The Crossroads of the World
A true story of life in the big city
(Photo: 1970s 42nd St, via Nostalgia King)
My first experience in independent living in NYC came after I started working for Saks Fifth Avenue in 1977, a story I told in a previous post. I was staying with my grandparents in the Bronx, but that was getting old fast. They didn’t have a very large apartment, and I was sleeping on the couch. My grandfather was a NYC cab driver, so his hours varied, and although he tried to be quiet, there was no way I could not hear him come in late at night or leave really early in the morning. I really needed my own space for all our sakes.
My job at Saks was certainly not producing big bucks. There was no way I could rent an apartment on my own, I would have had to find roommates, and I didn’t really know that many people, and was unwilling to live with total strangers. So, I went the way of many before me, and looked for a room for rent in someone’s home.
Today, I write house histories for real estate clients and homeowners, mostly in Brooklyn, and 90% of the buildings I write about had rentable rooms for boarders at some point during their long histories. I didn’t know that back then, but this was a time-honored practice in the city. Everyone at some time, needs a room.
My heart wanted the Upper West Side of Manhattan, then primarily home to artists, actors, musicians and seniors in rent-controlled apartments. But my wallet dictated that I’d be living in the Bronx, where I was living already. Back then, the way to find a room or apartment was the newspapers. If you were specifically looking for something in the black neighborhoods of the city, the best source was the Amsterdam News, NYC’s oldest and most important African American paper.
My Mom came down from Gilbertsville to help me find a suitable place and bring my belongings. Going through the paper, we found what seemed like an ideal room – in a house on Sedgewick Avenue, not all that far from my grandparent’s apartment. We met with the landlord, a middle-aged Jamaican lady. She approved of us, she thought my mother was quite elegant and classy, and I became the proud renter of a decent sized bedroom, furnished with a double bed, a dresser, a chair and a closet. $50 a week, on my $95 weekly take home pay. I moved in with a couple boxes of stuff, my black and white tv, my clock radio, my guitar and some clothes.
After settling in, it didn’t take long to realize that my new landlady had some issues. First of all, she was completely paranoid. The entire apartment consisted of her large bedroom in the front of the house, a small galley kitchen, a dining room/living room, bathroom and my bedroom. There were a couple of closets in the common space. EVERY door had a big sturdy deadbolt lock on it, including the closets. And they were all locked. OK…
The only phone in the apartment was in her room. Behind two deadbolt locks. This was decades before cell phones. After much persuasion, she allowed me to give the number to my job and to my mother for emergencies. But she did not allow me to get or receive calls, and I was not to give the number out to anyone. I was also not to use the living room, or to have company in the apartment.
I’m glad my Mom was with me when we negotiated the arrangement, because she told the woman right off the bat that I was renting the room, with kitchen and bath use. I was not signing on to be her maid and would not be cleaning the house. I would keep my room, kitchen and bathroom clean after my use, but that was it. Good thing, because don’t you know she tried to get me to clean the apartment? Ah, no. I would not have been forceful enough to fight back at that stage of my life, so thank you, Mom.
As I got to know my landlady better, she started to open up to me. It also helped that I have Jamaican relatives, and my father was from Guyana, so I understood the West Indian immigrant experience. It turned out that she fled Jamaica after the murder of her oldest son. He had been highly involved in Jamaican politics, which was a violent power struggle at that time. Apparently, he had been killed by men allied with the ruling party. She could not get anyone in the government to investigate his murder, and being afraid for her own safety, and that of her remaining son, they came to New York.
Her other son and his family lived upstairs in the second apartment. But she never talked about him, everything was about her dead son. That was why she locked all the doors, rarely came out of her room, and had a hard time coping with the world. It was really tragic, he had died several years before, but she was having a hard time continuing with her own life.
One day, after I had been living there for about four months, my landlady finally felt comfortable enough with me being in her house, so she decided to go back to Jamaica to take care of some business. Her surviving son was upstairs if I needed anything, and she graciously pulled the phone out into the hall, then padlocked her bedroom before heading to Jamaica.
I must interrupt the flow of the story to explain something about where I was living. My section of Sedgewick Avenue was far from the nearest subway station. I lived in what is known as a two-fare zone. I had to walk up Sedgewick to its intersection with another prominent street and wait for a city bus which took me to the train station. Coming back home at night, I did the opposite – I waited right below the elevated train station for the bus that rolled past my street. The buses ran regularly in the morning rush hour, but depending on the time of night, they could be few and far between, necessitating standing outside in the snow, rain, or humidity for quite some time.
Some enterprising people decided to run private van lines along the bus route. These “dollar vans” are in lots of neighborhoods throughout the city that are not well-served by public transit. They consist of a small fleet of panel vans with seats, able to carry about 10 people each. They were faster than the city bus, and would drop you off at your door, if you lived on a street on their route. They didn’t advertise, or have their names prominently on the side, they just slowed down, opened the sliding door and people got in.
I began taking the dollar van at night a month or so after moving in. The vans were cleaner than the subway, they were usually filled with people, the drivers were nice, and it was a good system. Since I usually came home from work at the same general hour every weekday, I usually had the same driver or two. Over the months, you got used to seeing them, everyone exchanged pleasantries and over time, you talk, laugh and get to know a varied group of people.
