STREET OF DREAMS
I lived with my
parents in Hoboken for the first
twenty seven years of my life in six different apartment buildings. I have no
recollection of the first two dwellings. When I turned four, we moved to a
beautiful ground floor apartment located at 805 Washington .
Shortly afterwards, we moved up to the top floor, to take advantage of the
lower rent.
The Goldberg’s
lived on the third floor. Mr. Goldberg liked to tease me. “Hello. Josephine,”
he would say when we met in the hallway. It made me mad. “My name is Joseph,” I
would tell him emphatically. “Okay. Josephine. Thanks for telling me,” he would
respond. He called me Josephine well into my teens, always amused at my angry
reaction.
. My dad had
opened a tavern in 1933 after prohibition had ended, but he lost it and all his
savings a few years later. This may account for our moving to a cold-water flat
at 729 Washington , just a few
doors away from the Academy of Sacred
Heart
This tenement
housed eight families, two per floor, including the Mullins, Byrnes, Roys and
O’Gradys. Each left an indelible mark on my memory.
Mr. and Mullins
lived on the first floor, opposite us. Childless, I guessed them to be about
sixty years old. I don’t think he had a job. She had three: A high school
typing teacher; a Democratic Party ward heeler; and the proprietor of a bookie
joint she operated from their apartment living room. Every afternoon a small
number of people including my mother gathered there to bet on horse races. She
placed the bets over her phone. I did not like her one bit, far too loud and arrogant.
One night her
husband arrived home drunk. While trying to push open his door, he lost his
balance, lurched and crashed through our front door, landing flat on his back.
The sight of him falling at my feet scared the blazes out of me. My mother
helped Mrs. Mullins drag her besotted spouse into her apartment and into the
bathroom. They managed to lift him into the tub, fully dressed, whereupon Mrs.
Mullins opened the cold water tap. The poor guy cried piteously, begging her to
let him out. She kept screaming at him to shut up. Did this shock treatment
sober him forever? We moved shortly afterwards, and I never found out.
Whenever I hear an
Irish jig, I think of another resident, old man Byrnes. In the summer he wore a
sleeveless undershirt and tied a bandanna around his mostly bald head. He had a
record collection of Irish jigs and reels and played them constantly. I hated
that music. I liked his oldest son, Junior, a great street athlete, the best
stickball player in town. He joined the Marines at the outset of the war and
fought in numerous battles in the South Pacific. He returned a changed and
troubled young man, disinterested in life. He spent most of his time at the
Eighth Street Tavern. Drunk or sober, no one could beat him at shuffleboard or
darts.
The second floor residents, the Roys, were also
childless. He enjoyed playing checkers with me. I never won. Later, after I
became a whiz at “Chinese Checkers,” he refused to play this game with me.
Mr. O'Grady, the
building superintendent, lived on the ground floor. He took care of three other
adjacent apartments, a tough and thankless job. It required him to shovel coal
and remove ashes from boilers during winters, and keep the apartment’s
hallways, stairs and sidewalks clean year round. The job did not suit him. Always
grouchy, he constantly chased kids from our play area in front of the
apartments. Because no one liked him, we hardly ever played with his son.
Around 1939, we
moved one block north to 825 Washington .
This apartment’s rooms were connected one to the next like railcars, in the
following order from front to rear: parlor, bedroom, bedroom, living room,
bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen. The parlor overlooked the street while the
kitchen opened to the rear yard. I vividly recall watching our piano take
flight once again, as moving men hoisted it in and out of front parlor windows.
A coal-fired
furnace in the basement provided an unlimited amount of hot water and steam
heat to each flat. Every room had its own radiator which made loud knocking
sounds and hissing noises when steam began to rise in them. On cold winter nights, the noise they made
assured us we would be warm.
I developed a
superstition while living in this apartment. I tried to avoid putting either of
my tootsies on the bottom step of the first flight of stairs. To avoid bad
luck, I jumped over it, always landing on my right foot. It brought me
extremely good fortune, quite obviously, because I am still here.
The nine other
tenants who lived in this building were virtual strangers to me. Sometimes a
few residents would gather on the stoop during hot summer nights, but as a
rule, neighbors kept their distance. We never visited each other. Talk about
détente and coexistence. If I hadn’t read their names on the community mailbox
located in the vestibule, I might not have known them at all.
I did know two
families. The Durkins lived on the second floor. One of their daughters,
Eileen, married her high school sweetheart, Joe Doyle, in 1948. They rented an
apartment on the fourth floor. Joe had been a classmate of mine in grade
school. They had a baby within a year’s time, a shock to me. A college student
at the time, I could not imagine myself being married, never mind a
father.
The plastered walls
of the apartments made them virtually sound proof. Linoleum covered our floors.
Every room had windows, making my home bright and cheerful, quiet and compact.
I never knew if
anyone decorated their apartments or made changes of any sort. Did they remodel
the kitchen or the bathroom? Did they paint the walls? Did they install new
appliances? I imagine some did. My family made very few improvements. One year
we bought and installed a washing machine. My brother painted one wall of our
parlor bedroom. We replaced the linoleum in various rooms. That’s the entire
list of upgrades that come to mind.
While living
there, I discovered a wooden box in a bedroom closet. It contained three tools:
a hammer, a screwdriver and a wrench. I never had occasion to use them. The
building’s owner maintained the place.
Had my dad not
lost his dough back there in 1934 or so, we might have moved to live in a
private home and there, I might have learned how to use such instruments.
However, it is more likely my dad would have hired lackeys to perform all the tasks
needed to maintain our castle.
Life did not
intend me to work with my hands, as my wife and children will attest. What’s
that thing called again, a plunger?
▀.
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