Mamiyaroid 62
Bronx Cheer
This piece is inspired by reading the elegant memoir, Do Something, by Guy Trebay. A memoir of 1970s New York was enough to get me interested, but learning Trebay was born in the Bronx made it an urgent read. It’s the kind of book rich with details that are so human you can’t help having a running dialogue with the author inside your head. Like his admission that he sometimes headed back up to the Bronx to re-visit his old haunts. It reminded me how I still dream about roaming my grandparent’s neighborhood—the library, walking past the gated community I got into my head was full of Russians, the oddly bucolic Fieldston with its secret pond, the lane where grandpa gathered mulberries in his pipe tobacco bucket. And this dreamland inclination to roam was shared by my mother. Years after nana moved to Westchester, my mother got homesick for her first NYC home, my grandparent’s basement, and we lugged a picnic from Washington Heights to the Bronx to take a look at the old house and then have our meal in Van Cortlandt Park.
One thing that resonated with me is Trebay’s sense of himself as an outsider—uncredentialed, somehow faking his way into a writing career. He may be of the last generation allowed a foothold into the arts without a college degree. The book reminds me of the kind of writing I loved to read in The Village Voice and the even shaggier alt weekly, The New York Press. It was local, it was weird, and I could have encountered it myself if only I’d been in the right place at the right time. In high school the weekly drops of each paper became ritualistic.
Last fall I attended a daylong seminar at the Endangered Language Alliance led by co-director Ross Perlin, and author of Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York. It was a thrilling day of learning at the offices of the ELA and we sat under portraits of participants in Mother Tongues, a photographic project by Yuri Marder, which features speakers of endangered languages.
Toward the end of the day, we sat with fellow educators and I sat at a table with a group that included a man who teaches in the Bronx. Though I have never formally lived in the Bronx I always light up when the subject comes up because my father is from the Bronx, I spent much of my childhood Saturdays visiting my Irish-American grandparent’s house in Riverdale, and much later spent one of the worst years of my life in my first librarian job as a K-8 librarian at a school underneath the 4 train on Jerome Avenue. Every workday I walked past a sinister mural featuring 1980s horror movie villains. Jason and Freddy welcomed me every morning to my waking nightmare. My insomnia and anxiety got so bad while working for an abusive principal I begged my doctor to drug me up. I wouldn’t have survived the year without it. Which isn’t to say there wasn’t any levity. I’ll always remember fondly the class of 3rd graders with special needs who convinced me to play the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” because they heard it in a cell phone commercial and then proceeded to mosh and trash the library before I turned off the music.
I mentioned to the man that my sister teaches ESL and film studies in the same building Stanley Kubrick attended high school. I forgot the name of the school and the man said wryly, “You mean Bronx Science?” I said, “No, they don’t have ESL students at Bronx Science.” My sister studied film in college and was delighted to learn she’d be walking the same halls Kubrick once walked. She wouldn’t have gotten this fact wrong because it all felt so serendipitous to her, like her life was finally making sense. Well, this man persisted and said, “Are you really going to die on this hill?” Normally I would have whipped out my phone and proved him wrong but for some reason I decided to be the bigger person and simply changed the subject. But I was right! Kubrick went to Taft! This arrogant man fell under the false assumption that genius needs a pedigree like Bronx Science, but if you look at the biographies of artists and writers we revere, being from the Bronx is pedigree enough.
My father moved back to New York from New Orleans in 2023 and my parents decided to throw their fortunes together once again after being divorced for more than twenty years. Don’t ask. The problem is this decision coincided with one of the worst housing markets in New York City and my parents spent a year living with me in Brooklyn until one of the housing lotteries I signed them up for finally paid off and they moved to their own place in the Bronx. Not long after this move, I was walking down a side street in my neighborhood and was puzzled to see an older white man walking toward me. Since my father moved, you might see white men 45 and under, but almost never someone in their 60s and 70s. My father proudly told me his notoriety as an elderly white man in the neighborhood was commemorated by people referring to him as OG. Maybe because one of the first things my father did when he moved to Brooklyn was find out which bodegas sold tax free cigarettes. The man coming down the street turned out to be my uncle Liam, on his way to use his stepdaughter’s laptop. We stopped to chat and when I told him where my parents moved he said, “That’s the South Bronx!” Then we both shrugged. What were any of us going to do in this economy?
