Alte#8: THE HOUSE I LIVE IN

The House I Live In

by Sandy Polishuk

I was filled with joy each year when I realized, sitting in the auditorium with the entire Temple De Hirsch Religion School, that we were there to watch The House I Live In again. I loved it even more than the Harlem Globetrotter movies, shown serial-like at my junior high during lunch hour. 

Frank Sinatra exits to the alley after recording a forgettable love song to find that a group of maybe 10-year-old boys have chased another boy into said alley on their way to school. He shields the boy and asks what’s going on. The boys tell him they don’t like him cause he’s a Jew. Frankie says they sound like Nazis. It’s 1945. They do not like hearing that. After a bit of conversation and a little lecture, he sings them “The House I Live In,” and all is well. 

We didn’t have racism on our minds sitting in that auditorium. I only learned now that it has a verse with the line "my neighbors white and black," which didn’t make it into the movie. The lyricist, Abel Meeropol, was reportedly enraged. Now that I know, I am, too. 

I also didn’t know who Abel Meeropol was, nor Earl Robinson, who wrote the music. I never met Abel (the adoptive father of the orphaned sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg), but I had the great pleasure of a couple of hours with Earl Robinson in the 1980s when I interviewed him for KBOO, my local community radio station. After our conversation, he and I and a station engineer walked across the street to a tavern where station folks hung out. Earl sat down at the piano and played and sang and we recorded. Heavenly.

I also didn’t know the short film had been awarded an honorary Academy Award and a special Golden Globe in 1946. I just knew I was happy when it came on the auditoriium screen. (I love the song!) I guess it wasn’t controversial to show us the film — but it was created by Communists who would also be caught in McCarthyism’s spotlight.

The Baby Doll Lounge

by Abby Robinson

The Baby Doll Lounge was already on the ground floor when I moved in.  At one point, the outside was painted with black, pink and white stripes. I mostly  only went in to pick up packages that were delivered when I was out; in that way the Baby Doll functioned like a doorman.  It was noisy and there were almost nightly fights on the street under my bedroom window. After a while, the fights seemed similar: same minimal dialogue, same jerky moves, generally the same results (except for the time someone got shot).

A guy named Dwayne always hovered around (selling drugs? Better not to know). He had a great laugh and I could hear it two floors up. I liked Dwayne. He was the mayor of the street; he knew everybody’s name as well as the names of their pets. 

Tribeca wasn’t very populated then and the streets were pretty empty. But I was never afraid. The Baby Doll lit up the corner and stayed open until 4 am. The manager, always wearing a baseball cap that matched his shirt, stood by the door.  None of the patrons ever bothered me but why would they? No matter what I wore, I was always overdressed.

I still have a black, weirdly designed Baby Doll t-shirt and a bar stool I got the night it closed. I wish I had the sign.

There’s a good  (and certainly convenient) restaurant in the space now, run by a nice, friendly family. The neighborhood has gone insanely upscale. The Baby Doll wouldn’t survive on this corner now (not even ironically); its clientele doesn’t live anywhere near here anymore. But I’m sad it had to leave and I still really miss it.

RAILROADED

by Maggie Whalen

It was 1960, perhaps, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. A third of the ceiling had fallen onto the floor of our kitchen in a building built in 1902. No sheetrock here — huge chunks of heavy plaster, rotted wooden lathing and other debris, all over theworn linoleum. The single lightbulb hung from the gaping, jagged hole above. The ceiling on the floor blocked the kitchen sink and the bathroom at the furthest end, so it had to be carted down the stairs and up the street to the dark alley where the trash cans were kept. The landlord did not repair it for close to a year. At first, I looked up each time I scurried beneath it, afraid a rat would take a flying leap onto my head.

The rooms in a railroad apartment are connected like the cars on a train. They are not much wider, and some are narrower. Our kitchen was the narrowest room in the apartment. The bathroom at the far end contained a smallish clawfoot tub with a large, drafty window above it, a pull chain toilet, and around two feet square between the toilet and the door. There was no sink or shower. This meant hands needed to be washed and teeth brushed in the kitchen sink or the bath tub. The walls, bulging in places and cracked, were painted in shiny yellow enamel. The bathroom ceiling had fallen in 1958. It broke the toilet seat but, fortunately, no one's head.

