This Is All I Got by Lauren Sandler

Author:Lauren Sandler [Sandler, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

13

SHERMAN AVENUE

The Champs-Élysées was the model for the Grand Concourse, constructed at the apex of the City Beautiful movement and completed in 1909. Seeking space and amenities, upwardly mobile families escaped congested Manhattan for the landscaped courtyards of the Bronx. By the mid-thirties, over three hundred Art Deco buildings lined the Concourse, finely gilded even through the Depression, offering central heating and private bathrooms in every apartment. But that was before the postwar dream lured new white families to the new white suburbs. And when Manhattan’s decaying tenements were demolished in the name of slum clearance, nearly 175,000 New Yorkers, mainly black and of Hispanic origin, fled to the buildings lining the Concourse and its nearby streets. The buildings told the story of this diaspora: A 1927 synagogue was rebirthed as the Grand Concourse Seventh-Day Adventist Temple; the Louis Minoff apartment building changed its name to the Papaya. The southern section of the borough earned a reputation as the most dangerous place in the country in the seventies and became synonymous with urban crime during the crack epidemic of the eighties. While in 2015 the city as a whole had never been safer, the murder rate in the Bronx was quietly increasing, though the former media glare on the borough was now barely a passing glance.

Camila’s new neighbors earned a median household income of $27,030—about a quarter of what Park Slope residents earned. In the Bronx, 34 percent of households, and at least 42 percent of children, lived below the federal poverty level. The most battle-scarred of boroughs ranked last of all sixty-two New York counties for health and welfare and was home to the single poorest Congressional district in the entire nation the year Alonso was born. Despite its widespread destitution, the Bronx had recently outpaced Manhattan and Brooklyn in a real estate surge, and home sales had risen 35 percent. Real estate developers saw blight as opportunity. Taxpayers had recently spent nearly a billion dollars subsidizing the new Yankee Stadium—rather than housing, health, education, or welfare—to add sheen to its $2.5 billion baseball franchise, the most valuable sports team in the country. New multilane thoroughfares that encircled the stadium did little to separate its colossus from the surrounding squalor. Just a quick walk from the ticket booth, where season tickets could run tens of thousands of dollars, was Sherman Avenue, Camila’s new address.

The minivan carrying Camila, her son, and her possessions turned down Sherman, parallel to the Concourse, and slowed past the neoclassical façade of what had been Taft High School. Stanley Kubrick had graduated from Taft in 1945. The last class to receive diplomas there was in 2008, the year it was shut down as a failing school. In the neighborhood schools that remained open, less than 13 percent of kids performed at grade level. Low academic performance and lasting health issues were a common hallmark of a childhood spent in an overcrowded home. In New York, more than 280,000 apartments were overcrowded, and that number was constantly on the rise—up 18 percent from the year before.

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