Dear Bronx:

I can't remember when I didn't love you. When I was little, Mom and Dad and a half-dozen siblings would come to Perry Ave to Nana and PopPop's house. It was so exciting after East Greenbush. We'd come down on the Thruway and get off at 233rd St, and go down Jerome Ave. I was convinced that the end of the 4 Train at the Woodlawn station was the gateway to New York. You could see the world from Nana's house -- the subway, the Thanksgiving parade, or just feeding the ducks at Woodlawn Cemetery. Aunt Ethel lived around the corner, and we played with the Irish kids next door. One of the 3 O'Sullivan girls had an exotic name - it was pronounced "Ah-va" -- It was short for "Ave Maria because she was born at Christmas, ya see" her sister told me.

So when I got a scholarship to come to Fordham, it wasn't surprising that I came. It was 1969 and the whole world was upside down. I lived my freshman year on Perry Ave - (Fordham had just gone co-ed and there were no dorms for women )- Sophomore year I got an apartment share I was 19 and ready for independence. College was a time of learning, but I learned the most at the demonstrations and the constant political, and philosophical discussions at the Campus Center during the day and the The L-D (the El Dorado Bar - long gone I'm afraid) under the 3rd Avenue El.

I met my husband at the the LD, 40 years ago today. He was just back from Nam. We married a year later. Mike and I settled back in my mom's old neighborhood, Norwood in the Bronx.. Nana, newly widowed still lived there, and we wanted to be able to help her (not that she actually needed help - she lived another 20+ years !)

As we were moving in lots of folks were moving to the suburbs. The Jewish folks from Mosholu Parkway were leaving. "There goes the neighborhood" the old folks said -- but we loved it, and proceeded to have 4 sons in quick succession. By that time the Irish had moved in. They were good neighbors - so we stayed. They didn't leave until the late 80's and early 90's -- and the same old folks said, " there goes the neighborhood" and the Latinos began moving in from Puerto Rico, Central and South America. They were good neighbors - so we stayed. By this time the "boys" had moved out to start their own lives. Most recently the neighborhood has seen an influx of people from Bengla Desh, and Pakistan and Africans and Russians, and the Cambodians, and the Bulgarians, and the Philippinos and the African Americans and most recently the Mexicans and they're good neighbors, and so we stay. Norwood is one of the most diverse communities in the country. And somehow, we manage to communicate and for the most part respect each other.

20 years ago, when Mike and the boys and I, along with 6 of our neighbors, lost almost everything in a fire, people in the community helped us - finding a place to stay, replacing clothes, and furniture, and school books. People collected donations at the subway station. Old ladies donated money from their Social security checks One neighbor took my youngest's stuffed animals and hung them by the ears from her clothes line every day for 2 weeks to get the smell of the smoke out. Ten days ago, another family experienced the same devastation. And the community - much poorer now than when we had our fire has begun to do the same thing. Because we're good neighbors.

So why do I love you, Norwood. Life is tough here. Lots of folks live one paycheck away from eviction. The drugs and the violence of the 80s and 90s almost killed you. But you're still here. We're still here. Because despite the Bronx's horrible reputation, despite the poverty, despite the crazy, real, difficult problems we face here, we are a community. Because you shelter people from all over the world, because you're home to many community groups and community people who stayed when the going got rough and who take care of each other in a way you don't see in other places. Because there's a richness here of people and cultures that transcends the differences and the profound difficulties. For all these reasons, I love you, and we'll keep muddling through.

Sally Barker Dunford

Dear Bronx,

I know I'm not alone when I say, thanks for enabling my parents to get together!

My mother, Fay, came moved from Bridgetown, Barbados to 1412 Prospect Avenue in when she was nine-years old in 1958. My father, Harry, who is white, grew up not far from her in a tenement on the east side of Crotona Park. He eventually met her brother, Mark, when they were students at Gompers High School, and they developed a close friendship over a love of handball, a fascination with electrical work, and the need to watch each other’s back traveling back and forth to the same after school job in Manhattan's garment district.

Mark often brought Harry home to eat his mother’s West Indian food, and the skinny white boy with thick glasses happily obliged! Fay, two years his junior, teased him that she was a better at spelling and Math than he was, which was true. She eventually became his tutor. He taught her how to play Blackjack. They eventually started going to the movies together and holding hands.

