![]() My father had a small coat factory on Thirty-ninth Street then, with about a dozen men working sewing machines. ![]() Out West, it was the time of the red sun and the dust storms, when whole desiccated farms blew away and sent the Okies, whom Steinbeck immortalized, out on their desperate treks toward the Pacific. Later on, in the Depression thirties, the summers seemed even hotter. I can recall only white people spread out on the grass Harlem began above 116th Street then. Babies cried in the darkness, men’s deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh beside the lake. With a couple of other kids, I would go across 110th to the Park and walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock’s ticks syncopating with another’s. People on West 110th Street, where I lived, were a little too bourgeois to sit out on their fire escapes, but around the corner on 111th and farther uptown mattresses were put out as night fell, and whole families lay on those iron balconies in their underwear.Įven through the nights, the pall of heat never broke. We kids would jump onto the back steps of the slow-moving, horse-drawn ice wagons and steal a chip or two the ice smelled vaguely of manure but cooled palm and tongue. Every window in New York was open, and on the streets venders manning little carts chopped ice and sprinkled colored sugar over mounds of it for a couple of pennies. Photograph by Weegee (Arthur Fellig) / International Center of Photography / GettyĮxactly what year it was I can no longer recall-probably 1927 or ’28-there was an extraordinarily hot September, which hung on even after school had started and we were back from our Rockaway Beach bungalow.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |