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https://www.melrosestories.org/files/original/3c26cd7df8f7fd940f67ae78062cd49f.mp3
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Ed Garcia Conde
Language
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English
Contributor
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Ed Garcia Conde
Diamond Naga Siu
Description
An account of the resource
Eduardo Garcia Conde was born in Mott Haven in 1975, and goes by the name of Ed. He has two words of his last name as part of the Puerto Rican tradition — both his parents moved to the South Bronx from Puerto Rico before their 20s. Ed grew up as a single child and moved to Melrose at seven years old after his parents won a housing lottery for Christopher Court, which is right off the 149 Street-Grand Concourse subway stop. Although he left the South Bronx after graduating college — a goal that formed in high school — he gravitated back to Melrose for the community and life of the neighborhood. He is a former real estate appraiser and is now an active member of the large LGBTQ community in Melrose. But his main job consists of running his Welcome2TheBronx blog, which garners 100,000 to 200,000 readers per month. Since his blog aims to represent the whole Bronx, he spends a lot of time walking the borough to try showing an unbiased perspective of the Bronx. He wants to share narratives of the Bronx that most people do not see or hear. And now, here is his story from when he was growing up with the city still burning, to now as he fights with his neighborhood to avoid its gentrification.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Diamond Naga Siu
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Ed Garcia Conde
Location
The location of the interview
Melrose
2825 Third Ave, Bronx, NY 10455
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
DNS: Hi. My name is Diamond Naga Siu, and I’m interviewing Mr. Ed Garcia Conde on Thursday, April 13, 2017. This for Professor Rebecca Amato’s (Dis)placed Urban Histories spring 2017 course at NYU Gallatin. Do you mind spelling your name for us, please?
EGC: Sure. My name is Ed Garcia Conde, and that’s E-D G-A-R-C (as in Charlie) I-A and second last name is Conde. C-O-N-D-E.
DNS: Okay great. So while this is about the neighborhood, I was wondering if I could talk a little about you first — I’d love to hear about your background, your time at Melrose, and you know.
EGC: I was actually born at Mott Haven in the old Lincoln Hospital. It was a hospital that was in the South Bronx since before the Civil War, and I was one of the last babies there. It was one of the last years that kids were born there, and I lived for seven years of my life in Mott Haven, but just literally Mott Haven is adjacent to Melrose, so it was just like, we were always there. I went to in Melrose, and then in 1982, while things were still burning… buildings were still being abandoned still. Underdevelopment was opening. It was sort of like a little beacon almost in Melrose on Morris Avenue and 150th and 151st Street, and it’s called Christopher Court. My parents decided to apply for the lotto, you know, the affordable housing lottery back then, and sure enough they were one of the lucky families that were called, and in 1982 — May of 1982, actually May 25, I’ll never forget the date, we moved to Melrose, and I’ve been living here ever since with the exception of a couple years, where I lived in Manhattan and then I put a little stint in New Jersey. New Jersey, I actually broke my lease in New Jersey, cause I just didn’t like it. I broke it one month shy of completing my full year, cause I just couldn’t stand living there. It was a horrible experience. Not because it was a bad neighborhood, but I felt so disconnected from everything, so I came back to Manhattan again, because that’s where I lived before I had moved to Jersey. And while living in Manhattan, I was living in Midtown, living in a nice luxury building. And high floor, but I felt so separated from everyone. Everyone was always cold, there was no sense of neighborhood, and I started looking again, and next thing I know, I’m looking in the Bronx in Melrose, and I found a place literally half a block from my parents’ house. So I moved back. And I was there for a while until things got bad with 9/11, you know? And everybody started losing their jobs including myself, so I ended up moving another half a block into my parents’ house again. And then actually I was there for about five years, until I was able to get back up on my feet. Moved within Melrose, I decided that I’m not going anywhere else.
DNS: Okay, great. So your family lived here the whole time?
EGC: Yeah, well, my parents were born and raised in Puerto Rico. My father was actually raised both Puerto Rico and here in New York. He came to New York when he was 12, so he’s pretty young. My mother on the other hand, she came when she was 19, so she spent pretty much her whole school years in Puerto Rico and her adult life all over here in New York when she moved in with her sister. And that’s actually how she met my father, because my aunt was married at that time, and coincidentally enough, my uncle — her husband — is my dad’s cousin, so my dad was visiting his cousin one day, and his wife — who happened to be my aunt — and there was my mom, and they fell in love. So it was too sisters married, you know, two cousins.
DNS: That’s great.
EGC: So I’m related to, my cousins and I are were from that marriage, we’re related on both sides, so it’s like we can’t escape each other.
DNS: That’s really funny. What was it like growing up here?
EGC: Growing up, I never really thought much about it, you know, the — so many bad things were happening, it just was so normal that buildings were burning and that I could walk six, seven, eight blocks with my mother through the neighborhood and not one person lived on any of those blocks. Whether the buildings were abandoned or it was just rubble and field at that point. So it was sort of interesting you know? Really as a child, you know especially one who’s imaginative like me, and you know, loving fantasy novels and sci-fi and all that stuff, my mind would always wander and sort of create these stories of the landscape around you. So it seemed pretty innocent to me almost. Like, I didn’t know that there was, that that was wrong what was happening around us. Even though we went to Puerto Rico every summer, my mother and I. Dad stayed behind working, because he could never get the vacation days together, because he had just started with New York City transit. So you know, I’m in Puerto Rico in the summers, and in the mountains where my mother grew up on the farm and then I’ll visit my dad’s family and my dad’s father — my grandfather. They were in the city San Juan, you know — beautiful — everything is pretty much kosher. But I never really put two and two together you know, like that why was my existence in Melrose so wrong, versus what that normal scene that I lived in the summers in Puerto Rico. Or where I saw elsewhere whenever we travelled. So it was, like I said, it was really interesting. I remember it was also the height of the crack epidemic, so my mother and I sometimes were walking to my cousin’s house also in Melrose, and I remember one day — the streets were always littered with crack vials. You’d see them everywhere with different colored caps and whatnot. And one day we were walking on Courtlandt Avenue and middle of the day, and there was like a big commotion, people excited. It wasn’t like a negative commotion, you know like a “run away, something’s happening.” And my mother heard people say, “Look, look, they have the blue caps and the yellow caps” and my mother was just curious. She was like, “Maybe they’re selling something, some trinkets or something.” And her mouth just dropped. She had me in my hand, and she’s like, “Let’s get out of here quick, quick, quick,” when she realized the guy was just holding like tons of crack vials with the drugs. That’s when things started becoming a little more real to me as far as what was going around. But it wasn’t until I hit high school that things really started to bother me. I went to school — you know, Catholic school in Melrose — St. Anselm, and it’s borderline Melrose it’s kind of like Melrose-Longwood, Woodstock, which nobody really talks about Woodstock anymore. It sort of got absorbed by Melrose and Longwood. But anyway, that’s where I went to school. I graduated in 1989 from 8th Grade and went to Catholic High School Cardinal Spellman in the North Bronx — largest Catholic School in the New York Archdioceses. It’s one of the top schools in the nation and in the state, and it’s where Sonia Sotomayor graduated from as well among tons of other amazing people. And that school was very mixed. My grammar school was predominantly Latino with a small African American population. And even the Latino was 98 percent Puerto Rican, so that was Melrose. Melrose was mostly Puerto Rican — that’s all I saw everywhere. There were African Americans, but Puerto Ricans were by far the vast majority. And then here I am in high school in 1989 as a freshman, and I’m surrounded by everyone under the sun. Every race, nationality, ethnicity. Everything you can think of. Socioeconomic groups, all of a sudden it wasn’t just low-income families, but it was some very wealthy families as well, all mixed in. So it was a bit of a culture shock for me to see all that. And I liked that, I loved it. But immediately once you started making friends and we’re all hanging out at each other’s houses, I started noticing my friends’ parents they happened to be, my white friends, mostly Italian. Mostly Italians, that was actually the group I ended up hanging out with the most and some of the Irish kids. But none of their parents would ever let my friends come visit me in the South Bronx once they found out that’s where I lived. And that’s when it started hitting me that something was bad, something was going on. But I still didn’t really piece everything together. I just felt really hurt actually that here I come home every day, I’m safe. Even though there are gunshots and yeah, you know, when I look back 1990, which was my freshman year, you know in Melrose and in the 40th precinct part of Melrose, we had well over a hundred murders, and every night I heard gunshots around us, so I guess I grew so accustomed to it that I didn’t realize that it was so bad that it was something really bad. And it took rejection from my friends’ parents to make me feel that way, and it really bothered me a lot and to the point that by the time I was toward my senior year in high school, I hated the Bronx with a passion. I hated my neighborhood… I just couldn’t’ wait to get out. And that was all thanks to, I look back, and that was all thanks to my friends’ parents, you know. For treating me as like I felt like I was being treated like one of those commercials that was like feed the children type of thing. I felt like they were extending some sort of charity toward me. And meanwhile, my parents weren’t low-income. My parents, my dad working in transit, and my mom was working for the archdiocese. We were actually middle-income family. Middle-class, middle-income family, living in the South Bronx. We were an anomaly for the most part, like as far as income went. But we weren’t poor or anything like that. We just happened to live in that neighborhood first by necessity, since that’s where they ended up moving and living, and second by choice at that point. It was affordable. It’s not that they weren’t looking to other places, cause when my parents first got married, they looked for other places on the Grand Concourse, and racism was still really high, and it was still mostly Jewish actually, and once they heard your last name, they wouldn’t show you an apartment, so that was out. Which is why they ended up staying where they were. But you know, going back to the high school, I just couldn’t stand the Bronx at that point. I just couldn’t wait to get out. I just wanted to live somewhere where my friends can feel happy to you know, and safe to come and visit me. I did have one of the friends, eventually their mother did let him actually come over and spend the night once, which was like a groundbreaking thing, but it literally in all my four years of high school, that was the only time that someone from outside my neighborhood, outside the South Bronx actually visited me. You know, it’s stunning. All of my friends that — the only friends that came to visit me in Melrose were the ones who live in Melrose or were in the South Bronx in general, but they weren’t the ones that I always hung out with the most. I spent a lot of my time in the North Bronx, especially during the summers, because there was really no place just to hang out in Melrose and feel safe, so every day I took the bus on Third Avenue at the hub, all the way up to Throggs Neck, while at Westchester Square, then take another bus to Throggs Neck all the way to the end, to literally the last stop. So talk about like, how far I wanted to escape the neighborhood was literally going as far as I could on the bus line, where my best friend who was Italian lived. And every day in summer, that’s what I did every day. Day in and day out. Leave at around 10 in the morning and we hung out. That’s all we wanted to do, that’s all he wanted to do anyway. We’d just veg out, watch TV, walk the neighborhood. It’s all suburban up there, middle class, you know. One-, two-story houses. Nothing bigger much than that. And it’s on the waterfront. Sometimes we’d go to the waterfront, you know, just hang out. But it was all escape the Bronx for me. Escape the South Bronx.
DNS: Did you express this to anyone?
EGC: No, not really, I never really spoke about it much to anyone except that you know, that I just wanted once I made it would be to move out of the Bronx, and that was just something everyone always said anyways, so it didn’t really seem strange if I had said it. It wasn’t like someone was going to turn and say, “Well, why do you want to leave the Bronx?” Because that’s what everybody does. You either move to Riverdale or one of the nicer parts of the Bronx or just leave the Bronx in general. It wasn’t until college, I didn’t go away. I went to New Rochelle in Westchester County, but I drove every day. I spent as much time as I could there on campus, and I would drive back. I eventually got a job on campus, so I could actually study and work and I’d leave when the library closed at 10, come back home and just park the car, and go to sleep. And rinse, repeat in the morning kind of thing and leave you know Melrose. There was nothing there at that point, I felt.
DNS: Is that sentiment the same today?
EGC: Not at all. It’s completely different, you know. I love this neighborhood with my heart, with everything. And looking back, I don’t feel guilty for how I felt, because I was younger, and I didn’t understand what was going on around me. It wasn’t like we had the internet either to research for ourselves as easily. It’s not like there were also books published. Everything that was written on the Bronx was always negative, and in the media. So now, it’s like complete love affair with Melrose. I love the vibrancy, I love the mixed-income families that live here, I love everything about it. The different cultures and ethnicities. It’s actually right now, Melrose is the most diverse it’s ever been in its history. You know, Melrose was founded in the 1850s by Germans — German immigrants from the Lower East Side. They came up to what was Westchester County, cause the Bronx wasn’t the Bronx at that point. It was still Westchester, and they spoke with the Morris family, descendants of Governor Morris who was one of the Framers of the Constitution and owned all this land. So they decided to negotiate with the family, like: “We want to buy a parcel of whatever land and move up here.” I think it was about a couple maybe just under of a couple of a hundred families that ended up moving and founding the village of Melrose. It was actually Melrose South, Melrose, and then Melrose East. But they were all connected. And it was from that point, it was German sprinkled in with Irish, then eventually Jewish and Italian as well. And African American eventually started looking at moving in. They started moving in — I’m not quite sure when that happened — I think it was probably in the 20s and 30s. Not much. It wasn’t until the 40s and 50s, and then that was when the Puerto Ricans started moving in. The Italians were here also. Actually, the Italians were here at the turn of the century. There’s still a couple of Italian families left — literally, there are probably only two Italian families left in Melrose from those original families that came over from Italy, you know, like three generations, four generations ago. But now, it’s not just like, when I was growing up, it was mostly Puerto Rican, African American, and then there was actually still Italian. Like the mass I went to at Our Lady of Pity, the first mass was in Italian, the second in Spanish, and then it was English. And then our Christmas masses, every Christmas and holiday mass was done in all three languages, so they didn’t have to have these long services, they’d just lump us all into one. So you know, everyone was always waiting patiently for their language to come up, but it was really mostly the people who only spoke English, because Italian and Spanish, we could pick out and understand pretty much what they were saying, cause the languages are pretty similar. That actually led to me learning Italian and wanting to learn it. That’s probably why I ended up hanging out with so many Italians in high school. Actually, I am 100% fluent in Italian to this day. And that started here in Melrose, because I attended these trilingual masses, because it always fascinated me. That was one thing that I did look back at, you know when I was in high school. “How come my Italian friends up there didn’t want to come down here when we still had Italian families that lived here.” That always baffled me, and every June, they had their Feast of San Antonio, and every June, they would march out of the church — the Italian community — hundreds and do a procession through the neighborhood. And it was really interesting, because it wasn’t just the Italians. At that point, the Italians who lived here, were like I said, dwindling, so the majority who attended the march were Italians who lived in other parts of the Bronx, Westchester County. They all came for the feast day, and they all did the procession. Everyone would literally stop, because they were like, “Where are all these white people coming from? Why are they marching through our streets?” And I was always the one who’s like, “They lived here, you know?” Because a lot of people didn’t know the history of their own neighborhood, and I was always interested about what was here. Like, who was here, and, uh, sorry. I talk in stream of consciousness, so I sort of lost my thought there. Uh, where was I? I forgot where I was actually going with this. Oh, I was talking about the diversity. So as a kid, you know, those were the three main groups, including the Italians and some Dominican families. That’s when Dominicans started migrating to New York, so they still didn’t have a huge presence like they do now. That to me was like a really foreign experience. It was like, “Oh, Latin from somewhere else.” Spanish was very different from ours, and I was like, that’s interesting. I only had a few in my grammar school there was only one Dominican student with me. In high school, there were a lot more. That’s when I actually was exposed more to that culture. But now, it’s Puerto Ricans, it’s Mexicans, it’s African Americans, it’s Dominicans, it’s West Africans. And West Africans — just to lump them in as West African is an injustice, because it’s whatever countries that are there as well. And also other parts of Africa. All living in side by side. And it’s Christians and it’s Muslims, you know. You have literally a Christian church right next to a mosque, so it’s pretty amazing to see everyone coexisting, and no one is fighting. That’s one of the reasons why I love this neighborhood. It’s like, we’re like a living proof of we can actually do it. We can actually live together and survive, you know. I mean, after Melrose and after the fires settled and people started moving back when the new developments were being built, because at one point, Melrose had a population of I think about 25, 27 thousand roughly. But by 1980, it was down to just a little over 3,000, and that’s the era that I lived. I lived in a neighborhood that was pretty much vacant. It was about 400,000 people that left the South Bronx. That left the Bronx in general between 1970 and 1980, so you know down in the South Bronx, we were decimated as far as that goes. People compared us to the bombings in Dresden, Germany. That was the image that a lot of people would conjure when they described South Bronx. And when you look at the old photographs, that’s what it looked like. You literally thought that this was a war-torn country. Where else do you see buildings collapsed, half-collapsed, you know? Burnt out shelves and abandoned churches except in war and war scenes. But then to where we are today in Melrose, you know we owe a lot of the, probably everything to Nos Quedamos We Stay, the organization that pretty much stopped the first time gentrification tried to come into the neighborhood, which was the city. The city had committed I would call them war crimes on our neighborhood through planned shrinkage by cutting out services to us. And if it wasn’t for organizations — grassroots organizations — that fought for our services to come back. I don’t know where we would be, but this neighborhood was rebuilt literally through blood, sweat, tears, and the lives of the people lost during those years. Nos Quedamos came in, because there was a woman by the name of Yolanda Garcia. She caught wind of a plan by the city that wanted to basically raze the entire neighborhood — what was left of the neighborhood — and then create middle-income and upper-middle-class housing condos and co-ops and whatnot. Literally displace the people who lived here, and she was like, “Nope, it’s not going to happen.” And you know, they got together, they fought, you know tooth and nail, and eventually they were able to have to halt the city’s plans, and they were able to design a plan that was for us by us, because if it wasn’t for that, we would have been gentrified long before Harlem and Williamsburg. Like that Williamsburg wasn’t even on the map for gentrification at that point or signs and neither was Harlem. It was actually our neighborhood that would have been the first one to go. So thanks to them, I’m still here. I’m still in my rent-stabilized apartment and my parents are still here, and my friends and family. Cause now we don’t have many empty parcels left. What’s left is already slated for more affordable housing. Although we’re starting to see market-rate housing being built, so now we’re bracing ourselves for the second wave, you know, of gentrification coming now that we built it up, everybody wants to come, so that’s a little scary.
DNS: Okay. So with all those factors, did those contribute to the name of your — or not the name — but the slogan of your blog?
EGC: Oh, “You think you know the Bronx, but you don’t?” So a little background on that. I started blogging in 2009 on Melrose, and the reason I started writing on Melrose is because… I had already moved out of my parents’ house the second time, and I was during my search actually, during my search for my apartment, every time I looked up Melrose and things like that, I never saw anything positive. Everything was just images of what I grew up with, which was — even though it wasn’t too long ago at that point — they were far enough we were with new construction with affordable housing and families moving in, and the narrative was always negative, it was never positive, which brought me back to my childhood, one that I didn’t really see much wrong. That was because even though there were fires and the drugs and the violence, there was life happening all around us. There we carnivals and street fairs and impromptu gatherings of hundreds of people playing salsa music and cooking up a storm in shopping carts and barbecues in the middle of the streets, cause hey, who were they interrupting? No one, cause there were bocks and blocks of debris around them. Puerto Ricans are known for making do with what they have, you know and just being happy about their circumstances. I mean, it is what it is. It’s almost like a motto in Puerto Rico: they’re still happy. So anyway, going back to the slogan, it was, well that came after. I decided to blog about Melrose, but again, because I was tired of the negative images and the false narratives, and I realized that nobody was telling our story from within. Everyone was just coming in and telling our stories from their eyes, which even though my eyes are biased as well, their eyes are just completely biased, cause they don’t even know the true history or they don’t know the true experience of living in the neighborhood, so how are you actually going to write about it properly? So I started doing that in September of 2009, and it was called Welcome2Melrose, and Welcome to the Village of Melrose was what I had originally called it, cause that’s what we were — we were originally a village. But we were still a village despite having grown, and the slogan once I morphed into Welcome2TheBronx, when I decided to cover everything, cause I realized it wasn’t just Melrose, but it was a Bronx-wide image problem that we had that people were still were thinking that we were burning and that gangs were roving our streets. It became “You think you know the Bronx but you don’t,” and a lot of that had to do with the fact that even I thought I knew the Bronx, but I didn’t. Once I started my love affair with the borough and my neighborhood, I just rushed into the history, looked into every history book that I could and old photographs and asking questions like, “Who’s this, who’s that? Why did this happen?” And that’s pretty much how my slogan came to be, cause I didn’t know, and I figured if I didn’t know and I lived here, if you don’t live here, then you definitely don’t know.
DNS: What are some things that people don’t really know about Melrose or even the Bronx?
EGC: Well, with Melrose, a lot of people don’t know that it’s the unofficial downtown Bronx. It’s also where the Bronx was founded, officially as the 62nd county at the old Bronx County Courthouse on 161st Street. That’s where the Bronx in 1914 became the 62nd county of New York City, and we officially separated from Manhattan. And Melrose, like I mentioned earlier was founded by German immigrants from the Lower East Side. If you go to Immaculate Conception Church on 150th Street, that was a church that was built by the German community, and if you go in there, the stained glass is all in German. After my original church Our Lady of Pity, we transferred just to one more block to Immaculate Conception, where my grandmother used to go — where she still goes. And that’s where we began service. So as a kid there, I never payed attention to mass much, cause I lived in Catholic schools all my life. My eyes would wander, and I’d read the stained glass, and then I realized that that’s not English, and that’s not Spanish, and that’s not Latin, what is it? And eventually, that’s how I found out that it was German. You know, what else? Melrose, we had an opera house on 149th Street, which George Burns, famous comedian performed at. And the legendary Mae West, she performed there. And as a matter of fact, it was her performance there that sort of gave her her claim to fame. Her sexuality, how she was very scandalous at that time, and she performed a play that she wrote — a piece that she wrote — and it was called “Sex.” And actually, after she performed it, she was arrested for indecency, even though it wasn’t indecency compared to anything with us nowadays. But Lloyd Ulton, the borough historian, the Bronx historian, he says that he likes to think that “Sex” debuted in Melrose at the opera house — that’s where it debuted in the world. You know, there are just so many things. What else about Melrose? Besides that, it’s a nice place to live, and especially now with everyone who’s worked so hard to carve their little corner of the world here in Melrose and so many different nationalities that are here. You know, and then the Bronx in general, I mean, has history, you know. The Bronx was the first borough of New York City. People don’t really realize that, cause in 1874, about 20 years after Melrose was founded — which I find kind of ironic, cause it was Germans from the Lower East Side — they were trying to escape the crammed quarters of that tenement living down there. And this was all farm land. Melrose was all farmland and country, so they came up here to escape and founded a village. And about 20 years later in 1874, the West Bronx gets annexed to New York City, so all of a sudden, they’re part of New York again. And that was 1874, so it was pretty much everything west of the Bronx River. And then in 1895, the rest of what is the Bronx today was annexed from what was Westchester as well. And I think in 1898, like two tiny portions of the Bronx came along with the rest, and for three years, if you count the full annexation basically of the borough, for three years we were the only other part of New York outside of Manhattan, and 1898 is when Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens came onboard. So I like to call us the first borough, you know, we were a borough before it came cool so to speak. You know, the Bronx has always been home to so many immigrants. I mean clearly, we are all immigrants here in North America, but taking it to another step, the Bronx at one point had the largest Jewish population. No borough to this day has ever come close to the amount of Jewish families that they had living in the Bronx. At one point, the estimates were between 40 and 60 percent of the borough. Everywhere you went was a synagogue, kind of like how you have bodegas now. And Christian temples and churches and whatnot. We have the largest population of Albanians. Albanians they settled here as well. We have the largest population of Puerto Ricans of course still. What else do we have? We also have the largest population of Irish from Ireland — Irish immigrants — in Woodlawn. Woodlawn is pretty much an Irish enclave, like you go up there, and it’s not uncommon to hear pretty much a thick Irish brogue, you know, just coming by. Just as you walk by the streets. We also have a very large Bangladeshi community. We still have a large Italian population although it’s dwindled a lot. There’s just so many different ethnicities in the borough just living side by side in different neighborhoods, so a lot of people don’t know that. We’re also the greenest borough, the Bronx. We have the most parkland than any other borough in New York City. Almost a full 25 percent of our land is actually parks. And we have three of the top ten largest parks. The largest park in New York City is in the Bronx — it’s not Central Park like a lot of people think. It’s Pelham Bay Park with about 27, 28 hundred acres, and the third largest park is Van Cortlandt. There’s just so many stories with history. George Washington slept here too, up in Van Cortlandt, and as a matter of fact, it was still Westchester, but what’s considered the final act of the American Revolution was when George Washington entered Manhattan and basically took over. It was considered like that was it. The American Revolution? Done. Well, he did that by leaving Van Courtlandt, the Van Courtlandt Mansion, and that’s where he went into Manhattan and ended it. So we have that claim of history. We also have the first Tibetan Buddhist temple in the Western hemisphere. Was here in the Bronx. It’s still here, so that’s another sort of like. That one is another piece of trivia that a lot of people don’t even think about, they’re like, “What? Buddhism? Tibetan? In the Bronx?” It’s like, yeah, they parked themselves right here, you know? Of all places, so a lot of firsts. You know, right just a couple blocks away into Mott Haven, the Lincoln Memorial, the Lincoln statue, that was carved here by the Piccirilli brothers. And the dome of the United States Congress building, the iron support structure, that came from here as well. So it’s a lot of history. And if you go to the main library on 42nd and Fifth Avenue, you’ll notice the lion statues, the famous lion statues Patience and Fortitude, they were also carved here in the Bronx in the neighborhood, over in Mott Haven, which is right next door to Melrose.
DNS: Wow. So —
EGC: Yeah. And there are so many more things that I can’t even remember off the top of my head, cause I’m on the spot, so I could keep talking about all the other stuff, you know?
DNS: It’s all good. Since you started blogging about both Melrose and the Bronx, how have the two changed?
