Jackson Heights, Queens: A Foreign Country

Slowly and then suddenly and completely there was prosperity. I’m talking about the late nineteen forties when post-World War II industrial abundance cranked up slowly and then spread wildly and widely in the early nineteen-fifties.  When everybody loved us, the U S of A, the saviors of Europe.  Slowly and then suddenly and completely the quotas on Jews in public school teaching or allowed entrance into Ivy League colleges were erased and it was as if they had never been.  An apology for the Holocaust?  Maybe.  We’re nothing like those Nazis.

But restricted neighborhoods like Jackson Heights, Queens, were still controlled by the private Queensboro Corporation. Restricted meant no Jews, no blacks allowed.  They didn’t think they owed an atonement to anyone. The state courts, after all, had upheld their right to restrict.   But the Queensboro Corporation couldn’t buy all the land.  New construction was everywhere the Queensboro Corporation wasn't,  plowing under farm fields and vacant lots. 

Into one of these newer buildings moved our Aunt Natalie, her two young sons and our Uncle Murray, four rooms on the fourth floor, apartment B40, next to the elevator.  She was done with the Lower East Side, she said. Done with railroad flat walk- ups. Aunt Natalie was the enterprising one, the one who couldn’t be stopped. One year passed as she watched and waited until she heard of an opening on the third floor, A35 to be exact. And, figuratively speaking, because in 1949 there was still a housing shortage, she lay down in front of the door to A35 and would not let anyone pass through until it was secured for my mother and father, my baby sister, Jayne and me.

            

And so we moved, my mother initially excited about being modern and leaving her parents’ home where the four of us had only the front two bedrooms.  

But Queens was so quiet, nobody on the street. Even though that’s what everyone said you moved for – the trees and the quiet.  Early on she sent me to the back garden that belonged to our building, assuming I’d meet some other kids there. Instead, both she and I were yelled at by the superintendent of the complex.  No children allowed alone in the garden. And during the ten years or so that we lived there no one – adult or child – ever sat or stood or in any way used that tree and bush crammed space.

Why did we come to “this god-forsaken Queens”? She asked herself each morning and wept. And every Friday bundled up my baby sister and I to take us forty minutes by E and then D train back to Rivington Street, to those two, now dear, front rooms, where our father met us and we remained until Sunday afternoon, fed and fussed over by Schmulka and Chinke who were delighted to have us back.

My mother didn’t know a down payment was required in order to become a modern family.  Her fee was this early loneliness. She didn’t know she was gifting me with a hunger for the honks and shouts of the narrow, crowded, treeless streets downtown that would stay with me until I made it back there as a young adult, to the Lower East Side, my true home.