I’m not exaggerating now. We’re talking about ’54, ’55, born in 1943, I’m at thirteen, fourteen, in ’55, ’56, I’m a Boy Scout and the lone White Boy Scout that we had in our troop lived in this building. And I had the assignment to come to this building to talk to him. And you say, “Well Richard, what’s his name and who was he?” and I don’t have the vaguest idea, I couldn’t tell you, but I have that as a living memory that I want to share with you. And so there was a kind of a point of demarcation between Broadway and going west, Riverside Drive, and Amsterdam, and Edgecombe and that area. You’re talking about a migration of predominantly Black people – now it’s Dominican and Latino people, but predominantly then in my generation of Black people. I came into the building and I don’t even remember if there was security the way we have it, went up to the apartment, and I was just blown away. This kid who’s going up and trying to induce this young man to join the Scout troop. As I remember - I haven’t thought about this a lot, but I think the troop number was 703 or something like that. But that was the connection, my first connection and memory of this building. And then my former wife and I moved into this building in 1972.
The neighborhood is a remarkable neighborhood. I would say in terms of its resiliency, its energy and stuff, it’s kind of the place to live, the west side. But it’s not made for everybody, this west side neighborhood. I think I would advocate…argue that we have kind of the best of the best.
Now my background. I practiced law for twelve years; I’m an English teacher now I teach at a high school in The Bronx and I teach three subjects, I teach African-American history, I teach journalism and I teach English, and I love it, love it, the kids, the vibrancy of the kids and stuff. The population of kids that I teach is predominantly Latino kids, Dominican, by and large African-American and so forth. So the position that I come from, why I identify so strongly with this building, is because I think the identity, the energy of this country and the resilience of this country is incorporating immigrants into our society and being accepting. That’s the energy of this country.
If this country is exclusive, as some would have it, and there are many ways to define exclusivity, we can define exclusivity by color, which we have traditionally done. We can define exclusivity by income. I would say many of us, not all of us, have good incomes, or with husbands and wives we struggle and make good incomes, we could define it that way. Property ownership - I don’t care how you define it, but the important thing here is that we need to really find a common denominator to accept all of us in this tent that we’re under. Muslims, different denominations of Muslims. I’m not Muslim. I have the most screwed up family that you would ever want to have in your life, I really do. Unfortunately they all have since passed. My sister was Jewish, [the] sister that brought me along was Jewish. My younger sister who died in this building was Muslim. I was raised as a Roman Catholic. My mother was raised as a Baptist. Whoa! Hello! Does that set you on fire?
More seriously, I can talk from different perspectives, and we can answer specific questions about the building. The fact that this building has come as far as it has come is a testament of God’s love, God’s love? I don’t know. The intelligence, ambition, I don’t know. This building has been a cornerstone in this man’s life, this man’s life, that lady’s life, this lady’s life, that woman’s life, this man’s life, my life, and some others, Robin, Robin’s mother, other people.
Steve Simon
Didn’t you have something with helping this? Don’t you have a particular vantage point? Weren’t you the manager of this building for a while?
Richard James
Let’s get back to that question.
Steve Simon
We’ll get back to it? Okay. You’ll come back to it later.
Richard James
If people are interested.
GWEN GILYARD
I was hoping that he would cover that, because I know that he knows more about what happened to get this building started to become what it is now. But we’ll get to it anyway.
I’ll tell my story about when I first met The Grinnell, or knew about The Grinnell. I had just come from Africa and I had to room with a friend of mine who was in 788. And she said to me, “Be careful when you pass that building down on the corner, at Edward Morgan Place and Riverside.” And I couldn’t understand why she said it, and I asked her, I said, “Why?” “Because those White people just stare at you all the time from there. I only see White people going in and out of there.” She had never been in there, and of course I had just - I only stayed with her for three months.
Steve Simon [?]
What year was this?
Gwen Gilyard
1968. Of course there were some Black people here then, at least two families, but I didn’t know it and she didn’t know it because they weren’t the ones who were standing on the outside and going into the doors and were probably giving her funny looks. So she said, “Be careful when you go there.” Little did I know that I would ever be living here, so I followed her advice. When I would pass here going to the store I would go on the back, or I would just walk a little fast. Because people didn’t look friendly, to be perfectly frank with you, those who were standing around, they didn’t look friendly. The building looked very exclusive from the outside.
Well my family was growing by one, about to become a second, and Manny decided we’d have to find someplace to live. And as daring as he is he said, “Okay, I think I like this area.” So we came over here. And because of the fact that he speaks Spanish, some anyway, he speaks some Spanish – as as far as I’m concerned it’s a lot – he he spoke with the super who was Latino and he got the apartment like that. So he had me come over, brought me over to look at it. I liked it, you know, the same outside, it looked rather impressive. But the moment I walked into that courtyard I said, “What is this?” A dingy-looking thing. And it remained that way until 1989 when the walls were cleaned and some other things were done. Because I don’t know how many of you knew, it looked terrible except to those of us who lived here, really terrible. I felt very depressed. What is this he’s bringing me into?
We went into the lobby, we saw some antiquated furniture which I liked, and then we went on upstairs. And then my impression changed because I saw the big rooms and the light from the windows and all that. And it changed even further when I met the neighbors, the Gordons were very friendly, and we’re still friendly to this day. We opened our doors, our door and their door, and the kids went in and out of the apartments backward and forward, we didn’t lock the doors. In the summertime we opened the doors and the breeze just blew through. Next to us in F was the movie director who directed Gloria, I believe he directed Gloria, Cassavetes. He had lived next to us. His daughter had the apartment then; two lovely children she had there. And on the other side of us were a private order of some nuns. Some people say that some of us might have influenced those nuns because one of them babysat fairly frequently for us, and another of them got married to one of the – I guess he was an ex-monk, got married. He had been a monk, the one that she married.
Well when we came here I was seven months pregnant with my last child, who was born in January. Believe it or not the elevator was out the night I went into labor, and I had to walk down the stairs. But I suppose what it did was that it made the labor shorter, because it was shorter than it was with the other kids. It could have been for other reasons, too, but definitely I had to walk down those stairs from the fifth floor. And the fifth floor really means the sixth floor, right. And no banisters to this day, thirty-four years later still no banisters.