One night, during the winter, I was one of very few people in the van. The driver, a bit older than me, whose name I can’t remember, was his usual chatty self. Then he asked me out. I wasn’t in the least bit attracted to him and wasn’t interested in going on a date with him. I was still very new to the city and knew that I was not ready to start dating NYC men. I was still at that shy, people-pleasing stage of life (long over now) and although I didn’t want to date him, I also didn’t want to hurt his feelings. So, I said yes. Obviously, he knew where I lived, so he said he would pick me up after he got off his shift one night, at 9 pm. He said we’d go have dinner and go to a movie and he would bring me home. I thought that wouldn’t be so bad, so I agreed.
OK, all this was taking place after my landlady left for Jamaica. I was alone in the apartment. On the appointed evening at nine, I was nicely dressed in my work clothes and fashionable shoes, waiting for this guy. Let’s call him “Joe.” No Joe. I waited. Still no Joe. I chalked up getting stood up to Divine Providence and was getting ready to call it a night. 10pm. The doorbell rings.
I opened the door. It was Joe. That was when I realized that I had never seen this man standing up. He was always behind the wheel of the van. I’m 5’9” tall, at least 5’11” in the shoes I had on. I looked down at a very short man, no taller than 5” 7.” I towered over him. Oy. It was not going to go well.
I told him he was an hour late. I don’t wait an hour to go out, we should forget it. He made all kinds of excuses and apologized profusely. He was so sorry, but would I still want to go out? I wondered what kind of movie house was going to be open at this hour, he assured me that in the city that never sleeps, neither did movie theaters. Again, my ingrained fear of disappointing people kicked in, overriding my good sense, and I agreed to go out into the night anyway.
We caught a car service on the street. Before we got to the movies, he explained, he had to make a stop in Harlem. WHAT? At that point, I’m in a car in a part of the Bronx I was not familiar with, and it was 1977, not a year to be wandering the streets in nice clothes and not much money. I gritted my teeth and said OK.
We got out of the car somewhere in Harlem. I have no idea where. I know my way around Harlem now, but I had only been in the city for a couple of months. Don’t ask me where we were. I do know we were at a bar/nightclub. Joe said he had to get something from his friend who was a bartender. We went in, me wide-eyed, and he sat me down at the bar, while he went off to do whatever he was doing, by which time, even innocent me knew was probably something illegal.
So, I’m sitting there at the bar, and this woman comes over to me, dressed in a tight-fitting dress with a plunging neckline and a fur coat. She asked me if I was with anyone and how was I doing, and what was I doing there. I explained that I was waiting for my friend Joe, who was over there talking to the bartender. She nodded, looked over at Joe, laughed and moved on. Nice lady. The music was loud, and the room was filled with cigarette smoke and other smells. Men were smiling at me.
About this time, I was playing mental “Let’s Make A Deal” with God. If He would just get my naïve, dumb butt out of there alive, I promised that I would NEVER go on a date with a short bus driver who I really didn’t know, EVER AGAIN. In fact, I would never date again. EVER. I might even be persuaded to take the veil, ANYTHING to get out of here in one piece. I pleaded with heaven, “PLEASE get me out of here! PLEASE!” I guess He got tired of my begging, and Joe came over and said, “Let’s go.”
By this time, it was getting pretty close to 11pm. We hopped into another car service and headed for midtown. Do you know we ended up at a movie theater on 42nd Street?! It was not today’s family-friendly Walt Disney, Madame Tussaud’s, Victory Theater, 42nd Street. It was “the Deuce,” the Sleaze Capital of America, 42nd Street, filled with pimps, pushers, the homeless and those looking for a disease-ridden good time, or just oblivion. It was the place where hope went to die. And where Suzanne and her date went to the movies.
We ended up at one of the semi-legit movie houses on the block that showed first-run movies after they moved on from the better theaters. I’ll never forget what we saw, it was a popular Sidney Poitier-Bill Cosby movie called “A Piece of the Action.” And true to the title, Joe spent much of the movie trying to get a piece of his own action by playing handsy with my leg. By this time, I was becoming far less naïve, I slapped his hand into next week and moved as far away as I could in the seat. After a couple of tries, he gave up. My feet were sticking to the floor, thank God it was dark in there.
The movie ended around 1:30 in the morning. Even Tad’s Steakhouse was closed. Our “nice dinner” ended up being a hot dog, fries and Coke at the Times Square Nedick’s. “Open 24/7!” He was now out of money, so we had to take the subway home, after waiting nearly another half hour on the Times Square platform for the train. When we got out at my stop, we still had to get a dollar van to made it back to my landlady’s home. I lied. I told Joe she would be there and was a light sleeper and was very protective of me, so thanks and good night. I closed the door in his face and breathed a prayer of thanks. I made it home in one piece.
The next day, I told my female co-workers at Saks this story. They couldn’t stop laughing. I stopped taking the dollar van, and shortly after that episode, my Mom moved back to NYC, and we shared an apartment in the same building my grandparents lived in. It was three blocks from a different subway line. I no longer needed dollar vans. I never saw “Joe” again. I used to tell my mother almost everything, but I never told her about my first date in New York City.