EGC: The two have changed drastically since I started blogging. Melrose when I started blogging, we still had a lot of vacant land that was still, it was already slated for development but nothing was going up yet. Since I started blogging, Melrose has gained roughly 4,000 apartments, maybe 5,000 apartments at this point. And there’s like another couple of thousand on its way. The Bronx, sadly, we’re a victim of our own success, cause now developers are turning their eyes on us. Since I started blogging, developers have taken an interest in the borough as the last frontier, cause there’s nowhere else to go — they’ve pretty much exhausted everything, I don’t think Staten Island is much of an option for them to make big bucks, so no offense to people from Staten Island. I love you, cause I go there. But that’s the number one thing you know? We’re worried now. We have these developers now and all these businesses coming to the Bronx. We have the first mall in New York City in almost 25 years to open. It opened up two years ago, going on three now, and not just the regular mall, but a mall with high-end stores with Tiffany and Michael Kors, so there’s this huge confidence by that sector, you know, that is starting to displace mom and pop shops, you know. We’re seeing more small businesses being shut down. People are being pushed out, even though the borough president likes to argue that there’s not displacement happening. But there is. There is. There’s landlord pressures and you know, displacement doesn’t necessary just happen by you being evicted or being priced out of your apartment, but it also happens when your landlord buys you out and says here’s $5,000, move out, you know, and then they’ll raise the rent: double the rent or triple the rent. But what’s $5,000 in New York City? You can’t start a new life like that, and you’re not going to get what you were paying. So like, it’s this whole plan of just pushing us out, and I think those are really the biggest factors. There’s one thing though that I did notice on the positive side is that — I don’t want to say that I started the trend for Bronx pride, cause I didn’t — but when I started blogging, there were really only two blogs around. One of them was someone who’s a friend of mine now. Nicole Perrino, you know. She founded Bronxmama, and it was a resource guide — and it still is to this day — you know, the number one resource guide for families. You know, what to do with your kids in the Bronx, and then there was another one called the BoogieDowner, which kind of covered the whole Bronx, and they were pretty cool. Loved the guys that ran it. The couple — it was a married couple that ran it — but they actually eventually left the Bronx. Not cause they necessarily wanted to, but they had another child, and their support system was in Queens, so it was kind of hard going back and forth on the bridge and expensive, so they decided to move back, and it was because of them leaving that I decided to expand just sort of fill in that gap, because they ended up giving the blog to someone who immediately within a couple of days destroyed practically everything that they built. A solid audience, a loyal audience, they just decided to use it to just advertise a lot of their real estate stuff, and you couldn’t talk about politicians negatively or anything like that. It was just so many rules that I was like, “This is not what a blog should be, you know?” This is like total censorship, so that’s when I decided to do the Bronx thing, but one of the things that I started was with Welcome2TheMelrose that translated to Welcome2TheBronx was Bronx pride… You live here — love it. And the Bronx is beautiful, contrary to popular belief. Even you know, I look back at my childhood, and there was beauty everywhere, even in the rubble there was beauty, and I wanted people to be proud of that and soon after — probably maybe four years after that — I started seeing more similar accounts, social media accounts popping up and people doing the same thing, you know. Showing the Bronx in a positive light, so that’s definitely one of the things that I’ve noticed that I love, you know, that more and more people are taking into their hearts — a borough that we all took for granted at one point.
DNS: Okay, what are some things that you would want to change within the Bronx? Or Melrose specifically?
EGC: You know, in Melrose, I would love, love, love more than anything for small businesses to be able to own the spaces they actually are in instead of just renting, cause that’s what’s causing the displacement. That’s why they have a lease for 10 years and then now that the market is looking rosier for landlords now when they go to renew their lease, they get an increase and then they don’t get another 10 year lease, they get like a three year lease. And after that three year lease, the rent is probably doubled again. So I think I would love to be able to work with the community to find creative solutions to — not solve that problem completely, cause that’s not something that’s going to go away — but to come up with creative solutions of how can we keep our mom and pop shops around, you know? Those stores, they’re the fabric and life blood of our communities, and there are many of them that actually not only just do business here, but they live here. For example, the restaurant that we went Xochimilco, the owners live one block over in their house that they bought. They were one of the first Mexican families in the neighborhood. They’re sort of pioneers in the South Bronx, you know. They own the laundromat across the street, so it’s like when I call the neighborhood a village, I literally mean it. Cause you have a lot of people who work here and who own businesses here that also live here. And I find that somewhat unique, I don’t see that. I’ve travelled throughout the Bronx, and you know other than communities like City Island, which is expected, cause it’s literally on an island, you know, you don’t see much of that, let alone New York City. So that’s one of the things that I’d definitely like to see. And protections for our people, especially our low-income, the most vulnerable, you know. We need to protect those families instead of pushing them out. Right now, public housing at NYCHA is a disaster, and we need to fix that. Those people deserve better. You know, my grandmother lives there. She’s going to be 85 this year, and she’s been living there for 45 years. You know, luckily her apartment’s fine and in great condition, but the general condition of the building isn’t that great, and I think that we need to take care of those people before we start catering or even think about opening up the neighborhood to anyone else, and that’s not something I necessarily want, you know? I don’t mind like in theory, development is not a bad thing. In theory. A mixed-income neighborhood in theory is not a bad thing, you know. For me, I think it’s great if we can have from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high mixed all together in one neighborhood, but in practice, it never works. In practice, you know, everybody gets pushed out except the ones who can afford it. So I think we really need to focus ourselves more on what we have rather than attracting what we don’t have. And why do we want to attract the crowd that never wanted to be here when it was rough? You know, for me, it’s like they’re undeserving of our beautiful neighborhood and our hard work and you know. Like Yolanda Garcia, she started that organization through anger and love of the neighborhood and anger at the city. And she died. She had a heart attack on Third Avenue, like she was living a stressed life right in the city. So there were many people, many warriors like her that are unnamed that died during the battle so to speak. So again, I question the motives of our borough president who all he wants to do is call it the New Bronx, and there’s nothing new about — it’s not the new Bronx — we’ve always been here. Those are really like the main things, you know. Of course, education for our kids, figure out how we can get our — now that we have free college tuition, hopefully things can start getting brighter for the future generations.
DNS: Yeah. How — cause you’ve lived here in like different times of Melrose — what would a normal day kind of look like when you were younger and then when you moved back and then now? Like what was daily life like groceries, laundry?