When heroin hit your southern neighborhoods hard, whites, including Harry’s family, moved quickly, but Fay’s family of twelve remained. Harry commuted regularly up North from Coney Island to see his best friend, Mark, and his now-steady, Fay, which you know, Bronx, is like commuting from another country. Harry and Mark eventually joined the Marines. Fay wrote him once a week while he was in Vietnam. She still teased him about his spelling, and he sent pictures of himself in uniform, addressed to his “one and only girl.” Eventually, they married at St. Anthony of Padua Parish, a parish near Fay’s 1412 Prospect apartment building.

There weren’t many “mixed” couples in America at that time. Many people questioned such unions with concerns about how “mixed” children would fit into America.

But I think it was you, Bronx, and how, for a brief moment in the 1950s and early 1960s, you shoved people of different races and religions together as neighbors and classmates, that gave them the courage to stick together. Perhaps because they lived around people of all different colors and backgrounds, they never saw their relationship as strange or taboo. They were just two kids from the Bronx who fell in love as teenagers, and stayed together ever since.

So thanks, Bronx. I owe you my life.

Sincerely,
Brian Purnell

Dear THE Bronx,
Like you, I’m not a kid anymore, And although my memory doesn’t go back to the sturdy Swede family that gave you your name, it does share a lot of years with you since mom popped me out in your Westchester Square Hospital (uh, Medical Center).

You and I could talk about a lot of things. Some, like Jahn’s Ice Cream parlor off Fordham Road, where the waiter never wrote down your order and always gave the right ice cream to the right kid, even when we switched seats, are sadly gone. Others, like getting mugged in Bronx Park for my sled and having to fight even though I was out-numbered and destined to lose, I am glad to see fade into the past.

But what I want to do in this is to thank you for the playground at PS 76, where we were playing stickball and I pulled a pitch sharply through a second floor window but didn’t scatter with everyone else. When the janitor’s head popped through the window I told him I broke it and asked how much it would cost and he disgustedly told me to “Get lost!” And for the playground a PS 89 where I swear it was James Earl Jones, doing scenes from Othello on a broiling summer day. And even if my memory is lying about that, the impression of the passion-filled scenes remains to this day.

Remember the playground in the Olinville Projects where Dennis was sniffing glue from a paper bag and I saw what it did to him and determined I would never, ever do anything like that? Oh and the playground in Bronx Park, where I would make my brother Paul pitch to me by the hour as I tried to hit the ball over the high stone wall into Bronx Park East—when I went to retrieve it, I would stop in at the Drakes Bakery outlet store and buy stale cookies for a nickel. What about challenging-for-the-court at the Columbus High School playground, where throwing elbows was a rite of passage.

And most of all, thank you for the St. Lucy’s Grammar School playground which provided a home for us to start St. Lucy’s Day Camp. Thanks to MaryJo and Fr. Frank and that playground, a whole generation of Bronx kids was raised in safety and joy.

You done good.
Joe

Dear Bronx,

In the forty five years I've spent with you, you've taught me that creativity, beauty and compassion thrive most in the midst of hardship.

I first met you in the mid-60's when my girlfriend and I visited her sisters living hear the Grand Concourse and Claremont Park. She was black and I was white, and we had a hard time walking hand in hand in most of the city. But not in the Bronx, We always felt safe her because the Bronx was a place where people of different races and cultures lived together and where people of different colors were part of the same families. Though we didn't stay together forever, I will never forget your hospitality during that challenging time in my life.

I then watched you burn from the Third Avenue El and the Number 4 train when I first stared working at Fordham in the early and middle 70's. It felt awful, at the time, that I could do nothing to stop this tragedy, but I took heart from the community organizations that mobilized, first to stop the fires from heading North, and then that began to rebuild every neighborhood that had been left abandoned and burned. Now virtually every vacant lot in the South Bronx is filled with new town houses, apartments and shopping centers. Thank you, Bronx, for showing me and the world, that your spirit was unconquerable, and that all the people that wrote you off as hopelessly beaten and decayed were wrong.

