A Cycle In Manhattan

A widow and her two grown sons walk into an empty stable. The horses that once lived here were some of the last transport animals in Manhattan, stolid, humble beasts leased out with a wagon to carry goods from one place to another.  It is 1943, the middle of World War II.   Neither son has been drafted. My uncle Louis because he is married with a small child, my father because he is the “sole support of a widowed mother.” Just a few years earlier the brothers would sometimes appear at this stable to rent a horse and wagon. It was the least expensive way to convey a large load of paper products uptown. 

Now they own a truck and a van. They are prospering. But their stock remains in a padlocked basement storage room beneath the family apartment which is located one city block south at 139 Eldridge.  And they still make phone calls to customers and keep the business’s books at their mother’s kitchen table.

The widow and her sons stand among the empty wooden stalls, imagining further prosperity.  Ancient wisps of straw poke out between the slats.  They consider the property. Asking price is five thousand dollars.  This is their cumulative savings from ten years of labor. It is 25 feet wide, 80 feet deep. There are two floors above.  It is enough space to shelter a lot more paper products.

The door to the empty tack room swings open on the right.  They peer in.  A space heater, stucco yellow walls, a few shelves, one window with bars facing the street, two mahogany roll top desks. Years later, in the nineteen-seventies, during an economic recession when business is slow, they will joke to each other that the roll top desks are worth more than the building. 

            

On this concrete slab floor they will build their good life. Where breathing and pawing horses once stood there will be inanimate rolls of brown paper, taller than a tall man. These rolls, which are the first thing one sees upon entering, are half-lit by a low-watt bulb and are almost Rembrandtian in the shadows they cast.  I never did find out who purchased them, or what they were for.   The business sold many things I understood: envelopes of every size in packages of fifty and in cases, industrial balls of twine, small rolls of wrapping or tissue paper, brown bags in sizes from one to twenty.  But those totem rolls just seemed to sit among the dust motes, ever the same, a kind of paper Stonehenge.  Which is how the building and the family business it housed, Atlantic Paper Products, seemed to us, the children: ancient and eternal.  

When my father and Uncle Louis moved their stock and the business into the former stable at 170 Eldridge Street, they did not change a thing.   During the winter months, in the former tack room that still looked like a tack room, the two of them, and later their sister, took orders over the phone wearing gloves without finger tips (the better to dial), and several sweaters over  woolen pants and long underwear.  When we, their children, would chide them for this: Get better lighting,  put in some decent heat, they would just mumble something that sounded like language but was really just a sigh of exasperation.  

From 1944 when they purchased the building to 1996 when it was sold, they changed nothing, not even the DC current.  Frugality was their North Star.  How else had they done so well? “We were like dust,” my father wrote in his diary more than once in the middle of the Great Depression.

Yet with us, their chiding children and with their wives, our mothers, they were open handed: clothes from Saks or B. Altman, summer camps, expensive colleges if that’s what we wanted.  What else was it all for?

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The man who purchased the building from Atlantic Paper Products was also an immigrant.  George Forgeois came to New York in 1979 with $500, a backpack and little English.  He worked as a dishwasher for many years while he learned the restaurant trade. Now he is a man of note in the city, incorporated and owning four fashionable Paris-like bistros.  When he purchased the former stable, former paper emporium, he had already achieved prosperity and so he transformed it into an elegant  one family townhouse with a roof garden. Something no one in our family could have imagined.  Mr. Forgeois's Jaguar, I am told, takes pride of place on the concrete floor.