EGC: Daily life when I was a kid. You know, we lived in Christopher Court, my parents are still there, still the original tenants, you know 35 years later. They had a private playground. That was a thing when they were built, you know. They built a private courtyard, a massive courtyard, gorgeous. And we had security. Cause you needed security in the Bronx, but it was a safe space. So I actually had — again, I was privileged — to grow up in the middle of the South Bronx in Melrose, where drugs and guns were everywhere and violence, and people were getting killed. But in our complex, it was an oasis, and I still call it that to this day. But my parents — our apartment — faced the courtyard, so my mother could always keep an eye out, but there we were kids, living a happy life. So after school, it was either playing video games on the Atari once the Nintendo came out or playing in our playground, and then hearing my mom calling out my name. My full name is Eduardo, so she’d be like “Eduardo!” and then I’d here that and be like, “Time to go home, so go upstairs.” And I think that had to do with the fact of why I felt safe in the South Bronx, cause we had that. We had that security guards, the security guards there watching over us and we were able to play in that garden in the middle of the chaos, so you know, my mom at that point, she wasn’t working. When I was born, she worked maybe for a couple years, but you know, she decided to be with me. I’m an only child, so when I grew up, I didn’t have siblings or anything. She decided to stay home, and make sure everything was taken care of with my needs. So I spent a lot of time with my mom. Going shopping. Shopping was always, you know, in the 80s, when I look back, there was a particular path we took, cause you don’t want to go into the worst areas, even though you were in a bad area. You never wanted to go through the public housing, even though my grandmother lived there, you know, and we always went with my father every Saturday for dinner. Which is only four blocks away from us, but we never, we tried to not go through the projects as much, cause that’s where a lot of the guns, we would hear the gunshots coming from. So 149th Street was the safe zone, cause it’s a big commercial district and Third Avenue. So we would always walk up — we took the longer route, cause we were on 150th and 151st, so if we wanted to get to Third Avenue to the shopping district, we could go all the way up 151st Street if we wanted to, but it was easier going through 149th Street, cause at least you have store after store after store versus just you know, a vacant house, a vacant building. But other than that, you know with school and Sundays, going to church with my mom. My dad didn’t go to church until I was about 14, and that was when we transferred from Our Lady of Pity to Immaculate Conception. Our Lady of Pity is closed now, closed about six years ago I think. You know, we had a bakery that we would go to, that’s where we’d get the bread on the weekends. What else? It was just, you know, it was pretty much doing a lot of that with my mom running errands and then on weekends, we’d go away to Pelham Bay Park for picnics and barbecues in the summer with other family and friends. It was always a fun, big production for me, especially when it was a big one we were going out. You know, my mom and the other women in the kitchen, they would rotate kitchens in different houses, you know preparing the food for the next day and you know, going to sleep late and waking up really early so we could take that drive to the beach, you know, it’s like four or five cars, all of us packing in, and now that I think about it, they really sacrificed a lot for us. You know, all this sleep time. I didn’t think about that until just now when I caught a whiff of that memory with all the women in kitchen and the guys, you know, my dad and everyone was buying the supplies. It was a lot. It was a lot for us — gotta thank them when I see them today. You know, that pretty much was routine, you know, every day I would go down to buy the newspaper for my dad. I always wanted to go do that, usually go get the milk as well or the bread. It was always an adventure for me, and then growing up, now in Melrose, it’s pretty much the same, you know. For me, my laundromat is across the street, so it’s the family with the restaurant, that’s where I go do the laundry. I have a dog, so I walk her around the neighborhood, and she’s a Siberian Husky, so she gets a lot of walk. Although when I was in high school and in college, that’s when I had my first dog. Probably one of the most well-known dogs in Melrose ever. His name was Rex, and we rescued him, my ex and I. My first boyfriend actually worked in a motel in Putnam County, and he worked the graveyard shift, so he was just stuck there midnight to 8, and there was this dog that lived at the motel, but he wasn’t taken care of too well, and you can tell, and we couldn’t take it was just eating us away. The dog barely never slept, because every time someone came into the motel — because he lived in the lobby — so he would just run in and greet the people and get excited and bring his toys and everything. And it would break our hearts, and one night, he just said, “Wait here.” Cause I had just dropped him off, and I was like, “Okay.” And then he comes out with Rex in his arms and he throws him in my car, and he’s like, “Run, go, take him!” And I’m like, “Oh my god, we’re dog-napping!” But like I said, they weren’t taking care of him, so we rescued him, and we actually spoke — myself, I had told the story to the priest, you know at Immaculate Conception. And he was like, “You did a good deed. The dog wasn’t being taken care of.” I mean you know, and they didn’t really miss him at the motel, you know. To our knowledge, they never really spoke about it. Cause he had a habit a couple of times running away, so they pretty much attributed it to that. I mean, he was running away clearly, cause he wasn’t being taken care of, so Rex came to live with us in Melrose in Christopher Court, he was a poodle bichon mix, and everyone just fell in love with him, you know. We joke around, he was like “insert your struggle hero,” and he was the first dog in Christopher Court, cause dogs weren’t allowed. So we were like uh oh, what are we going to do? And my mother was like you can’t keep him here, but my mother and my dad just fell in love with him and you know, next thing we know, we eventually actually got taken to court, because of the dog. But there’s a New York City code that if they know that you have the dog for 90 days and they’re still collecting your rent, dog gets grandfathered in, so that’s what eventually happened. And then eventually you started seeing more families taking the risk and now, there’s definitely dogs in the building. So you know, he was a groundbreaking dog, and he was already six years old when we had him — when we got him. And he lived another ten years, he lived a long, full life with us. Travelled to Puerto Rico. But everyone in the neighborhood like, “Hey Rex.” They knew him more than they knew my name, and there’s a big, empty lot that used to be an empty lot until recently. That was fenced in, it was the size of a city block, and it was always perfectly manicured, because it belonged to the building next door, and it was like our unofficial dog run, so I always let him running around there, and then there was the day that we noticed he was getting older and older, and it really came quickly. And one day my mother had come back home early, cause she wasn’t feeling well from work, and she found Rex in the hallway just — not dead — but he couldn’t get up. And she called me crying, and I ran down from work, I left my office, and we took him to the vet. And it turned out that he had a big tumor, but he wasn’t going to be down, but he probably isn’t going to make it, you know. So we decided to bring him home, and we did with a comfort pack so he wasn’t you know, in pain. Just wanted to be with him, and our neighbors started coming, knocking on the door to pay their respects to say goodbye to him. And I’ll never forget that. You know, around 3 in the morning, he passed away. Took him to the animal hospital, and we made preparations to have him buried at the pet cemetery in Westchester, and our neighbors came up for the little — they actually have a private wake area, like a little viewing area, where you can view your pet, the casket before they bury it, and we were like, “Wow. We had a dog that was that famous that people came to his funeral, cause they just loved him that much.” And they were crying with us, right there at the gravesite as the casket’s being lowered and shoveled in. So that’s one aspect of daily life that I just totally had just forgot about it. The routine of just walking the dog, and he always came out with his toy. One of his toys, and everyone just always laughed, cause it was always just some stuffed animal or something. I buried him with the toy, the only toy he brought with him that fateful night that we kidnapped him — dog-napped. It’s not a crime — it’s a rescue. His beloved Sharky, a little plush Sharky, so I buried him with that. I was like, this is what you came with, you know, go with that. I didn’t want to keep to around. I still have his dog ID on my keychain. And now the tradition passed along to my Siberian Husky, you know, walking through the neighborhood. She’s also pretty well-known in the neighborhood as well. A Siberian — she’s red as well, she’s red — so it’s sort of a unique color for Siberian Huskies, but yeah, that’s my routine in the mornings, is walking around the neighborhood. I like to take long walks just to see what’s going on and you know, say hi to people on the way, and that’s how I know if there’s something that needs to be addressed. If there’s a light out at night, if I notice some lights out, I get on the 311 app, and I start reporting them, making sure they get taken care of. If they don’t get taken care of, I forward it to the councilman and say you know, listen, this block has this many number of lights out, and then he’ll push for it. Same thing with NYCHA. If I see something sort of like off, you know, I’ll make sure that that gets taken care of. So I’m sort of like the eyes and ears. And if people tell me, you know, I have people who’ll like tell me like, “Oh, I heard this is what’s happening on my block, can you help us?” And I’m like, “I’ll go take a look.” And I’ll make sure I forward it to the right authority to take care of it. And yeah, that’s kind of like what I do. I shop local. Before, when I was you know, when I was growing up in Melrose, The Hub, that’s the oldest shopping district in the Bronx, The Hub. And Third Avenue and 139th Street when we were crossing, that’s actually the busiest intersection outside of Times Square. It’s over 200,000 pedestrians a day go through there, and you know the whole shopping district is mostly — now it’s changing — you know, a lot of national retailers are coming in, whereas in the 70s and 80s, there were a few, but most of them because of the fires and the economic downturn were small, low-, middle-income families, so I always stayed away. There was always this stigma like, you know, you’re poor if you shop there, you know, don’t shop there, so I would drive to White Plains in the middle of Westchester County 20 miles away to do my shopping when I was in high school and I had my car. And even as an adult, I’d shop in Manhattan, go to J-Crew and all the expensive stores, but it wasn’t until I moved back, and I started loving where I really lived that I started shopping locally. And to this day, I will shop at the mom-and-pop shops first. I get all my clothes, all my shoes and sneakers, I shop for my clothing on Third Avenue. I don’t have that, you know, conflicts anymore. And then I realize how much I’m saving too, and I’m like, “Holy crap, I just got the same designer stuff that I could have gotten for retail, I got it for so much cheaper, you know.” And you know, I ran Bronx Fashion Week for two years. We had it in Melrose at one at the old courthouse, and I was the vice president of public relations and marketing, but I was doing most of the logistics behind it, and I shopped on Third Avenue for those events, and everyone was always asking me, “Oh, what are you wearing? Where’d you get that?” And I’m like, “Third Avenue,” and they’re like, “No.” And I’m like, “Yes!” So my friends are like, “Are you kidding me? You really got that?” And I’m like, I give them the store names and I’m like, “Check these stores out — a lot of gems there.” And you know the fact that really no one likes saying that they shop there is even better, because you’re going to find things that no one else is wearing. So it’s pretty funny. Even my mom, she’s like, “Oh my god, you did a turn around. You would never shop at Third Avenue. You used to cry if I bought you things from Alexander’s, and now you don’t care.” And I’m like, “You know, I want a vote with my dollars, you know.” I want to make sure that goes to our businesses in the neighborhood, so you know, like I said, it’s the mom-and-pop shops first. If I can’t find it there, I’ll try to find it at another mom and pop shop in another neighborhood if possible. And then if not, if I have to go to a national chain, like a retailer, it has to be in the Bronx. You know, like I don’t buy anything that’s not in the Bronx, unless it’s just not here, you know. My electronics, that’s kind of like the only thing that actually I don’t support mom and pop shops, because I kind of like —they’re not that trustworthy usually with electronics — so you never know what you’re getting even if it’s refurbished or not, so I have no shame in saying I go to the Best Buy. But I do it in the Bronx, so I make sure that tax money stays here, cause for me it’s really important you know to keep the dollars. Food shopping, I do the same. I do the food shopping the neighborhood, farmers’ markets when the season’s here. We have a number of farmers’ markets throughout, you know. We have one in the hub sometimes, another one next to Lincoln Hospital twice a day — I mean, twice a week — and then there’s the granddaddy of them all on 161st on the Grand Concourse on Tuesdays, that’s my favorite. So that’s where I get a lot of my produce, and everything else I get it at local — I shop at Aldi’s, it’s a national chain. The reason I do is it’s kind of hard not to, you know, you get things for 50 percent off, versus supermarkets, so until the supermarkets start lowering their prices, that I won’t. And that again, is I’m voting with my dollars, you know. Hopefully, they’ll realize they’re losing you know, a lot of business. You know, and we have plenty of supermarkets in the neighborhood, so there’s you know, in theory you’d think that with so much competition, it’d be cheaper. But it’s not. But Aldi’s rocks. Last night, Aldi’s was closed already, and I had to go get milk, cereal — I drink almond milk — milk, cereal and Splenda, and I went to the supermarket, cause I had no choice, and I spent 15 bucks, and I felt so bad, because at Aldi’s, I would have spent about six bucks. I was like, wow, that’s like nine bucks. I could have saved that for something else, you know. So yeah, that’s what I do.