Anyway, the neighbors were really very good. It was a tradition that you welcome people when they come in on the floor, so we were welcomed very well. And it remained that way, you know, with the people who were there, the ones who came in later. And it’s that impression that I had when I first walked in here started changing.
And then there were things that other people were doing on their floors. They were having “Meet the Neighbors,” when people came in they were having “Meet the Neighbors” nights. And then we had annual “Meet the Neighbors” in the courtyard. And I will never forget Ninon [Omura] and her Japanese lanterns, Rose Omura, she had those Japanese lanterns, and it looked good out there. We stopped it, I’m not sure exactly why we stopped doing it, but it was really a very wonderful thing to do. And I always felt that it was something that we really should keep up, because you get to meet people on a different level.
And we came in here to the problems. Not at the moment it wasn’t, but later on it got to be that there was no hot water, there was no heat. Joel came down to our house once and he said, “Where’d you get heat?” We didn’t have heat.
Woman [I think Connie Sutton]
Christmas no heat, I remember.
Gwen Gilyard
It was the sun, because we were on the south side, we were in 5G, and the sun made it warm. But we had to go to our friends in The Bronx to take a shower, take a bath. And today if it happened of course we could go to Riverbank and swim and then take a shower. We didn’t have a Riverbank at that time.
Steve Simon
One of the services of this association will be to help you set up an arrangement with other nearby buildings so you won’t have… We’re trying to develop relationships here with other buildings. You won’t have to go to Riverbank.
Gwen Gilyard
But I remember that winter in the latter part of the ‘70s I just stayed cold – during during the middle of the ‘70s rather – I just stayed cold. The reason I stayed cold is because I couldn’t even go to work and get warm because the Board of Education where I taught you know I taught with the Board of Education, they had a limited amount of oil that they could use. I think they shut the school down at a certain time of the day and all that. So I’d go to school cold, remain cold, come home and would still be cold. And it’s a wonder to this day I don’t have pneumonia or TB or something.
The part I thought Richard was going to do about what happened to change all of this, I know that we in the community in The Grinnell did demonstrations, we hung out banners, we had T-shirts, and we had fairs within the building and out in the streets as well. Would you believe it that we had a fair once on the first floor on the west side? And what did we have at the fair? We sold food, we had music, we had artists and craftspeople as vendors, and we also did it in the lobbies, in each lobby, the west side lobby and the east side lobby. And we got notoriety because we had the banners hanging and we had people coming in. There’s a television channel – I don’t remember which one it was – but came and took pictures of what was going on. And that was publicized because I couple of people spoke to me about what was going on.
How much that had to do with our winning our case I don’t know, but it certainly brought us together, the people here in the building were brought together with all of these activities.
Connie Sutton
Just in case some people don’t know, all of this was happening because during the ‘70s when rent control still existed and rent controlled buildings were really fighting against it and having problems, the owners of this building had wanted to break up the apartments and they couldn’t do that because it was too difficult to reconstruct it into separate, smaller apartments to get more rent. And so what they started to do was cut back on services, no lights in the hallway, elevators not working, no heat, etcetera, until that was like those Winters that we had.
Steve Simon
Rent strikes.
Connie Sutton
Rent strikes. And what they also tried to do was to bring in welfare families, because they figured they could get more money from the welfare families than they could get from rent control, etcetera. That created a certain amount of conflict between more middle class Black and Latino and White families and the welfare families. And we had in here a cell in the ‘70s of the national heroin group, a cell we discovered when they cracked it nationally. These guys were lovely; they lived on the second floor on the west side and they would help you with your packages, they were really nice. And then lo and behold we discovered that they’re a cell and they had to move out.
We also had here on one of the J lines - was it 3J, Robin, do you remember what number it was? It was one of the lower floors.
Man
The working women.
Connie Simon
No, they were selling drugs and prostitution there. And it took us three…
Man
A whorehouse.
Connie Sutton
A whorehouse, right. So we had a lot of things that were going on in the City that was happening and the landlord…
Gwen Gilyard
The reason why I didn’t go into some of that is because I thought Richard was going to cover it.
I’m going to go on, because I am looking this from a very personal impression. Because there are things that you can get on a level from how it affects you personally that you just can’t get the other way.
Anyway, there were other organizers I want to mention, like Vera Sims, Marilyn Nixon, and Roberta Gaddis. They were some of the people who organized a lot of these activities that were being done and they led the children in doing them. Mark Gordon was one of the people who took the children to the library and made a stamp club. He and Barbara also had a peace group, and they took the kids to the Soviet Union. They did marches here in the States and they took the kids to the Soviet Union. And all of this has an impression on how you feel about the building, and what happened.
Later on Vera Sims and I had a rites of passage group, and we were assisted by some other people here. Mrs. Zamora ran an official nursery. And several of the children in the building went to her nursery. Janet Olsen was the piano teacher. Ruth Johnson had a farm in Wallkill, New York, and she had different families who would drive those two hours, right? – hour and a half, to do cooperative farming which gave the children an opportunity to see what farming was like and see what it’s like to put your hands in the dirt and how food grew.
The community ballet teacher as Aren. Almost everybody around here went to Aren for ballet.
Man
Did she live in the building, too?
Gwen Gilyard
No. I don’t know where…
Man
She lived on 163rd, 652 West 163rd.
Gwen Gilyard
And there are many other remembrances that are connected with the building and the community, like the Easter egg hunt that was given by the Church of the Intercession. Ernie’s, our main supermarket, where if you went there you’d see somebody you knew from some building in the community, and which we no longer have the opportunity to do that anymore. Ernie’s is where El Mundo is now.
And one time there was a big snowstorm and the cars got stuck out there in the snow in front of our building, and all the kids and their fathers went out and pushed the cars out and got them started. And of course they laughed about it; it was a lot of fun for them.
Woman
And nobody charged money.
Gwen Gilyard
No, nobody charged money.
And I think I mentioned the “Meet the Neighbors” nights. And the food co-op, which was really wonderful. Of course you shared in the purchasing of the food, we shared in the hosting and the selling of the food. And I wonder if anybody remembers that Dr. Omura always liked to buy carrots. He bought more carrots than anything else. I don’t know that a man can live by carrots alone, but he certainly bought a lot of carrots.
