The Times They Are A-Changin'

As a youth, my family and I occasionally visited friends at their apartment with windows overlooking a busy El. In fact, you could practically reach out and touch the subway trains passing to and fro. It was the Number 4 line to be precise. And the apartment dwellers in question lived in a walk-up at the intersection of Jerome Avenue and East Gun Hill Road—where west meets east. That is, where the West Bronx ends and the East Bronx begins. The address was actually not too far from where I grew up in Kingsbridge. It was only a ten-minute drive, yet it seemed like a different world altogether.

For a kid who liked both playing with and riding on trains, I considered this apartment the absolute coolest place a person could live. Watching subway traffic at all hours from a bedroom window perch was akin—from my ten-year-old perspective—to an urban paradise. Now, more than forty years later, I can better understand why people might prefer to live someplace else.

Residing in eye- and earshot of a heavily-trafficked El would typically be considered less desirable living quarters than someplace off-the-beaten trail—like a block away. But the times they are a-changin’ in New York. Recently, I stumbled upon a rather large sign at W242nd Street and Broadway that advertised luxury apartments. During its building stage, rumors swirled that the completed edifice would be dormitories for my alma mater, nearby Manhattan College. What an awful location for college kids to burn the midnight oil studying for exams, I thought then, not to mention for sleeping off a Natural Light Beer binge. With trains coming and going at that very spot all day and all night long, it’s a never-ending story of metal-on-metal screeching, earsplitting horn blowing, and—the pièce de ré·sis·tance—air-brake sighing when the Number 1 train comes home to roost. "Luxury,” it would seem, is in the eye and ear of the beholder.

If nothing else, they are "close to transportation."

And close to sprawling Van Cortlandt Park, too.

Every time there is a heavy rain, Tibbetts Brook "daylights" itself in the park.

In barbecue territory...

It's that time of year around this part of the Bronx. On weekends, buses become trains.

The luxury apartments will have a bird's-eye view of this sort of thing on a regular basis.

As a youthful passenger in my father's automobile, I remember requesting with a certain yanking hand-gesture that truck drivers blow their loud horns. The luxury apartment dwellers can mime something similar to passing train operators.

There once was a time when Dunkin' Donuts was "worth the trip." That is, pretty scarce and hard to find. Not so anymore.

An empty Natural Light beer can—a Jasper's preferred brew.

Groundbreaking at the college for its future state-of-the-art "South Campus." This locale once hosted a house on it that was owned by boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. When I attended Manhattan College, the house was still there and called Farrell Hall. For a reason that now escapes me, I visited Farrell Hall on one occasion.

Springtime on Broadway. A couple of days ago, I wore my winter jacket.

Today it's close to ninety degrees.

Tony Riverdale's haphazard building through the years would have made Ayn Rand proud.

When "The Century" building in Riverdale first opened, there was no covering on its tennis courts. For a summer or two, the woods surrounding it supplied us with bag loads of free tennis balls for our stickball games.

Stickball games that, by the way, were played down this block at John F. Kennedy High School. The school was built on land that previously housed an area we all knew as "Shanty Town."

"That's a fancy-looking apartment building over there. I wonder how much an apartment is?"

Elevated subway tracks were once the rage, even in Manhattan. Now, only the Number 1 train—and briefly at that—daylights itself in the northernmost reaches of the borough.

I grew up with the El on nearby Broadway. I waited for my "Special" bus, which took me to high school in the East Bronx, under the El. I enjoyed a snow cone at Woolworth's in the shadows of the El. It was an evocative area institution for sure. Nowadays, however, I can better appreciate the quieter and cleaner benefits of an underground railroad.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)