DNS: Do you think other people have that same mentality?
EGC: Yeah, I see a lot of people, a lot of my neighbors, do the same thing — they try to keep things local, and I do have conversations with people like, “Hey, have you ever thought about shopping here? Try to keep it local.” Another thing about Melrose actually that I forgot to mention that people may not know just hit me, cause it’s part of my daily life, in the summer especially is our community gardens. We have about 17, and no other neighborhood in New York City has that high concentration of community gardens, and you know, they’re just special places. Most of them — actually, pretty much all of them — were founded by the Puerto Rican community. The oldest one is Casa de Chema, which is on Brooke Avenue between 157 and 156, and it’s basically a cultural center. I mean, you go there, and there’s live music there on the weekends. The founder passed away two years ago unexpectedly, and he’s credited as one of the first in New York City to build a traditional casitas, which are the little houses that were common in Puerto Rico at one point. It was a lot poorer — pretty much all the houses were little wooden shacks and bungalows — so the Puerto Rican community decided to build those things in the empty lots that were left behind by the rubble sort of like back home, and yeah, that’s another important part that I totally had forgotten about, how a lot of these lots were brought back to life since they were abandoned by community gardens, you know.
DNS: Absolutely. So unfortunately, our time is almost up, but is there anything else you’d like to say about growing up in Melrose, the Bronx, the neighborhood, how it’s changing?
EGC: No, I mean, I think I covered it. I don’t know, what do you think?
DNS: Do you have any final thoughts?
EGC: These are always the rough ones, the final thoughts. Yeah, I do. I have a final thought. I want Melrose and the Bronx to stay Melrose and the Bronx. I don’t want it to become a generic, gentrified, homogenous, bland, soulless place, you know. I want it to be a place where people come to and not only realize their dreams but live them, you know and stay here. I don’t want people who don’t really care about the history. All they want to do is just create their own version of what they want to see, you know. I want them to see what we have and appreciate it and ask how they can contribute, you know, or how they can help. Instead of saying, “Hey, we have an idea, what do you think?” Don’t come in that way. Come in respecting the existing culture, respecting the existing history, you know. Respecting the countless lives that were lost, because that’s what they’re doing. They’re coming into our neighborhood, you know, and you’re basically standing on those shoulders, so respect them. Ask them. Ask the people who’re here, “What do you need? How can I be of help?” Understand your privilege basically and use it for the greater good.
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1:12:23
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The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Ed Garcia Conde Oral History Interview
Subject
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Life in Melrose then and now
Description
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Eduardo Garcia Conde was born in Mott Haven in 1975, and goes by the name of Ed. He has two words of his last name as part of the Puerto Rican tradition — both his parents moved to the South Bronx from Puerto Rico before their 20s. Ed grew up as a single child and moved to Melrose at seven years old after his parents won a housing lottery for Christopher Court, which is right off the 149 Street-Grand Concourse subway stop. Although he left the South Bronx after graduating college — a goal that formed in high school — he gravitated back to Melrose for the community and life of the neighborhood. He is a former real estate appraiser and is now an active member of the large LGBTQ community in Melrose. But his main job consists of running his Welcome2TheBronx blog, which garners 100,000 to 200,000 readers per month. Since his blog aims to represent the whole Bronx, he spends a lot of time walking the borough to try showing an unbiased perspective of the Bronx. He wants to share narratives of the Bronx that most people do not see or hear. And now, here is his story from when he was growing up with the city still burning, to now as he fights with his neighborhood to avoid its gentrification.
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Ed Garcia Conde
Diamond Naga Siu
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English
blogger
ed garcia conde
Interview
Melrose
oral history
welcome2thebronx
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https://www.melrosestories.org/files/original/41b007cadcec17d08e62b938f435e1b5.m4a
bc4a92242b8865dc022479a0a8f7f318
https://www.melrosestories.org/files/original/0d3d227fed772cef955664a1daa456a1.pdf
30ca1570759baffd291a18e3d5e55eec
Dublin Core
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Title
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Sam Marquez
Subject
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Oral History
Description
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Sam Marquez is a retired firefighter, who joined Melrose's Engine 41 in the early 70's and served for over 20 years, most notably through the "Bronx is Burning" era.
Date
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April 2017
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Brandon Cris
Sam Marquez
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English
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Brandon Cris
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Brandon Cris
Sam Marquez
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01:13:20
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(Dis)placed Urban Histories: Melrose
Interviewee: Sam Marquez
Interviewer: Brandon Crispin
Date: April 5th, 2017
Place: Bronx Documentary Center Library, South Bronx
Transcriber: Brandon Crispin
Abstract: NYU student Brandon Crispin interviews longtime Melrose resident Sam Marquez, who recounts his days growing up in 50s/60s East Harlem, attending high school at Aviation in Queens, leaving the city after high school to join the marine core, and finally returning to become a firefighter at Engine Company 41 located in the South Bronx. Sam served from the early 70s to the mid 90s, notably working through the “Bronx is Burning” era as a Fire Marshal for the Arson Investigations Unit, where he worked to uncover the root causes behind the prevalence in fires within the area.
Brandon Crispin: Hi, this is Brandon Crispin, interviewing Sam Marquez. The date is 04/05/17, April-Fifth-Twenty-Seventeen, this is for Displaced Urban Histories, NYU Gallatin, Spring 2017. Hi Sam.
Sam Marquez: So do you want to, I don’t know, I can start, you know, I was born in East Harlem. I was raised in the streets of East Harlem. At that time we used to, they didn’t have that many cars in the neighborhood so we used to play games in the streets.
B: So not on the walkways, right in the middle of the street-
S: In the middle of the street, they didn’t have that many cars. Now every family has two, three cars. In those days you’re lucky if three people on the block have cars. And we used to play games every season. For example, during the summer we used to play stickball or we’d play tag or johnny-on-the-pony, ringolevio-coca-cola. These are games-these are street games that we used to play in the 1950’s, around there. But we used to have- football used to be one of the winter games type of games we used to play. One of the things that was interesting was that stickball. You play stickball with a broom handle and a rubber ball and no gloves. And we used to play- our block would be 117th St., we used to play against 115th St., 120th St- Every block had a team. And on Sunday afternoons after church, we would play the game for money. So that was like a summer game we played. Then, in the winter we used to have football. In the order we used to play games they kept us warm for example, johnny-on-the-pony, ringolevio-coca-cola, we used to have coppered guns—
B: What’s Ringolevio-Coca-Cola?
S: That was uh *laughs* that was a game where you had your home base. And you would go and hide someplace in the block. And then the opposing team-lets say you had an offensive team and a defensive team- the defensive team would try and come find where you were hiding, and they captured you they had to bring you to the home base so you had to be in the home base unless one of offensive members would come free you. Now he would have to say “ringolevio-coca-cola” three times, and then you’d be free to go and hide again.
B: And where’d the name come from?
S: Uh, I really don’t know—
*laughs*
B: That’s how those things usually go—
S: It’s one of those things that basically its, its a street game. We have 5 boroughs in the city of New York- you have Manhattan, Brooklyn, you have Queens, Staten Island, and you have The Bronx. Now if you notice, The Bronx is the only one that has two words in the name. “The” and “Bronx”. The other boroughs have just a single name. “The Bronx” has two words, that’s something that I learned not t0o long ago. So anyways—
B: So where’d your parents come from?