And Vienna and Rose Omura used to lead the Christmas caroling outside of the giant Christmas tree in the courtyard that Lefty [the superintendent] always put up. We knew Lefty was the one who was responsible for that.
And then there’s the gardening that Janet Olsen started, and Manny Gilyard and his committee continued and perfected, and helped to make The Grinnell a showplace in the community.
Man
We still have the trees.
Gwen Gilyard
And some people may not agree but the Jeri Curl boys did something, of course other than selling dope. When I first came into this community you could not walk away from Broadway without being mugged sometimes. But when those guys started hanging around the low class muggers stopped.
Many people, men and women:
We had a higher class of muggers.
Gwen Gilyard
They didn’t mug you, they were out for the big stuff.
Anyway, that’s it.
Q andA SESSION
Steve Simon
We’re going to turn it over to the audience in just a moment, but Richard, do you want to add something?
Richard James
What a lot of people don’t understand is that what’s been described as kind of an anomaly, it doesn’t happen anymore, but the owners of the property abandoned the property. And when they abandoned the property they owed the City three, four hundred thousand dollars in back taxes. So the property went onto the City tax rolls, the people In REM…
Man [I think it’s Wayne Benjamin]
No, it did not go on the tax rolls. It came off the tax rolls.
Richard James
Yeah. But in REM - at that point in time it was called - the legal body…
Man
The Board of Estimate.
Richard James
The Board of Estimate. And so what happened then is you had two, I think two, philosophical/political/historical elements merging. One is you had this group of people, Whites and Blacks, historically connecting, families, children, who didn’t think in the context of being White or Black, they thought in the context of being human beings, and they shared, and sharing was the most important element on the west side in this building, and - I have to watch my language - the building situation was in political, monetary chaos. It was up for grabs. And so there was no sponsor. Everything that we hear about now today there is an outside sponsor. What does the sponsor want to do? The sponsor wants to make money. There’s no problem with making money. There was no sponsor; we were the sponsors. And so that enabled us to come together and not think of a profiteer, but to think of each other and how we were going to come together as a community. And so if you’re having trouble understanding that, that was the confluence of events that brought us together.
Wayne Benjamin [I think]
The landlord abandoned their property, and you were then forced to come together and manage the property yourselves.
Man
Well, we got the administratorship.
Steve Simon [?]
There’s a history behind that, there’s some of us that can talk to that, but we’ll get into that, but maybe we’ll take some questions.
Wayne Benjamin
Well, let me just follow up on what Richard said because once again one can lose sight of where we were, not we Grinnell but we the City of New York. A quarter of a century ago there was a period of time when the City of New York owned something like 50% of the residential properties in upper Manhattan. And there was a tremendous amount of abandonment. I believe Harlem lost 50% of its population from the 1950s to the 1970s. So even as grand as this building is architecturally, some would look at it and say it had no value. There are two wonderful buildings in the low 140s on Riverside Drive with River and Park views that were in the news several years ago that were owned by what’s called the Dracula landlord Morfesis. I know people who lived there whose children talk about growing up without hot water, walking up to the ninth floor in what’s supposed to be an elevatored building. So it’s a very different type of environment. And people can’t imagine that now when they think of the real prices now, but that’s not what the City of New York was like a quarter of a century ago.
Steve Simon
All right. We’re going to turn it over to the audience.
Woman
…765 Riverside Drive, and the super turned us away because he wanted to keep all the older people in the building. He didn’t realize if he got younger people in it would turn over. So he kept us away, we came back later, and we took the first apartment we could get and we’ve been there over forty years, and love it. But it was a little turbulent moving in here. Thanks.
Steve Simon
Thank you. Does anybody have any questions?
Woman
Could somebody talk a little bit about - I heard a mention of a Jericho game?
Steve Simon
JHeri Curl. JHeri, J-H-E-R-I, Curls, the Jheri Curls gang. They used to hang out on the corner. They used to hang out outside the bodega on the corner of 157th and Morgan Place. And there was a major police-DA raid, and they were all swept up in it, some time in the ‘80s.
Gwen Gilyard
Or was it ‘90s?
Richard James [?]
They dominated the corner, and they were threatening and intimidating.
Man
I think they ?? [owned?] the building across the street.
Richard James
They made it clear that if you mess with them you could lose your life. At one point part of our cooperation in this building was on the corner apartment, 1A, we allowed the FBI to set up cameras, surveillance, on the ground level and from the roof. And so they were able to take license plate numbers, they were able to take pictures and so forth, and that really led to their indictment and conviction.
Man
You’re giving away classified information.
Woman
This is the ‘70s?
Man
No, this is late ‘80s, early ‘90s.
Man
Now we can talk about it.
Connie Sutton
I just wanted to give a small, fast I hope, remembrance of what happened between the transition of going bankrupt and of becoming a coop. And that was 1978 it went bankrupt. This was after all these terrible things that we were experiencing, along with a number of other buildings that went bankrupt. And I do remember that as a last effort the owners tried to get a million dollar, in fact were getting, a historical grant of I think…
Man
PCP [?] loan.
Connie Sutton
It wasn’t a loan, it was a grant. And we objected because we said they would not really deal with all of the systemic problems that we were having in the building. And I at that time was going back and forth because I was doing field work in Nigeria, and I came here - which had just gotten over the Biafran war and so on - and I thought oh, isn’t this building wonderful, how all of us can get together, really work together compared to what was going on there. So then we got what’s called the 7J interim, as a number of buildings did
Man
67A [?].
Connie Sutton
Whatever it was, we were going to run it…
Man
You’re 7J.
Connie Sutton
…where we would show that we could run the building. I came back, and then we ran the building. And the City owned the building, and the City wanted to sell this building and the others that they were owning. And they had said that they were asking $100 an apartment.
Man
250.
Connie Sutton
Was it 250? Whatever, okay.
Man
They put you in the TIL Program.
Connie Sutton
But at the time they wanted more for this building. And also at the time the bank decided they wanted the building. And that’s when we had these enormous protests, Dinkins was Mayor, to stop the bank from buying the building.
Man
Dinkins was County Clerk.
Connie Sutton
No, he was Mayor at the time, I think.
Man
Not in the ‘70s.
Connie Sutton
No, it was in the ‘80s.
Man
Koch was Mayor, Koch was still Mayor.
Connie Sutton
…he said “no.” Reagan got in, and they went up to $200,000 and we argued, the negotiating team, we’d better buy it because if we don’t buy it we’re going to lose it. And so we bought this building beyond what was being asked for in the Bronx buildings that were being sold, against the objection of a number of people living in the building, for $250,000 with a very liberal…
Man
So it was about twenty-five hundred per apartment or so, roughly.
Connie Sutton
No, it was for our apartments which are nine - for $4,500.
Man
But based on the size.
Man
The down payment was 10%.
Connie Sutton
It was very, very liberal. But it was that shift to Reaganism that made people come together here and agree - because they were fighting before about not paying the City.
Man
Well, does anybody deny at this point that it was a good deal?
Connie Sutton
No, of course not. But I just wanted to go through what that period was when we were running the building and then allowed to bid for it. And the bank had tried to get in and we said “no.”
Woman
In what year was the building built?
Steve Simon
1910-1911.
Connie Sutton
I have a statement. It was started in 1908 and finished in 1909 or ’10. But historically you can get a different.
Man [I’m hopelessly mired in who is who]
Historically apparently there was an original development plan has the earlier date, but that plan apparently did not move forward, and an affiliate of that company, or a relative, continued with a slightly different plan which was what was actually built. But I think Christopher Gray wrote about this the Times several years ago in response to that very question.
Man
It sounds like we should be planning a 100th anniversary party.
Man
If not this year, the next two.
Man
In what year did you close off the side entrances? I won’t ask why, but…
Man [I think Steve Simon]
It’s a good question. That would have been about - and Joel and Manny can help with that - 1977-78, Manny, ‘77-’78?
Manny
I think it was before, but it was around that time. And the reason that it was closed is that there were situations like pocketbook snatching and youngsters would run in the door that we use now, snatch a pocketbook and run up the stairs. So by blocking that off they wouldn’t be able to do it.
Man (Joel Rothschild?)
But we paid a price for that, because my wife was a violinist. She would come from a concert after midnight, and she was accustomed to going straight from the subway into the side entrance, which was a short distance. Now with her clothes she had to go clear around the building, and it was a very hostile territory at that time. It was the only thing to do.
Man
Interestingly enough there were debates about [it], as with everything, that people contemplate and decide, there are debates about everything. Because there’s no - people have different opinions.
Man
Different needs.
Richard James
This is just my push. But in a democracy you have to tolerate different opinions, ridiculous as they are, you have to listen to people, you have to because that’s what makes a healthy exchange, and be tolerant. And so we had all kinds of exchanges. I don’t know what Board it is; we’ve had so many different Boards. For those of you who don’t live here and you’re getting an impression, there’s no one individual, there’s no one entity, group, philosophy or whatever; it’s been a hodge-podge of different groups, different philosophies, different people and stuff, tolerating and exchanging that has made us survive to this point. Some stronger at other times than other times. And so I remember with Wayne, the fact that Wayne came in and Wayne is an architect and he offered his advice and his training helped, I think it was during his time, I’m not quite sure, but I have a vague recollection that the point at which we decided to build that booth out there…
Connie Sutton [I think]
When was that?
Richard James
’81-’82, it’s hard to get a grip on it.
Man
After ’87.
Woman
After ’87.
Woman
It was in the ‘90s.
Richard James
But there were so many robberies and molestations and criminal activities going on with this side gate, we couldn’t police it and everything. And the other point to remember is that right now the guys who work here are terrific guys, I personally think, and they’ve now been here fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years, thirty years, some of these employees. And so we’ve gone through kind of a change, blocking that off, the guard booth and so forth, and now we don’t really have those problems anymore. And I don’t know when we move onto the next discussion, I don’t have a sense of what this Oval is doing, I’ve lost contact with the Oval. I used to have contact; I don’t have it anymore.
Steve Simon
We’re going to reestablish that contact. Jane [?], you have a question?
Jane
For those of you that raised children in this community, did any of them go to local public schools?
Steve Simon
Good question.
Woman
I can answer that. [Cross talk.] I’ll tell you personally.
Steve Simon
Do you want to say something, Connie?
Connie Sutton
No, my son did not go to public school because he started school toward the late ‘60s and they already had guns and drugs in the public school here. I sent him to Walden. And then I sent him, we sent him, to Fieldston, and he did not like Fieldston, and he turned and told my deceased husband and myself that he was glad he grew up here because the kids in Fieldston had no idea of race and class. They wouldn’t even - the parents wouldn’t even let their children and play with him here.
Richard James
My son went to 169. I myself went to 169. I myself graduated from George Washington High School.
Steve Simon
Now, 169 is no longer…
Richard James
The school that I went to is no longer 169, they’ve long since torn that down. 168th-169th Street, yes.
Steve Simon
It’s now 128.
Richard James
Yeah, 128. My son went there and then the neighborhood was so difficult and tough and my - being married at the time - we decided and we moved him down to Wagner High School, Junior High School, on 157th Street. So he used to get on the train and go on to Wagner.
Man
157th?
Richard James
57th Street, on the east side, Wagner. I forget now, it’s been a long time. But then he did come back up and attend A. Philip Randolph on the campus of City College. Now I have a fifteen-year-old, Nicole, and so Nicole goes to the High School of Math, Science and Engineering at City College. So I’m an advocate of public education, strongly, and I’m an advocate that that is a national-state responsibility. And I think that personally. And we’re all going to die. I say that to say that I’m not afraid of death in any context, but as we move along in life, and if God is willing, public education and that responsibility is something that we have to press. If we become an elitist nation, an elitist nation, [and] we already are to some extent - now I’m proselytizing - but if we become an elitist nation to the point that a sound public education gets away from us then we’re going to become a lost country. That’s my fundamental belief. Sorry!
Steve Simon
Did we mention that Richard was a vice-president at Bronx Community College?
Richard James
I was at one time, not any more.
Steve Simon
Did you mention that?
Richard James
No.
