The Address Book by Deirdre Mask

The Address Book by Deirdre Mask

Author:Deirdre Mask
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2020-03-23T16:00:00+00:00


RACE

10

Hollywood, Florida

WHY CAN’T AMERICANS STOP ARGUING ABOUT CONFEDERATE STREET NAMES?

For two and a half years, Benjamin Israel, an African American Orthodox Jew, attended every meeting of the Hollywood, Florida, city council to talk about street names. (Every meeting, he corrected me, apart from when he was too “laid low” by lung cancer treatments to make it.) Israel had grown up on Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem during the terrible years of New York’s drug epidemics. His father, who was Jewish, had fled religious persecution in Ethiopia. Eventually he made it to New York on a merchant ship, and met Israel’s mother.

His mother worked as a maid to support them. After school, Israel had to clean up after the addicts who used the foyer of his building as a toilet. Still, he loved Manhattan, but when his bronchitis got worse, his uncle took him to Florida for a week’s vacation. He could breathe and he never left. Soon, he settled in Hollywood, a medium-size city between Fort Lauderdale and Miami. Israel trained in carpentry, and found a house close enough to a synagogue that he could walk there on the Sabbath.

Now Hollywood is his home. At every city commission meeting, Israel, his hair growing white under his yarmulke, made the same point. The town’s Confederate street names had to change. Three names in particular: Lee Street, after Robert E. Lee; Forrest Street, after Nathan Bedford Forrest; and Hood Street, after John Bell Hood. All three streets ran through Liberia, the historic black district of Hollywood. The city commission gave Israel three minutes to speak each time, and his passionate speeches were often sandwiched between residents complaining about slow traffic or Airbnb regulations.

Hollywood, Florida, wasn’t so much founded as conjured. Joseph Young, a developer, had panned for gold with his father in the Yukon; he didn’t find any, but in California he discovered real estate, which was almost the same thing. As his biographer Joan Mickleson has described, in January of 1920, at the age of thirty-eight, he came to a scrubby patch of land north of Miami, to find yet another fortune. The land, wedged between two farm towns, and covered in palmetto, jack pines, and marshes, did not, at first, look promising.

But it didn’t matter. Young drew up elaborate plans for the new city, unironically based on George-Eugène Haussmann’s redesign of Paris, with wide streets, circles and boulevards, and lakes deep enough for yachts. (Young claimed he didn’t call Hollywood after the California city; he simply liked the name.) In just five years, the town had a railway station, a country club, a department store, and an ice plant.

It was the 1920s, and the United States was the richest country in the world. Americans brimmed with pensions, paid holidays, and new automobiles. Florida was hot, but the rest of the country was brutally cold. In 1920, a seventy-two-hour blizzard covered New York with almost eighteen inches of snow. Soldiers from the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service used flamethrowers to melt the ice. In Boston, almost seventy-four inches of snow fell on the city the same year.



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