S: My father was one of the original pioneers from Puerto Rico, and he came to New York City in 1926. And to get here, he sold a horse that he’d had in Puerto Rico, and he sold it to get enough money to get here. And then, when he came here he came by boat. And when you come by boat you have to be sponsored by somebody in the states so he had most of his friends that grew up in Salinas, PR who came ahead of him. They formed a Salinas Social Club in New York. My mother, my father sent for her after about 2 years of working in NY. Now when he first came here his problem was the language. He spoke Spanish, only Spanish, in Puerto Rico, and he had to learn how to speak English here so he got a job working in a factory—this is what he told me which is a funny story—and he says that when he got here he didn’t know English, but he got a job working in a factory and all you have to do is follow instructions of what to do with your hands. So they used to have the lunch hour, and he would follow an American into a diner, and whatever the American ordered father would say “the same”. And he had “the same” for months and months and months wherever he went for lunch he would have “the same”. Those were the only words he knew and then he gradually became, probably one of the first Puerto Rican bus drivers in the city of New York. He has, when he passed away he was one day from reaching 100 years. My mother passed away when she was 94. They’re both buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Brooklyn.
So basically we used to play the games in East Harlem, and what I was trying to say is that we had very good skills, athletic skills growing up in East Harlem, and we had like a social club in the block. In the block everybody knew each other. Each family knew the other guy’s family. And if you did something wrong, or misbehaved, they would tell your father and mother. That’s how close the block was at that time, it was very close. We had drugs in those days but our block didn’t have that many problems with guys looking for the drug epidemic at that time. So we all grew up and became firefighters, lawyers, couple of my friends are doctors, teachers, principals. So they did very well, the guys and the ladies that grew up on the block did very well for themselves. And only because the parents looking out after us, they wanted, what they never achieved they wanted for us to achieve. And we did, just like I want my kids to better themselves and help them however i can. I have 2 kids, boy and girl.
B: Did you guys ever have any—while you were growing up in East Harlem—ever any problems of gang activity—
S: —Yes.—
B:—And what was it like in those days?
S: In those days they did have gangs, they had, like I said, in our block they had a social athletic club, that’s what we did on our block. Other blocks had gangs, and they would try to infiltrate into our block and we refuted them. We just didn’t care for them we didn’t pay attention to them, and they’d go away. In those days you had the Dragons, Viceroys, you had—
B: The Wanderers.
S: Who?
B: The Wanderers, they’re from Brooklyn.
*Laughs*
S: I never heard of that one. They had the Red Wings, which was the Italian gang on the Eastside of Harlem, then on 3rd Avenue, East Harlem was Little Puerto Rico. Then when I graduated from Aviation High School, which was one of the schools that, if you wanted to go to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, or Aviation you had to take an exam to qualify to be a student in that school. And I passed the one for Aviation and they accepted me/
B: That’s how you ended up going from Harlem to Aviation in Queens.
S: Right. But i went to PS57 which is 115th St, then I went James Otis Junior High School which was on Pleasant Ave on the Eastside of Harlem. There we used to, before we got to 3rd Ave, a bunch of the guys and ladies would get together and we would have to run from 3rd Ave to 2nd Ave to Pleasant, because the Italians would run to attack us. So we had to be in a group to get over there.
B: And were all the social clubs gangs and all the groups were divided that way, the Italians had one, the Puerto Ricans had one?
S: Yes, yes. See the good thing about growing up in East Harlem that was interesting was that I never knew what prejudice was. I grew up on a block that had Italians, Irish, Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans, it was all mixed together. We had light Puerto Ricans, dark Puerto Ricans so we never talked about racism in those days.
B: But was it ever like apparent just in how people treated each other or was it just, like did you ever feel a type of way towards the Italians or towards the Black groups.
S: Well we knew that, no it was never, I knew that I had to be with a group of guys and run towards Pleasant Ave to go to school I knew that. And I knew that if you went by yourself, you stood a chance of somebody beating you up. So as a group, they would think twice before they tried to beat us up. So um, I never had that inclination of racism like they had down south. The only time I experienced racism was when I went into the Marine Corps, and my first foray into the Marine Corps was they sent us from New York City down to Paris Island, South Carolina. On the way down there by bus, I, we stopped someplace in either South Carolina, North Carolina, and there was this “Blacks Only, Whites Only” sign on the doors. So I said to my friend, which one should I choose?
*Laughs*
So, you know, I never knew what racism was. So I said, “I’ll go into the white one” so I went into the white one, nothing happens, and boom. That was it. So that was the first time I ever experienced racism was when I went down south.
B: So going back to the high school question: you mentioned that you were applying Aviation and Bronx Science too?
S: No no, those were the schools you had to take an exam to enter or else you’d go to a vocational school. Either to Metropolitan middle trades and then you had Commerce, Junior Richmond, different types of schools that were vocational. They would teach the ladies how to become secretaries or if not, but if you wanted to specialize you had to take an exam like i did.
B: Were you ever going to The Bronx in those days growing up? Did you have any experience with The Bronx back then, before you started working here?
S: Very little. Very little experience. I only experienced The Bronx when I was assigned here as a firefighter. After I came out of the Marine Corps, I took the test for the Police Department, the Fire Department, and I turned out the Police Department because I just got out of the Marine Corps and in the Marine Corps I used to carry a .45 and I didn’t care for having a gun, I didn’t want to have no part of having a gun, and I decided I’ll wait for the Fire Department. When they called me, it took about a year, year and a half before I got called to become a firefighter. Then you go to training, this is in 1973, you go to training and then after that, in 1974 I was assigned to Engine Company 41 in the South Bronx on 15oth St. between Courtlandt and Morris which is only a hop-skip-and a jump from East Harlem. And that’s when I also looked for an apartment in the Grand Concourse, and my wife and I at the time we lived there. I used to work here, she used to work downtown.
B: And how’d you feel about, when you first got the job, about being a firefighter in The Bronx in those days.
S: Oh I was elated, I was very happy to get a job. And then when you’re a firefighter and you’re doing good, you’re saving lives or you’re helping a community and in those days there weren’t many latinos on the job. And we used to ride on the backstep, not enclosed in the cabin like they do now. The firefighters used to be on the backstep holding on, we’d go to the fire and take the hose and try to put it out. Anyway, when I go into a building and I’m extinguishing a fire and the people come out panicking, I’d know what was going on and when I spoke to them in Spanish, they couldn’t believe it. This was a Latino speaking to them in their own language, so they were happy about that, and I felt very happy about that. I felt very proud.
B: Did you ever get thrown off—and you probably did because you’re from East Harlem—but did you ever get thrown off by the image The Bronx was getting from the press, were there ever any crazy stories about The Bronx being this crazy no man’s land?
S: Actually when I got here, that’s when “The Bronx was Burning”.
B: Oh when you got here was when it all popped?
S: When I got here was when The Bronx was burning. Literally blocks after blocks after blocks were completely shells, the building was nothing but a shell because they were burned down. The fire used to travel, there was a space on the roof on the last apartment in that floor, and if the fire got there it would travel horizontally into another building. So it would go building to building, and then come down and burn that entire building.
Interesting enough, at that time in the 1970s, people and building owners were setting fires in their apartment to move into a better apartment. In those days the projects just was something innovative they were using, that they built/constructed in The Bronx and Harlem. People, in order for you to get onto the list, if you were burnt out of an apartment then the Red Cross would place you at the top of that list to be the next to get an apartment. People got wind of it, and they used to burn their apartments just to get into a new project apartment. When I say burn, I mean if you or I were experiencing a fire in our apartments, you had time to come down with your luggage—
*Cat enters the room. Sam hates cats*
You would come down with your luggage downstairs as the firefighters were going up to extinguish the fire. And I saw that a couple times as the owners of the apartment were coming down with their luggage. You’d go up to the roof and you’d see their couch and plastic over the couch, on the roof.
B: Oh so you knew the people were doing this? You would see them doing it.
S: Yea we knew it. Two things, not only were they doing it but the owners of the buildings were burning out the tenants because they didn’t want to fix up an apartment or give you services that they’re supposed to provide. They would rather set the building on fire, collect insurance and then be over with. The same thing with the supermarkets. People would come in, set supermarkets on fire at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, and by the time we got there it was engulfed. So the owner of that supermarket would get paid by the insurance company. Until in the early 80s, they beefed up the Fire Arson Investigation team. Then they started investigating the reason why so many people were setting fire to their apartments and why buildings were being vacated because of the burns. Then you had so many blocks where literally every building on that block was nothing but a shell. Some of the people would compare it to World War II in Germany, where all the bombs destroyed some of these structures and all you see is just rocks. At that time in The Bronx, with a lot of the drugs, they’d use them as dens—
B: The burned out apartments?
S: Sure, sure. They were stories, I could tell you stories where some of these drug dealers were so innovative that they’d take a doberman pinscher or a pitbull and then somehow or other they would take their vocal cords and cut them off. So that, when the dog came upon you, he wasn’t barking, he was right there aggressively ready to attack you. We didn’t know that, until getting wind of it, that there were dogs in these buildings.
B: Wow.