A few years ago I was on the 2 or 5 train headed to Atlantic Avenue to transfer to get to work in Sunset Park. I noticed an older man standing reading the New York Times with the deft elegant origami you never see anymore because no one buys the paper, let alone reads it on the train. I admired this man from a distance until he came into better focus and I realized it was uncle Liam. Of course!
A month ago, I went to pick up my father from a medical procedure. It was all the way on E. Tremont Street heading out to Throggs Neck. We had to take a long bus ride back to his neighborhood so I could get the 2 train back to Brooklyn, but he was excited because on the way to the clinic he’d seen the headquarters of his sister’s husband’s family business, DeNegris Mausoleums (gravestones). He instructed me to keep my eye out so I could snap a photo from the bus.
We missed our stop and had to double back to the subway but it wasn’t so bad because we stopped in front of an interesting building with a wrought iron gate with an ornamental element I realized was meant to represent flames. It was the Fire Alarm Telegraph Bureau Bronx Central Office.
Being back in the Bronx made my father nostalgic and he talked about cutting school to go to Freedomland and Palisades Park. He made me sit and listen to the song by Freddy Cannon. My mother chimed in, “I remember that song,” though it wasn’t part of her own childhood since she’s from Taiwan.
Back in the fall we also went up to the Bronx Library Center to hear Ian Frazier talk about his book, Paradise Bronx. G grew up in New Jersey in Tenafly across the river from me in Washington Heights. While we killed time before the event, I pointed out the building on the Grand Concourse that used to be Alexander’s Department Store, already dying the few times I visited with my parents as a child. With much more ambivalence I also pointed out the US Army Recruiting Office, also on the Concourse. My father always said when his number came up, he was sent a letter and a token to enlist for the Vietnam War before he was formally drafted. He tried to avoid this for a while but Lehman College wasn’t working out, so he eventually enlisted in the Navy and that’s how he ended up meeting my mother in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. He was only nineteen when he arrived in Asia.
At the Ian Frazier event it became clear that the audience was there less to celebrate his book but to celebrate themselves and having survived their Bronxness. A woman greeted us as we walked in with, “What high school did you go to?” I knew answering “Stuyvesant” was the wrong answer, so I kept my mouth shut.
Last weekend my sister’s kid spent the weekend with me, and I introduced them to Chinatown, which like the Bronx, is an important touchstone for me as a New Yorker. They told me when their teacher asked about their weekend plans they said “My Ayi is taking me to Chinatown.” The teacher asked, “Are you Chinese?” And T explained they’re Taiwanese. Then T said to me, “I don’t think she knew what that was.” You’d think things might have changed in 35+ years but my teachers weren’t really clear what Taiwan was, either, and I used to make things easier for people and say I was part Chinese but I stopped doing that more than 15 years ago.
Walking on Canal Street I pointed out Mott Street and said that Ahmah worked in a garment factory there and sometimes me and their mom would have to go for the day when there was no school and no babysitter. I said we’d walk down the rows of ladies sewing and greet them with “Ni hao, Ayi!” and accept whatever candy or treat they doled out to us. Inside Kam Man Market, also on Canal Street, I told T they were lucky they didn’t have to spend long days trailing Ahmah while she shopped. Though sometimes she’d buy us hot dog buns at Maria’s Bakery or Mai Dong Lau (McDonald’s).
Toward the end of our day, I showed T the Kimlau War Memorial for Chinese Americans. Not because I’m so patriotic. I spent much more time talking about Corky Lee and the “photographic justice” he sought for Chinese railroad workers who were left out of the celebratory photograph at Golden Spike, Utah. His posthumous book is Corky Lee’s Asian America.
No, the reason I showed T this memorial is because it was erected by the DeNigris Monument company. My Irish great grandparents all emigrated to New York as young adults or teens, so T is a 4th or 5th generation New Yorker depending on how you’re counting. I wanted T to know that our connection to New York is all around us, you just have to look.
Lastly, here are two photos of mine from Free Film: NYC’s South Bronx iteration. Buy the book here.
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My email: adalenakavanagh@gmail.com
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-Adalena Kavanagh