Gwen Gilyard
I was going to say that my children went to various kinds of schools. They were in special programs, and I think if your child can be in a special program you allow them to do it. And then they went to my schools, wherever I taught, they went there sometimes because I could keep a better eye on them. And it varied, whatever I thought was the best place for them, and I think that’s what anybody should do, whatever they think is the best for their child or their children that is what they should choose really.
Steve Simon
And since I don’t have children they did not go to local public schools. But I did.
Harriet? One second, one second, Stella hasn’t asked a question yet.
Stella
I’m sorry I came in late. Maybe my question has been answered. But what is the purpose of the Oval group, this group here? What do you plan to do?
Steve Simon
Well, we did say something in the beginning. Basically we’re trying to develop some community camaraderie and some community involvement. And so one thing we do is raise money to put tree guards around the tree and try to beautify the area. We’re trying to maintain the Oval itself right below the building in the middle of Riverside Drive and we have plantings there, and we do other things around. Harriet has been very active with the sitting area on the south side of 155th Street which is sort of a no man’s land, and we try to maintain that and try to keep that clean. And we’re just trying, we’re trying with this lecture series or whatever you want to call it, we’re trying to just bring people together and try to develop more of a sense of community.
Vivian Ducat
And please sign the sign-in sheet before you leave; that helps.
Steve Simon
And we’re willing to do almost anything you want to suggest.
Harriet.
Harriet
Back to education. When we moved into the neighborhood PS 28, 155th and Amsterdam, had been recently complete[d]. And it was obsolete from the minute that it opened, overcrowded. It was just one race of children in the school. And I remember the d?? now, it was a very political group.
Steve Simon
Who now live in this building.
Harriet
Yeah, yeah. And they sent their children there, and there were two White children in the school and the school seemed to accommodate them in not such good ways…
Man
5, R, 3, 2 [????].
Harriet
…taking them ?? research section. As a believer in public education I looked around in District 6 and found 187 to be very acceptable. It was a K through 8 school. And again, nothing better than public education. I’m a product of it and a teacher with ??? education. And I had seen PS 28 as a teacher, and it just didn’t pass.
Steve Simon
Joel, you must have something more to contribute to this.
Joel
Well, first of all on the subject of PS 28, actually all four of my older children went there.
Woman
Including that one over there.
Joel
Yeah, including Michael.
Michael
I remember being the only White boy in my second grade class. And I didn’t even notice it, but I kind of remember that experience.
Man
Not really noticing it.
Michael
Not really noticing it.
Joel
The kids in the school, kids who stayed, stayed on, as my three daughters did, it was very funny, they were conscious of Black and White, but they weren’t conscious of who was Black and White. So all of their friends they regarded as being their color, regardless of what their color was. Kids were color blind at that point. Michael, who’s here, he lasted partway through the first grade, and the reason was quite simple.
Michael
Second grade.
Joel
I think it was first. I’m not sure. But in any case I remember very well what happened. My wife went in for an interview with his teacher, and his teacher immediately complained that he looked out the window all the time. He could read and so forth. And Dottie said, “Well maybe he’s bored.” She said, “Yes, he’s bored,” as though that was his fault. So she walked down the hall immediately to the AP in charge of earliest grades, she explained the problem. The AP said, “I have a problem. We have only one class now of people either in first (or second grade - I thought it was first) who have any hope of going to college at this point.”
Woman
In first grade?
Joel
Yes. This was the conditions in the building at that time. And she said, “And he’s in it. I don’t know where to move him, but I’ll move him into…” what was - they didn’t have deliberate tracks, but it sorted out that way. So he got moved into a class which was entirely Black except for himself because the teacher there was an older teacher and had some understanding of education, wasn’t just a fresh girl who was about to have a baby and leave the school, and had no interest.
Steve Simon [?]
Is this the early ‘60s?
Joel
Yes…
Michael
1968.
Joel
…This is the early ‘60s.
Man/Woman
The late ‘60s.
Woman
Can I speak up for 28? My son K??n went to 28. And he graduated from there. And I remember one thing that impressed me that the teachers who were there when he was in the sixth grade were the same teachers there when he was in the first grade. You see I have a personal philosophy about education that wherever your child goes to school you have to take a direct and personal interest. When he was even going I said to myself wherever he goes to school I have to be informed and I can ??? I loved his teachers, I mean we just really had some great teachers. But also they like to see concerned parents, too. And also he went to A. Philip Randolph.
Joel
The crucial thing about PS 28 at that time was the teachers’ strike. At the time of the teachers’ strike the parents in the school, together with some of the staff, opened the school in spite of the strike, we kept it open. And during that time we picked up a bunch of new teachers who came in and who were really excited about this school which had bucked the strike and had remained open. And for a brief time, five years, six years, seven years, there was a remarkable group of teachers there, some of whom people in this building know very well because they went on to other very good schools in the City, like Central Park East and so forth. And the Andriases [Note: Jane Andrias taught at PS 28, but the family did not live at the Grinnell.] were part of that.
Man
Nick Andreas also lived in this building?
Joel
Rick Andreas’ wife.
Man
??? taught ???
Man
What was that?
Woman
She taught at 28.
Joel
At 28. And they were permitted to really run a very exciting school. And for that reason Michael’s three younger sisters managed to graduate from the school. But that was a remarkable situation.
Man
Actually I’m a little bit fascinated by the famous people who lived here. Cassavetes lived in this building?
Steve Simon [?]
His daughter did.
Gwen Gilyard
I think he lived here, too. At the time that we came in the daughter was living here.
Man
So what do you have upstairs?
Connie Sutton
I have “Gloria.”
Man
Because I remember when it was filmed out here when they kept on doing the car crash scene.
Richard James
But the context for people who may not understand, the Cassavetes we’re talking about is John Cassavetes, the Cassavetes who’s both and actor and a director. And when you don’t think about this stuff a lot you forget the context in which it happened, what year it was. I do remember this, Hugo Zamora was the treasurer of the coop. I remember it because I negotiated the contract with the film company personally. I worked at Bronx Community College, I worked for Roscoe Brown, and I used to sneak away from the College to negotiate these kinds of things, including other kinds of things, contracts, all kinds of contracts. But with Cassavetes we met in a midtown hotel, Hugo and I, and the contract price - don’t hold me to this, I don’t remember exactly - we’re going back to the ‘60s, so we’re talking about something like twenty-five, thirty thousand dollars. And Hugo and I - when my wife and I moved into the building we lived on the eighth floor and Hugo and I were neighbors. Well Hugo and I have never been the best of friends.
Here’s the thing, here’s the thing: I really deeply believe in this, to my soul, is that you’re going to have political differences and philosophies with people and you’re going to argue and debate and stuff like that, but when you have a common cause you really have to come together and kind of reach an agreement. That’s what politics is about. And it’s painful because you have to compromise on some things that you otherwise would not compromise on, but you have to do it to move the agenda ahead. That’s what politics is about. And it hurts because you’re compromising on stuff that you would say to yourself, “What am I doing?” and stuff like that. So when people have equal power - so Hugo’s more - I will not say an unkind thing about this man, I will just say we didn’t get along.
And so we went to the hotel and we’re sitting down with John Cassavetes, the movie director, we’re sitting down with people from Hollywood, the financiers, the executive directors and stuff like that, and they want to rent space in the building. And Hugo Zamora was like - it was - I’m a negotiator, that’s one of the skills that I have, God blessed me with negotiating skills. I can talk and I can see the other side and I can negotiate. Hugo on the other side sees the bottom line. You know what I mean? He sees the bottom line. So I exerted a little bit more power and exuberance than he did, and this is going to be it. So back then, it’s ’81, ’82, I don’t remember the year we signed. So when they came in the way I got duped with the “Gloria” contract is that it seemed like they stayed here for two or three months filming “Gloria.” They took every event, Cassavetes was fine but the financiers, executive financiers and stuff, and so they stayed here. And every ounce of filming opportunity, car crashes, apartments [?], they did everything they could to maximize their investment in their location. You know what I mean? But at the time we needed the money.
Man
We got a roof.
Richard James
Roof, we got a roof, we got mailboxes, we got some other kind of stuff.
Wayne Benjamin
It’s the official “Gloria” roof.
Well just a bit of trivia, the original and the remake of “Gloria” were both filmed here. But this is the second or third time that Richard has pointed out that there was someone who may not be his dearest friend in the building. But it’s also that I understand very well. And I also in 2008 see a very different Wayne Benjamin from 1987, because I can be very project-oriented and very focused on what is it we’re trying to accomplish, and I really don’t want to hear…
Man
Is that called anal?
Wayne Benjamin
No, that’s called being focused. But to some extent getting the job done can be achieved in any number of ways. And I had a professor in grad school who said, “If you can sort of stand the level of tension, or intellectual tension, you will probably end up with a better product because you’re taking all of that energy and putting it into that.” But the thing that helps make it all work is going back to this notion of community, and having the opportunities to sit down, if not break bread but to open the bottle, and to be together in a very different setting. And that is something that I think happened more when I first came to the building, and it sounds like it happened a great deal more in the earlier years. And I think it’s that kind of activity that can allow you to have the level of tension but not get to the point where you are mortal enemies.
Steve Simon
Manny, do you want to have the last question? As long as you don’t… Oh, one second.
Joel [?]
I want to raise one thing that I think has been overlooked, but Manny you go first.
There’s a phase of the history which is of tremendous importance and has not really been mentioned, and that was the extraordinary rent strike which we ran for a number of years just before ’77. And the fact that this was so tremendously successful really belongs to the Beinarts, two attorneys who volunteered for Met Council and who were superlative tacticians.
Man
Was that Mel Beinart?
Joel
Mel Beinart.
Wayne Benjamin
Oh he lived here, too?
Joel
And what Mel taught us to do was to run a successful rent strike. Now a rent strike is not the withholding of rent, it’s use of your rent to collectively bargain. And we did this magnificently. And there were details as to how it was done so the strike could not be broken through the courts, it was done very skillfully, but the center of it was a contract which Mel negotiated with the landlord in return for a substantial amount of money, I think $15,000 that we released. That contract said that for every day without heat individual shareholders [he doesn’t mean shareholders] could deduct a half day’s rent, for every day without hot water they could deduct a half day’s rent, and for every day without elevator service they could also deduct a half day’s rent. Now the way this worked was at the end of the month you made out a check which was your rent check, you made it out to yourself and you gave it to the treasurer who was Hugo. Hugo Zamora then kept all the checks, and at a certain point the time would come to negotiate with the landlord and to release the checks, or release a sufficient amount. And we negotiated the amount that was going to be released. With this we bought a new burner for the boiler, not a new one, a secondhand one, not a very good, we got cheated. We also bought many, many loads of fuel oil when things were cold. And in the end we used that money to advance, loan [lend] to our staff their take-home pay so that we could induce them to return instead of going on strike for not getting their pay. So this rent strike was central, and it was really that rent strike which built the sense of unity which then went forward to take the building away from the landlord and to get a 7A administrator appointed.
Steve Simon
I’m glad you added that footnote. Manny.
Manny
I don’t know. I had a few thousand things I think I’ve forgotten.
Steve Simon
Save any question you have for your wife for later.
Manny
One of the things I think I wanted to mention is Hugo Zamora, a Latino from Cuba originally. Hugo is a beautiful person, and if he has a responsibility he will adhere to it. And being treasurer he was concerned about making sure monies were straight. And we had a problem in our apartment, and I withheld monies from the rent. And I remembered it turned out to be an amount of money he thought may have gone astray or something. And he spoke to me about it. And it was almost like with tears in his eyes because it was like, “Manny, I have the responsibility of getting that money, and you’re a friend and I love you, but you’ve got to get off the money.” And it was like tears almost coming to his eyes when he said that. And so I just wanted people to get a much better understanding…
Man
He took other people to court.
Manny
Whatever. Well, it was going to go to that level, etcetera.
The other thing was relative to going to school. We have two daughters. The oldest [older] daughter, I guess after being in school with Gwen went down to PS 6 because she was in a program at PS 6. From PS 6 she went up to Horace Mann. And the same thing that Doris said we did at Horace Mann, which is that the parents, the African-American parents, kept an eye on the school. They had a presence at the school to make sure things were taken care of properly, just in case. There was a group that we created there, and there was a fellow who had graduated from Horace Mann and from Harvard and heard about our daughter about to graduate and didn’t put in for Harvard. So he got on the phone one Sunday and spoke for a while and he had a batch of stuff, and we applied to Harvard as a result. My daughter was accepted to all of the schools, including Harvard, but she decided she didn’t want to go.
