In 1966, shortly after I started college, my family moved from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, to a then-new building. It was built under the states’s Mitchell-Lama urban renewal law that encouraged clearing of tenements and replacement with new buildings. These were not classically “rent-controlled” (like the controls instituted in older buildings post-WWII) but has restrictions on the rent, limiting the profit of the landlords and requiring justification of any rent increase.
I have very good nostalgic memories of my growing up in Brooklyn, in an era far very different from its current status as the hip center of the universe, mostly post-Dodgers and very much pre-Nets (at least in their Brooklyn incarnation). But I never regretted my family’s move to “The City”. As a college student and young adult when I came home for vacations or visits Manhattan, and especially the Upper West Side, was diverse and cultured and exciting in ways that were so different from where I had lived in Brooklyn. I loved coming there, loved walking the streets, day or night (a lot of night as a young man), reveling in the variety of small stores on Broadway, and the fact that the subway was only two short blocks away. And that coming from the subway you could stop for food for dinner from the butcher, baker, fish store, fruit and vegetable store; there were also family-run stores of everything from shoes to jewelry to laundries to delicatessens. And, within a few years of living there, my mother, a kindergarten teacher in the local school, knew most of the families whose children had passed through her class. That was not different from back in Brooklyn, where the same was true for my mother and her “kids” and their families, though there was probably more economic and ethnic diversity in Manhattan. There were (mostly) the same sorts of stores on the shopping streets of Brooklyn, but Broadway had a different feel; it was so intense!
One of the first, and most amazing things, we noted was how many movie theaters were within a few blocks of our house. There were also no multiplexes then, but the Riviera and the Riverside were on the same block of Broadway between 96th and 97th streets. The Symphony (now the Symphony Space, but then a movie theater) was on Broadway at 95th, and in its basement, with an entrance on 95th, was the Thalia. The Midtown was on Broadway between 99th and 100th and the Olympia up at 106th. The New Yorker was at Broadway and 88th, and the Loew’s 84th St was at – 84th St! There were even more theaters further south on Broadway. So I went to the movies a lot. This was a big change from the Avenue U, 25 cents + 5 cents candy Saturday double features in Brooklyn!
One night in the first summer we were there and I was home from college, 1967, my father and I were walking on Broadway, alive and vibrant at night as Avenue U or even Kings Highway never was. There was a lot of action and people as we approached a Stark’s Coffee Shop, on the corner of 92nd (or maybe it was 91st) St. We realized that they were filming a scene from a movie in the coffee shop, and we stopped for a while. I later saw that scene, many times, in the film The Odd Couple, with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Indeed, most often at the Thalia, which had an enormous collection of films and played a different double feature every day! You needed to have the printed schedule (no computers!) to keep track of what was coming so you could catch what you wanted to see. Most often, the Odd Couple (1968) was paired with another great film set on the Upper West Side, A Thousand Clowns (1965) with Jason Robards and Martin Balsam. I am sure I saw that double feature multiple times. I recently saw a posting of the Greatest 100 Films of All Time, and neither was on it. I don’t suggest that I am an expert or fit to judge this, but I have my opinions, and if I were compiling the list of the 100 Greatest Films I Have Ever Seen (which, in full disclosure, would not include the majority of the films on that other list), those two would certainly be on it!
The two most-grounded-in-the-neighborhood members of my family were my mother, based both on her role as an early-childhood teacher in one of the local schools and her incredibly warm and engaging personality that made, really, everyone love her, and my youngest sister, who attended public schools through high school on the UWS. Actually, she went to the school right next to our building, while my mother taught at the one 3 blocks away, which was itself closer than my own elementary school in Brooklyn had been to where we lived, demonstrating the density of Manhattan. I mentioned diversity; in terms of race and ethnicity, and even income, it was. I am sure that Sesame Street, beginning about that time, was based on the Upper West Side of the late 1960s. Not only were many ethnic groups represented in the neighborhood and in our building, but unlike in Brooklyn there were many mixed families – not only Italian AND Jewish (the big ethnicities of my old neighborhood) but Irish and Puerto Rican, Black and Polish, and on and on.
Things change in 50+ years. My father, who lived in that building from 1966, died a couple of years ago; it was a rental, not a condo, so we couldn’t buy and keep it. This means lots of people – family (not just immediate but very extended), friends, friends of family and family of friends, no longer have his apartment to stay in while visiting New York. Just as Brooklyn has changed so much I cannot recognize it, so has the Upper West Side. The family-owned stores are mostly gone, and walking on Broadway it seems like most of the stores are the same chains you would see in a suburban shopping mall. But not completely; there are still places to get NY pizza (the BEST!!! No question or comparison!!), if not for 20 cents a slice, and a few delis to get knishes, and a lot of fruit-and-flower stands. But a lot fewer movie theaters. The Thalia (now the Leonard Nimoy Thalia) no longer shows movies; its day as a repository for thousands of films was doomed by DVDs and streaming services. It, and the old Symphony are now Symphony Space, still a cultural center. The Loew’s 84th St is a multiplex fit for any suburban shopping mall. But there are still a few theaters that regularly play both old and new “art” films (an old term generally equated with “foreign”).
My mother has been gone for decades; even the “new”
playground at the school she taught in that had a plaque in dedication to her
has been replaced by a newer playground, with no plaque. The Upper West Side is
both mallified and gentrified, and also become a destination for young Orthodox
Jews, especially Lubavitcher. And, yet, despite the fact that no one with a
regular job can afford an apartment, there are still lots of poor people living
there, so it remains a diverse community.
So I still have warm memories of both Brooklyn and the Upper West Side from different parts of my youth. Being a child in Brooklyn was good, and being a young adult in Manhattan was great. It was a much cooler place to bring people I was dating to see; long walks actually took you places – Central Park and Riverside Park and the river and the Boat Basin at 79th St., and Columbia and Grant’s Tomb and Riverside Church. All those things are still there even if Broadway is full of chain stores.
For my father’s 90th birthday, we hired a car and driver and went to Brooklyn, starting in Coney Island and heading up to the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Williamsburg where he grew up. We saw my old neighborhood farther south, my high school and Brooklyn College, and the Ebbetts Field apartments. It was nostalgic, but it was good to get back to Manhattan.
But I actually have no plans to go back to either in the near future; I’ll work off of my memories and don’t need them replaced.