The kitchen had a non-functional dumbwaiter, which in much earlier times could haul things up from the ground floor. We had a metal cabinet for food, a very old refrigerator, a stove, and a double sink. A tiny shelf sat at the edge of the sink, where the Ajax, my father's Greasolvent, our toothbrushes, and a cup containing my father's false teeth sat. In the corner above the sink, the plaster all around the water pipe was badly cracked, a perfect home for roaches who sometimes floated with my father's false teeth. Above the sink was a large window. Our kitchen window was never washed, and the curtains were never opened, since the window faced across the fire escape to the wall and window of an apartment in the building nextdoor and let in little light. That apartment was home to a family with sixteen children, who were all adults by the time I knew them. We had a mere five. Long, shallow, built-in cabinets lined part of the opposite wall. From years of painting, the doors didn't stay shut, and the drawers didn't pull easily. A washing machine partially blocked the entrance from the dining room. Clotheslines were strung in the kitchen, dining room and living room. My mother worked full time as a secretary and did the laundry on the weekends. My father would often shove the wet laundry out of his way, leaving hard-to-iron wrinkles in everything.

The dining room was wider. A grey formica table stood against one wall, always partially covered in greasy auto parts. My father was a truck mechanic. My family had moved from Bushkill, Pennsylvania to New York in 1944 after my father's gas station failed. A large window with a fire escape was at the end of the room closest to the kitchen. When I was very young, it was a treat to eat my lunch on the fire escape, which looked out onto a parking lot on the street behind ours. As we were only one flight up, our fire escape had no hole leading down. It did have a staircase leading up to the other floors. It had previously looked out at the back side of a building on the next street. When that building was torn down, a parking lot, surfaced with something resembling ground coal, replaced it. Our table would get covered with a fine black dust you could write your name in. A long radiator was beneath the window. My mother would stuff the holes around the radiator with steel wool and insert a beer bottle with its neck broken off down into the largest hole to try to keep the rats from coming up. The rats were hard to control. The worst they had done was to bite my brother Bob when he was five, kill our pet bird, and bite my Aunt Mamie's finger while she slept. Their smell when they died in the walls was a close second. Their numbers increased when five blocks of tenements like ours, one avenue over, were torn down in 1962 to make room for the Penn South co-op apartments. Next to the window, a small table held our telephone. Above it was a metal medicine cabinet with a mirror where my mother would comb her hair and put on her lipstick.

All our walls were painted with shiny enamel paint. Years of linoleum were piled underfoot so that high-heeled shoes left little dents. The floors were very rarely washed, and the thresholds between the rooms were badly splintered. As a result, we always wore shoes in the apartment. The portable TV sat on a stand in one corner of the dining room. A dresser with a heavy-duty four-slot toaster sat on the opposite side. You couldn't make toast and watch TV at the same time without blowing a fuse, and you could only toast two pieces of bread at a time. Residents had to buy their own supply of fuses and replace them when they blew. The fuse box was inside the entrance to the dark basement. There were few electrical outlets in the dining and living rooms, which required plugging in the toaster across the doorway each time it was used. We always ran it once to chase any lingering rats out before making toast. Every morning, my sister Irene, who was three years older than me, would predictably scream as a rat ran across the threshhold. I had no empathy for her fear of rats, and she had none for my fear of roaches. If only we could have shared the same phobia!

The entry door from the building hallway was across from the dresser. We only locked the door when no one was home. The dining room led to three narrow bedrooms in a row. There was an overhead light in each room with a pullchain, but there were no electrical outlets. There was room for a single bed against one wall and a dresser on the other, leaving a passage about two feet wide. There was a door between the first and second bedrooms, but none between the middle and final bedroom. My parents had a full-sized bed in that one, with a dresser at the end of the bed. Each bedroom had a shallow closet. The middle bedroom had a sealed window, covered in layers of paint blocking any chance for light. It was high up on the wall and would have opened to a narrow airshaft. There was a riser in each room with peeling paint, blistered from the steam heat that rose through them. There was no way to control the heat. It came on with lots of hissing and clanging, and then went off completely. If the coal delivery didn't come for the building, we could go for days or a week with no heat.

My parents' bedroom led to the living room, with French doors between the rooms. During the 50's, I slept with my sister Irene on the pullout couch, and my oldest sister, Diane, slept on a pullout easy chair. My next to oldest brother, Bob, slept in the first bedroom. My oldest brother, Joe, left home when he was 16 and I was a year old. He had witnessed one too many wife beatings and was finally old enough to stop my father. He hit him on the head with a shillelagh. Why we had a shillelagh I can't say. My father threatened to press charges, and my brother was taken in by a nearby seminary. He learned how to bind books while he was there. He was able to enlist in the Air Force when he was 17 and never lived with us again. He came to see us when I was 5 or 6 with his Belgian wife. He was a stranger to me, and a stern one. On a trip to the Museum of Natural History, I remember him scolding me because my heels kept kicking my own ankles, dirtying my little white socks.

My paternal grandfather in his final year or years slept in the middle bedroom. By that time he was bed-bound and demented, completely dependent on my mother's nursing for his bodily care. The odor was intense, and I would hold my breath as I walked through that room. I have a vague memory of meeting him once when he still lived in Bushkill. I must have been very young.