My other daughter, the youngest [younger] one, there was a school in the neighborhood called Modern School on 152nd Street. So she went to a few schools including the Modern School, an alternative school, and also to A. Philip Randolph and so on.
Gwen Gilyard
And my school.
Manny
And your school.
Woman
Are you all like living here still?
Connie Sutton
Are you asking us?
Richard James
Yeah, I have a - having lived here, the great attraction of the building is the physical structure of the building, and the large apartments. I don’t know if you’ve been inside the apartments or seen them generally, but…
Men/Women
She lives here.
Richard James
You do. Excuse me, I’m sorry. I know she does. Her daughter and I go to the same school actually, but I’m just speaking generally, I’m sorry, apologize.
Woman
I understand.
Richard James
The beauty of the apartments is just that they’re big and the sunlight comes on the east and they just offer so much more than what’s being offered on the market generally. That’s one aspect of it. What I feel - and this is just an issue of age, I’m getting older. And as people, new families, move in in the past two years I’ve had three families move in on my floor, I live on the fourth floor on the east side. Two have children, one just moved in and stuff. And so the sense of connection and camaraderie and working together and fighting together, that’s a different time, a different period and stuff.
They pay substantially more than any of us would have ever paid, indeed I would say substantially more than any of us could have afforded at the time, we couldn’t have afforded. If this building were on the market at the prices or comparable prices that are offered now, even though we’re talking about different amounts of money, many of us, not all of us, would have had to move. So it’s not a racial issue, I don’t believe it’s a racial issue, I think it’s an economic, class issue, and generational.
If you pay a million and a half dollars and you’re paying a mortgage and you’re paying the maintenance and you’ve got two kids in school, one in private, one in public, and all that stuff, then you’re struggling. I mean what we’re seeing now in terms of the election is that as middle class people we’re struggling to survive.
Man
People paid a million and a half to buy apartments?
Connie Sutton [and others]
Yes.
Steve Simon
Gwen.
Gwen Gilyard
It is not an island. I like living here because of some of the reasons that Richard gave, the size of the apartments and the proximity to the highway and all those things. But it is not an island. There’s a community. And it’s getting more difficult as time goes by to deal with the community from the standpoint that things that were here last year have disappeared, out in the community I mean. And it keeps getting worse and worse.
[Pandemonium of cross talk - can she give an example, other people providing her answer.]
Not even like the stores. When we first came here there was a children’s shoe store, there was a lingerie shop, I mean in this area. There was a supermarket that they called Ernie’s. There’s something sort of similar to that on 157th Street, but it’s still not quite like that. There has never been a pet store in the community, so if you wanted something for your pet you had to go someplace else to get it. There was a card shop here for the longest. There is nothing like that now.
[More pandemonium.]
Wayne Benjamin
The interesting thing is, and I guess I’m still the youngest person here, I turned fifty in December - but the interesting thing is once you get to a certain age where half your age ago you were still adult, the City is not the same today as it was fifty years ago, twenty-five. I don’t have the same sense of looking for, not lost, but looking for or desiring sort of a static sense of place. In terms of do I still like living here, the place that you call home I think is very important, and I love the building and I love my apartment and I love my triangular foyer, because the foyer literally takes the shape of the side and up the building. And I remember years ago when we had like real snowstorms being on the subway and there was some guy panhandling and I just felt so bad for him because I was looking forward to getting home to my overheated pre-war apartment. And I don’t know necessarily where I would go if I left, which is not to say that I couldn’t find someplace, but I don’t see the reason to go.
But the sense once again of community is something that the same way that I came into this building and said the folks on the Board are crazy, I would never be on the Board, I remember attending Community Board meetings and saying they’re even crazier and that I would never - and I was asked several times to, when you were with Sam Michaels to be on the Community Board, and like forget about it - so for the last five years I’ve now been on the Community Board. And there’s something, and I’ve said it to my fellow Board members, I feel that the building is less connected to the neighborhood in some sense than it used to be.
And what is happening in terms of education or arts and culture or languages, whatever, I think the building needs to be more connected to, and that’s why I think what the Riverside Oval has done during last year is excellent because Grinnell used to be more in touch with the Oval. But bringing the activities into this room at least begins to link us back to those activities, it begins to link the building to at least its immediate neighbors, and if we can then get the immediate neighbors to start talking about historic preservation, or charter schools, or the Hispanic Society decided it wanted to stay, and they were actually here in this room talking about their plans, and what can we do to help shape those plans or encourage it, or make sure that our friends and neighbors know about the Hispanic Society, all the work it does with the local public schools. So I think there’s a sense of greater connection that we need to strive towards.
Gwen Gilyard
There is a greater connection. When you go past your fifty years and you…
Wayne Benjamin
I’m working on that now.
Gwen Gilyard
I hope you do. And when you get there you’re going to find that it’s not so easy to get these little things that you need in life when you have to run here and there to get them. There’s no greengrocer, as somebody said back there. And you don’t want to have to go down to Fairway to get what it is that you need because you want something very fresh, you want something to juice that is good for you, and all. The older you get - and I’m talking about myself, I’ve gotten older, and I don’t want to have to run here and there to get every little thing that I want. I like living here, but I don’t like having to run here and there to get everything I want. And I belong to a group that started out at 790 where they were trying to say, “What can we do to bring some of these things into the community?” But the group folded, I don’t know what happened. I don’t want to be a leader of it, but I would’ve been a member of it, yes. But perhaps that is the kind of thing that has to be done. But it’s not happening now.
Steve Simon
I think we have to try to wrap this up, so just two more comments, and you’re going to yield again to apartment 1J?
Bonnie Rothschild.