And thank you Bronx, for giving the world hip-hop. In the middle of the 70's, when large portions of the Bronx were burning and music programs in the schools were being eliminated by budget cuts, young people in the Bronx, some
African American, some Latino, some West Indian, were creating a new form of densely percussive music, using two turntables and a mixer, that made whole neighborhoods dance, and then incorporated poetry and rhyme to dazzle the imagination. What started in the Bronx soon spread into every neighborhood in the country, and eventually the world, where young people were marginalized, forgotten, and looked on with contempt. Hip Hop, your original product, became as popular as Rock and Roll was in its time.

Now, "The Message" that you spawned during those difficult years is give life daily, in the suburbs of Paris, in the favelas of Rio, in the immigrant quarters of Berlin. In all of those places, where life is hard, young people use hip hop to say, in the words of Grand Master Flash; "Don't push me, cause I'm close to the edge, I'm trying not to lose my head. It makes me wonder how I keep from going under."

Thank you Bronx, not only for surviving, but for triumphing in the face of adversity, and setting an example of endurance and creativity for the entire world.

Sincerely,
Mark Naison
Professor of African American Studies and History
Fordham University

Dear Bronx,

I loved you and I was in love with you and I loved while I lived in
you. This I remember: our garden with basil plants to my waist, the
kittens and then the cats and then the kittens again. The way the
river smelled when I biked over it, it smelled like home, a mixture of
sewage and rain and salt. The way the street sounded in the summer,
music and children's cries and the teenagers across the street arguing
and laughing at me: calling me their older sister, their cat lady and
then as they got older hitting on me just to try it out. The way the
sun hit the Projects and turned them golden brown, the way I would
bike through Hunts Point and find somewhere I felt no one had been for
years, some industrial abandoned corner of the city. Forgotten but not
left. And actually not forgotten either just made to look that way so
that it seemed like a secret. And I remember the taste of huerovos
rancheros on 3rd ave. And tamales on the way to the subway on a cold
day, warming your inside. But all of this is secondary. Really what I
remember is that while I lived there, while I lived in you, I was in
love. I was so entirely in love that I thought nothing existed outside
of my love and so nothing existed outside of you and because I thought
this it was true. And then I moved, somehow betraying you and somehow
betraying my love. Everything fell apart after I moved Bronx. Nothing
was the same and everything changed. I changed, my love changed and
now I am not regretful but nostalgic for a time when when there was an
abandoned dog tied to the lamp on the corner we would be the ones to
untie it, take it home, nurse it back to health and then hold it all
night long when it was scared. Dear Bronx, I was so much younger when
I loved you, when I was in love with you and while I lived in you.

All my love,

Manissa

Dear Bronx,

I said “It’s quits,” and walked away. You are the place where I grew up but I left you as soon as I was able and I never explained why. I owe you that. It’s long overdue. Please understand that I loved you then and love you still, but we were just no good together.

In the 60’s and early 70’s when we first knew each other, I thought you were great. I played stickball and knock hockey at PS 80 and basketball in the Oval Park. I had a garden plot at your Botanical Garden. I played manhunt on the one city block we declared “in bounds.” The synagogue was home base and I knew which alleys connected, where vicious dogs patrolled and what roofs were left unlocked. I owned your streets – well, I thought I did. These were our salad days. I thought we had a future.

By the mid 70s, I was a teenager and the honeymoon was over. You changed. I started to notice your imperfections. Going out alone at night meant being hyper alert, always wary of potential menace. We added gates to our windows. Street names like the Grand Concourse, where I had my first apartment, became ironic. The odds were against us.

I took a part time job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I was a freshman in college. I spent days exploring neighborhoods that were so close, yet so different and grander somehow. I seemed to fit in better in Manhattan. I became dissatisfied with you. I watched the cityscape change as I rode north on the 4 train, noticing how tired your face had become. I wanted the challenge of a new love and let’s be honest, you paled in comparison. I planned my escape.

I moved to Manhattan in 1988. Maybe I outgrew you, but I was never ashamed of you. I knew that what we had was special. I defend you to detractors – declaring defiantly to transplants from Ohio that I grew up in the Bronx. “You want to make something of it?”, being the highly transparent subtext. I am who I am today because of you. I am tough when I need to be and human all the time. I take nothing for granted. I don’t regret the time we spent together and I wouldn’t trade my years with you for anything. I hope we can be friends.

Love,
Annie Walsh