Our living room/bedroom had a small metal closet for our clothes painted to look like wood (it didn't). There was also a wide dresser against one wall. There were two large windows, one with a fire escape. It was sunny at that end of the apartment, and the windows overlooked the front stoops of our building and the adjoining one. In a corner by that window, we had bookshelves and an open black wooden box for our toys. A door that led to the building hallway was at the end of the room closest to my parents' bedroom. We kept that door locked and never used it.

As elderly relatives came and went and as some of my older siblings moved out, the sleeping arrangements changed. When my grandfather died in 1957, Diane moved into the middle bedroom. That same year, my brother Bob joined the Marines, and my great aunt, Mamie, moved into his bedroom. I don't remember much about her at all. She was very old and seemed to spend all her time in bed. When Diane got married in 1960, I moved into the middle bedroom. Irene continued to sleep in the living room, on a new couch that did not pull out. At the foot of my bed, there was a very huge paper bag, about three feet high, for Goodwill donations. The rats thought it made an excellent home and would rustle around in it all night. They were easier to listen to than my father's loud snoring and country music radio in the next room, which he left on all night. Worse still was when he would wake up in the middle of the night wanting my mother to have sex. She would tell him it would wake us up but he would angrily say he didn't give a damn. She'd tell him she had to go use the bathroom first, and then she and I would wait out in the dining room for him to fall back asleep. But sometimes I awoke to the sounds and odor of them going at it, and I'd wait in the dining room by myself for them to be done.

I turned 18 in December, 1966. On January 1, 1967, I moved into my own apartment in the East Village, land of bathtubs in the kitchen.

At the Curb

by Nancy Lubarsky

A tray table teeters on the 

sidewalk. Small treasures 

placed on rusted flowers 

that coat the surface — shell, 

pink lace, cameo — not meant 

for the dumpster in the rear 

of his driveway, not for sale or 

free. Just there. And then, in 

the hands of others. Each day

new items appear: broach, pin

cushion, perfume bottle. I stop

to feel the etched glass, breathe

in lavender, return it to the tray. 

Next time, a souvenir scope. I 

close one eye. Inside, a sepia 

couple embrace, smile. I slip it 

into my pocket, and walk on.

Nancy Lubarsky

10  000 HOME   LESS   CHILDREN

for Brian Rushton

by Marty Cohen

Inside the veteran with fake papers and a 

formulaic rap working the train

The kid with one ear having flashbacks in 

community college writing class

Inside the fake nun from the cult collecting 

change in a tambourine

The girl from vo-tech reading Simone Weil 

for the first time

Inside the saxophone player so stoned he 

doesn’t even pick up the coins in his hat

The steel guitarist who used to work this corner

Inside the street vendor in an apron with a 

business card and a copy of The Fountainhead 

the busker flogging his own poems

The blind beggar with a black lab and a can 

of pencils stationed in front of 

Radio City Music Hall since I was a boy

Sailorman Jack turning over a career in insurance 

to sing on street corners in the financial district

Inside the secret of homelessness the secret of addiction

Inside the system the controller of the heart deflowered 

every day by the unsympathetic executive director

Inside the terminal like some cheap magic shop 

one thing turning into another 

degrading before our eyes

Inside the spaces between the words of the stenciled slogan

       10  000      HOME    LESS     CHILDREN

One kid      another kid       another      each with a name

And spaces between the words of their lives

My Building Has Changed

by Esther Cohen

When I moved into this undistinguished building

passable yes beautiful no corner of Columbus 

and 77th the neighborhood was

a different place. I liked the apartment because of the shape

of the rooms, and the windows, not

elegance, or views. I was an office temp and I often wore

a dress to work a friend had made with domino buttons. 

working on a novel intended to be a language dance

called Mango Tango and my roommate, Emily Sterling,

studied acting at NYU. Our neighbors were more or less

like us. No one had an MBA or talked about money

except like this: I Hope I Can Pay the Rent.

Over the years the city changed. Some from The Old Days

still live right here and many came after: younger, different.

And here we all in the pandemic. Locked in together 

city building that is a city neighborhood some evenings

we who barely said hello for years meet in the hall with glasses of wine

and we talk because we are here together and because we all

miss people and because it is the pandemic and we understand

how much we need each other now.

DRIVING

by Dorothy Friedman

I am driving towards the hospital in a l959 Buick.

When I get there I will have my first child in 2 hours and 13 minutes.

I am driving towards the hospital in a 1963 Plymouth.

When I get there I will have my second child in 2 hours and 10 minutes.

I am driving towards the hospital in a l967 Toyota.