Bonnie Rothschild
I’ve lived in the building twenty-five years now, and I’m one of the new kids on the block obviously. But I raised a child here, Michael’s youngest sister, Rebecca. And I was raised in what a writer, and I’ll never forget this, in an introduction to some book, described as “darkest Queens.” And darkest Queens is White Queens, at least it was when I grew up. There were no Black people except maids; I don’t think anybody knew what a Latino was, rather than the ?? person the Latino word for not, it was sort of de facto - I don’t know what the politics were, but to me it was just the way it was. And when I came here, I came to Columbia, went to Barnard and got generally involved in a more heterogeneous area, which was the upper west side, and Joel and I got married and I came up to live. And this place is home, compared to where I grew up - and you know you would think that you would be nostalgic for where you lived as a child, and I have some good memories of it - but this is home. And I raised Rebecca here, and Rebecca is a color blind, culture blind, ethnic blind kid. She knows what those things are but she’s going to be twenty-one, and this is it, White basically Jewish kid, but she has been living in Chicago and she’s been doing work with kids on the south side of Chicago, and she belongs to a singing group called Rhythm and Jews, most of whom are not Jewish, but the first semester that she was there these kids at the beginning of their Christmas break went down and worked in New Orleans and sang to raise money for the Black, mostly Black, displaced people in New Orleans. And that’s the kind of stuff that she does, that’s the way she thinks. And right now she’s in India because she’s so interested in it. And I know that this community is very, very important in the way this young woman has developed, and I love it, I love it here.
Connie Sutton
Me, too. And I’m eighty-two and I wouldn’t leave for anything. And I wouldn’t be for any other place. And it is because it’s not only a place where all the people I know, from both the Caribbean and Africa, can come and stay, and they are part of my family, but also because I have family here, I have people like the Rothschilds that I have known as long as I’ve been in New York, and Sue who is very, very, very close to me, and Tony who lived in the Village where I did my initial field work years and years and years ago who is very, very close to me. And I can’t imagine living anywhere else, not that I don’t travel still, not that I don’t go places and bring people here, but I would not want to live anywhere else. And I would not want to abandon the history of what I have known and cherish about this place.
Steve Simon
I don’t think we would want you to live anywhere else either. Manny, your final comment for us.
Manny
Before the current windows were put in if people looked outside the window, it was wood prior to the metal, they would see a metal piece, the rope would wind around it. And so in the old days they had awnings. And that gave a natural coolness to the room, it cut off the Sun, etcetera. Also the doors, you not only had your regular door, but there was a screen door. And when we came in, we’re in 5G, so you could keep your door opened and it would be as if we had circulation of air…
[Manny is being drowned out by Connie Sutton who’s saying: I think that’s true but I don’t… And he’s being covered by Steve Simon who’s saying: You can see where the hinges were.]
Manny
In other words, when they created the building, what I’m trying to say is that they did some natural things that didn’t require to have an air conditioner, etcetera, etcetera, and so on.
The other part is something that happened recently. I was fortunate enough to be on the Board during the time that a lot of the current work that’s done, the courtyard, the lobby, the entire building…
Steve Simon
If you hadn’t cleaned that courtyard you’d never hear the end of it from your wife.
Manny
Anyway, the part that I wanted to bring up relative to that is when the lobbies, we were about to sign the contract for the lobbies, and fortunately for us at that time we had an individual who was quite knowledgeable about prices relative to this because this was his area of expertise. And that president rushed down to the office to sign the contract because it was a steal for the work that they were going to be doing. And we got a lot of work done for a pittance as opposed to what the real value was.
Steve Simon
Richard, you have the final comment.
Richard James
I believe the challenge is how to keep the diversity in the building that we live in and cherished and worked so hard for, and keep the diversity in the Oval, and keep the diversity in New York City. I don’t have the answer for that. So much of what we do and how we feel having children in college and having parents to take care of and having expenses and loans and so forth is driven by finances, and that’s understandable. We’re all human beings. But I would argue then that we haven’t mentioned the word Dominican in this room at all today.
Gwen Gilyard
I did.
Richard James
Okay, if you did I didn’t hear it. But we haven’t mentioned it in any significant ongoing way. And I only mention the word Dominican because we live in Washington Heights and we have a very, very sizable Dominican population in this area. And I’ve been to the Dominican Republic so many times - I don’t have to give my bona fides about the Dominican Republic or Dominicans - my essential point is that diversity is a critical point. I don’t want to see a dominance of Blacks, I don’t want to see a dominance of Whites, I don’t want to see a dominance of any particular race of people.
I think the possibility for this country, for our Washington Heights, and for the Oval, reducing it down, for this building and for the next building and the next building, is diversity. And I don’t have the answer. I don’t know how Dominicans can afford, or poor Blacks or middle class Black families, or for that matter middle class White families, can buy in, because the property values continue to grow. But there is something to say for the fact that keeping that diversity and keeping communities together. How it’s done, I don’t have the answer, but having a focus on that. We’re all getting older, so as we get older we want to sell and we want to pass on benefits to our children, that’s only natural.
But the other side of that is how do you do that in such a way so that the next generation of people can come along and benefit from The Grinnell? And the only way to do that is what we’ve been talking about is having a sense of community, a sharing. That’s the only way to do it. And we’ll find a way to do it. I may be wrong, who knows? But I think that’s the answer. And it’s not Washington Heights, it’s Harlem, it’s all of those, it’s Bedford Stuyvesant, it’s all of those communities, it’s the west side that we cherish, it’s Queens, it’s every place.
Wayne Benjamin
Well another final, final comment. There was going to be another panelist who at the last minute couldn’t make it, and that’s Yvonne Smith. I mention that because what we are doing now is something that over the years we’ve done informally, and that’s kind of just talking about either our recollections or remembrances about the building or the neighborhood, and we always said, “What we really need to do, either sit down and have someone film it or reduce it to writing,” and once again it’s great that the Riverside Oval [Association] prompted us to actually begin to do something that internally we were saying we needed to do for years.
Steve Simon
Really there’s enough material here, there’s enough history of this building. We could go on for hours and probably for several different nights, and maybe we’ll do that some other time. But I want to thank all four of you for giving us… Gwen, Wayne, Connie and Richard, thank you very much.
Our Stories: Voices from the Grinnell An Oral History Evening Sponsored by the Riverside Oval Association
The residents of 800 Riverside Drive celebrating community, a unique sense of place, and an architectural gem
