01 May 2023

Yorkville—RIP, Colorful New York Neighborhood


My mystery series protagonist Bruce Kohler lives in a railroad flat in an old-law tenement in the Manhattan neighborhood once known as Yorkville. It used to be his parents' apartment. Yorkville was a white working class neighborhood that successive waves of immigrants called home. Ralph and Alice Kramden (look 'em up, kids) would have felt at ease there. My husband grew up there in the 1950s. Each street was a village. The kids played stickball and jump rope in the street, and everyone's mother sat on the brownstone stoops and considered it her right to yell at any kid she saw misbehaving.

In the oldest of olden days (or as they're now called, back in the day), the area bounded by 96th Street on the north, 79th Street on the south, Third Avenue on the west, and the FDR Drive with the East River beyond it was known as Germantown. My husband, who grew up there in the 1950s, could remember bitter old men drinking German beer in the dark corners of German bars, muttering in German about who should have won the War. The avenues and 86th Street abounded in shops where you could buy superb sausages and chocolates. My husband still tends to compare any sausage he tastes to the sausages of his youth. Today, that abundance has dwindled to one restaurant, the Heidelberg, and one butcher shop and German market, Schaller and Weber, both on Second Avenue.

By then, though, it was Yorkville, and he belonged to its dominant group, the Irish. The St Patrick's Day parade in all its glory marched up Fifth Avenue, turned right on 86th Street, and marched east with flags flying and bagpipes skirling. His birthday falls on St Patrick's Day. As a child, he believed the parade was just for him. The Ruppert Brewery was the chief source of local employment, and the whole neighborhood was redolent with its fumes.

In 1956, in the wake of the failed Hungarian Revolution, immigrants from Hungary flocked to Yorkville. The Hungarians brought their own cuisine, available in restaurants and pastry shops as well as the kitchens of my husband's friends' mothers. In a story to be published in AHMM in 2023, Bruce says, "Second Avenue in the 80s is where all the Hungarian restaurants were. There’s only one left now, unless it’s closed too. Farewell to goulash and palacsinta, along with the ivory-billed woodpecker and the Xerxes blue butterfly.”

My mother's side of the family were Hungarian Jews. In fact, my mother was born in Hungary. I have a vivid memory of dinner with my Aunt Marta in a Hungarian restaurant on Second Avenue. I was just back from the Peace Corps, so it must have been 1966. We were probably eating goulash or chicken paprikash. We were talking about how my mother, as the oldest sister, had to watch Marta and my Aunt Hilda, the baby, because their mother was a young widow and had to work. Marta was telling me how bossy they thought my mother was and what a hard time my grandmother had.

"After all," she said, "she had to raise four daughters on her own."
"Don't you mean three daughters?" I said.
And that's how I learned the family secret—I had an aunt who'd been a gifted pianist, had a "nervous breakdown," and spent the rest of her life in a mental institution.

European immigrants of various nationalities, including the Polish and Italians, brought their cultures and cuisines to Yorkville. But by 1985, high-rise luxury apartment buildings had begun to threaten the character of the neighborhood to such an extent that some of the side streets had to be protected by a new zoning law. In the long run, it was futile, because eventually working class families and small restaurants and retail businesses could no longer afford the gentrified neighborhood their community of villages had become.

In "Death Will Take the High Line," published in AHMM in 2022, a newcomer to the city asks Bruce, "Are you a real New Yorker?"

“Born and raised,” Bruce says. “In Yorkville, a neighborhood that’s so New York it doesn’t exist any more. The fashionable Upper East Side is planted on its grave."

13 comments:

  1. Ah, nostalgia. Ralph and Alice—remember when the Jackie Gleason Show was live? I remember seeing Jackie fall on stage and break his leg. Them was the days! The neck of the woods where I grew up no longer is recognizable. Truly, you can’t go home again.
    Edward Lodi

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    1. I watched Jackie Gleason as a kid, but I didn't really understand what the working class was and how my husband's background differed from my own until he said, "Remember The Honeymooners?" Ohhhh.

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  2. Nice! It is easy for non- New Yorkers to forget it was a city of neighborhoods.

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    1. I'll post again about New York neighborhoods. It's a subject of endless fascination.

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  3. What a great article - thanks for the view of a neighborhood I didn't know much about. My grandparents were Greek, so OF COURSE they lived in Astoria, and I have been in that neighborhood a lot. I always loved Astoria - it was the one place where I totally fit into the crowd!

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    1. Eve, Astoria is a neighborhood that has changed and gentrified without losing all its ethnic flavor. That can happen in Queens, but not in Manhattan. I suspect the key difference is the value of real estate.

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  4. Liz, you paint a nice word picture.

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    1. Thanks, R.T., that's a welcome compliment from a master.

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  5. Elizabeth Dearborn01 May, 2023 14:26

    Apologies if you already know about https://forgotten-ny.com/
    I've never lived in New York City but every time I go there to visit, I run into someone I know, who also doesn't live there. ?

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  6. I frequently run into someone who does live here, even though there are 8.5 million of us! And I don't necessarily mean people from my neighborhood or even people I've seen in the past few decades. My therapist from the 1970s, a poet before I started writing poetry (long before fiction), at the dentist's...my son and grandchildren, who live in New Jersey, in Central Park...

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  7. Wonderful article, Liz. Much of that history has been repeated in Brooklyn and da Bronx. Many people never leave New York, but sometimes New York leaves them. You can’t go home again.

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    1. Thanks, Leigh. More to come on Manhattan, and I could talk about parts of Queens too.

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  8. I don’t think I’ve seen a German fast food restaurant outside New York. Of course I’m thinking of Zum-Zum with its sausage lineup. But I loved the radio ads of one famed company: “Schickhaus… the most carefully pronounced name in meats.”

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