When I get there I will have my third child in 1 hour and 20 minutes.

It is all a trick done with mirrors.

Giving and passing on.

The walls of my house I carry with me.

I use music, paint, a picture to transform it.

I hang the house on a hill

where it seems to be suspended in space.

Cambria Heights, Queens, New York  

by Judith Kerman

I always thought

my childhood was boring

Virginia Schmidt with her

rat face and dishwater hair

standing on my foot

until, crying, I finally 

pushed her off

Sheila who was

maybe smarter than me

or maybe not

we ran around naked

together at 4 or 5

later she had body hair

before I did

and then I moved away

when I saw her again years later

she had a woman’s figure, wore

a fitted black dress with white piping

like a grown-up

I had my own bedroom 

with a porch facing the maple tree

and hot pink sunsets

that threatened novas

I played alone

on the bedroom floor

with Susan and Ruth

my two dolls, and Susan was 

a prince, her sexless body

marked with red

crayon

pink ribbons 

dripped from my dress 

for my sixth birthday party 

pink ribbons for 

a doll’s blonde hair, girly-girly 

Marilyn Monroe heavenly 

angels, chocolate boxes

pink wallpaper with gold stars and red 

roses scattered across it

replacing the old dark green with yellow and white

pansies like monkeys’ faces

a house with a locked door

suddenly opens

I walk back in 

but this is someone else’s 

house, I need 

a can opener or 

new roll of toilet paper

but they don’t keep things 

in the same drawers

pink was what I wanted

it was not my color

Permission Granted 

by Lawrence Bush

I used to work at home for so many hours that I became afraid to leave the house — afraid that I’d miss an email, 

an opportunity, a responsibility. I called myself a homebody, but I was really becoming an agoraphobe. So I asked Susan to see if, for my birthday, she could locate an old-fashioned ticket dispenser, the kind you might find at a crowded deli counter: You push the lever, you get a number, you wait your turn. 

She couldn’t find one, so instead she made a “Permission Box,” which dispensed tickets. Each time I left the house, I would put a ticket into my wallet, and after about five times 

I didn’t need to perform the ritual. 

The Permission Box. Every therapist should have one.  

Pink Hula Hoop

by Margaret R. Sáraco

I remember when my young son tossed his pink hula hoop 

so high it got caught in the oak tree branches

I remember we stood in the driveway and stared up, 

marveling how far it traveled; we could never reach it

I remember we went inside 

counted the money in the change jar

I remember walking to the toy store holding hands

I remember he rolled the new one all the way home, 

my voice caught in my throat when I thought he wasn’t watching for cars

I remember thinking about that old-fashioned hoop and stick game 

and he didn’t know anything about that, but he rolled it the same way

I remember he played outside until dark

I remember the next day it was there, 

and it was still there even after he went away to college 

I remember thinking that even though we didn’t see each other often

we spoke on the telephone

I remember telling him the hula hoop was still in the tree

and then after a fierce windstorm, it wasn’t,

that the pink hula hoop was set out with bulky waste 

and I had to write this poem to remember everything, 

to remember with my heart, for when my memory fails.

Staying Home 

plague xvii

Rachel Berghash

I stay at home where the air is dense,

objects are close — vase, book, picture,

drawing me into their secrets

never to divulge or indulge in.

I sit at home where intimacy

cuddles me. I prostrate or kneel, 

telling God “come settle in me,”

and sigh the psalms softly

lest old wounds awake.

I think of wide spaces,

sea, woods, and the rest.

I move closer to ordinary things, 

sink, scissors, and the like,

I watch the cacti grow

and the showerhead that sprinkles wide. 

I want to settle in God, 

and let my porous skin absorb the chirping

of sparrows, and the dog’s barks, 

which echo through the window.  

The House
by Lori Frankel

I live in used to be

Our house.

We loved our house,

home made,

decrepit, but homely.

 We called it The House

of the Mildewed Ear

(with reason). But

it gave air to

our being, our

being together,

a house with a

Personality. People

walked in and noticed. 

Is it now the same house?

No.

But still decrepit,

still homely.

Unweave a Rainbow       

for my brother

by Marjorie Hanft

Emblem of a spectacular incandescent existential 

childhood         we called her the prism lady

who babysat us in her home where we were mesmerized by a 

lantern or hurricane lamp            or were there crystals dangling

from some Victorian lampshade        in that brick house

in ’60 or ’61 when White Plains was still a town where a kid could 

play in the woods at the end of the street       never mind

hobos near the tracks        and were we already on our own

submerged     in our latchkey days            when we were put on    that plane

to be with our Florida grandma          where we watched her neighbor 

through the high rise window      Lily with her two-pronged tushie poker

securing          as our destiny         a staunch belief in witches?