S: So even in some of the supermarkets they did the same thing. So, that was one example. Theres another example where they used to, in the vacant building, they would take and there would be a hole in the floor and they’d cover it with carpeting or a rug, and then they’ll do all their drug dealings in the back. So if there was a fire in the building, they knew that the firemen would be coming and they’d have time to get out. So what happens with this hole in the floor, we didn’t know it. It’s pitch black when you’re trying to extinguish a fire, so the electricity doesn’t work and the smoke is very dark and dense, and you’re just trying to advance along. One time I was advancing the line, and I fell down to the basement from the first floor, but I held on the hose and I was able to save myself from any injuries. But, right away they realized this was a common practice that the dealers were using.
B: Wow…
S: They were very innovative. They would take a bottle, crush it, and glue it on the banister. So that when you were coming up, trying to do whatever, you were cutting your hands, through your gloves ‘cuz we wore gloves, you were cutting yourself and not knowing why, and that would give them time to get out before getting arrested or pick up their stash or their loot or their drugs or whatever it was. But like I was saying before, the advent of the Arson Investigations Unit, the beef up of their squad prevented a lot of insurance companies from paying out these landlords that were setting buildings and buildings and buildings on fire.
B: Because they started investigating the causes of all these fires.
S: Exactly.
B: And they started linking them.
S: Exactly.
B: And what year, how far into the 80s was this?
S: This was the beginning of the 1980s.
B: Oh this was during the very beginning?
S: Yes, beginning of the 1980s. And as you went along the Arson Investigation squad grew with more firefighters, these were firefighters doing the actual investigation, so they would start as firefighters and be promoted to fire marshal. They would investigate the origin and cause of a fire.
B: But as a firefighter, did seeing these things like how people were taking advantage of the system by burning their own places or the crime aspect and actively getting into it, did that ever discourage you from doing your job? How’d that make you feel about your job?
S: No it never discouraged me. At that time I didn’t think too much about what was happening around me because we used to get, Engine Company 41 was probably the busiest company in the City of New York. We used to go out and get 4/5—we’d call them “good fires”—but its never a “good fire” when someone gets burnt out of their home.
B: What was a “good fire”?
S: For us, extinguishing it without anybody getting burnt out, with nobody being hurt. That was good for us. But sometimes we’d get into a building and you could find some bodies that were overcome by smoke, heat and smoke. Some were burned, some threw themselves off the window just to escape getting burned. I saw all that, I saw basically all the ravages of the fire. But what happened was, in those days, George Steinbrenner of the Yankees, Yankee Stadium was on 161st St. So the Yankees are still playing and winning World Series’ and what he did was, there was a lot of vacant buildings in the Yankee Stadium vicinity, in that neighborhood. What he did was, he had plywood placed inside the windows but on the outside he drew a curtain of people inside looking out. So if you were riding a subway and see the plywood with these drawings on it you’d think somebody was living in that building when actually there wasn’t. What that did for us, it prevented us from venting a burning apartment or building because the heat and the smoke had nowhere to go but back in our faces. So we had to develop a procedure where one of the first things to do was break the plywood in order to vent the heat and hot smoke as well as extinguish the fire.
That was one of the things they did and people thought that these buildings were still occupied! In reality, they were just a shell with no one living there. You go down the block around the concourse, the Grand Concourse, and you can see that north or south of the Concourse there were no lights. The city had turned the lights off in that block. It was pitch black on either side wherever we went, and that was block after block after block where there was no electicity, it was black, and people just didn’t give a damn. Some of those buildings— the Grand Concourse was at one time considered the Park Avenue of the Bronx. It was really a nice place—
B: It was the “Grand Concourse”
S: Yea it was really a nice place to live! You had buildings that were pre-war with sunken living rooms, really gigantic living room spaces, big bedrooms, beautiful bathrooms, kitchens, it was really a nice place to live. Then it gradually, the neighborhood changed. In those days the owners or the people who used to rent those apartments out, they would take out special cards of buildings where they knew they were gonna send Puerto Ricans, they knew where they were going to send the white people, the blacks. In a mild way it was discrimination in those days. That was the way it was in the old days. Now you see buildings that have really been renovated and all those shells of buildings that you had in the old days, the developers from downtown came into the South Bronx and put in bids for the shells at $1, and the city would give it to them with a proviso that they would have to renovate the building and make it livable. That’s why you see a lot of old buildings that have been renovated and people are living there now, and now you see the influx of gentrification coming into The Bronx.
B: So when did that era start dying down for you and what was it like for you in the 90s in The Bronx?
S: In the 90s—In the late 80s, one of the things that really puzzled me was that Mayor Koch, at that time the mayor of New York City, he wanted to close down Engine Company 41 in a neighborhood where fire was more prevalent that any other neighborhood in the City of New York. And he says, what we’ll do to save money on the budget, is close down this company because we have another one down 156th St, or we’ll close down the other one down 143rd St. So he decided to close down Engine Company 41. That’s where I said to myself, because in the (Engine Company’s) kitchen we used to talk about the current events and what was happening and a lot of times they’d say “Have you heard they’re trying to close down Engine 41?” and I’d say “No that’d be crazy! They need fire protection here more than they need it in Gracie Mansion!” More than that neighborhood or 42nd St! They need more protection here than there because more fires were in this neighborhood and the records would prove it. Not only fires, but deaths caused by fire.
So I got wind of it and I went to this lady, Sister Barbara, and I used to be on the Executive Board of the Community for the Developmentally Disabled, and they were a group that started group homes in Michelangelo which is on Morris Park and 150th St and they did it because they came from Willowbrook in Staten Island, an institution where they used to—if you had a family member that was disabled or dis-formed because of birth—they would send you to these institutions when the family couldn’t take care of them. They used to bring them and they never gave them any dental, medical, educational, or rehabilitation skills, so they dwindled physically in these institutions. Through Geraldo Rivera who did an exposé on Willowbrook, was when the governor of New York decided we’re going to take them out of Willowbrook, and build group homes as if they were kids of the neighborhood. So what they did was they started these group homes in The Bronx, in Manhattan, in Brooklyn, in Staten Island too I think.
And I became involved, and through them there was this Sister Barbara who had a group home of 150th St and Michelangelo, and I go to her and say “Sister Barbara, you know they want to close the firehouse…” and she goes you’re crazy, how could they close it down here of all neighborhoods. So through here and Marty Rodgers, and the Immaculate Conception Church, we formed a group of the Immaculate Conception People for Change. We lobbied the City of New York. They did close it down, they shut down the ‘Company, they took the firefighters and they sent them to other parts of the City of New York. I was fortunate enough to go to 143rd St, a sister ‘Company to me so I knew most of the guys there. So I was still in the neighborhood, I was still here in The Bronx, and I was able to ask “what was the reason why they’d want to take the fire protection from this neighborhood?”
B: The one that needed it.
S: But you know why? Because this is prime land! Manhattan was growing up immensely and the rents were going up immensely, so why not take a part of The Bronx, let it burn down as they would say “The Bronx is Burning” or “Brooklyn is Burning” or parts of…I think that was it. Brooklyn and East Harlem. That was one of the reasons. But we got together and lobbied, and had meetings, and had a group of people that came together and protested wherever we could against Mayor Koch. Wherever he was at, somebody from the group would be there raising up a banner that said “Give us back our Company!” and we protested. We were very fortunate that at that time David Dinkins was running for Mayor of the City of New York, he eventually became the Mayor, and one of the first things he told us as a group was “If I get elected Mayor, I’m gonna re-open Engine Company 41” And they did, for the first time in the City of New York—Never happened in the history of the City of New York that an Engine Company was re-opened, Never.
B: What year was this?
S: This was 1989. And when he became the Mayor, he reopened Engine Company 41. It wasn’t exactly the same, it was “Enhanced” Engine Company 41. Part of our duties then were to be a specialized Engine Company where we’d go to fires out of our own district and extinguish fires, do rescue, do ventilation, do whatever the chief would assign us to do.
B: Was it the same guys you had worked with before?
S: No, some of them came back but most of them stayed in the different companies they had been sent to. We had a lot of new guys that came into the ‘Company who really didn’t understand what the community was about.
B: Were they from The Bronx?
S: No. They were from upstate or Long Island or…
B: So you went from being the new guy to being the veteran in the BX.
S: Yes. I’m still involved with the ‘Company. I go to the parties, we have 9/11 memorial mass every year. We organize that, and I help them wherever I can. They need my help I’m there for them. I’m like a teacher to the young kids, they see me and they ask questions like “What was it like in the old days?” because the gear they have now is more protective than what we used to have in the old days. As I was telling you, in the old days we used to ride in the backstep, holding on to go to a fire. At one time in The Bronx they used to hate the firefighters, I don’t know why, I really don’t know why, but they used to take garbage cans, these big metal garbage cans, and they’d go up to the roof, and as we’re passing by they would throw them at us sometimes hitting the firetruck. That’s when they decided it was safer to have the guys in the truck.
B: And why do you think that was happening? Did the people associate you guys with the government and have problems with you guys as part of that sect?
S: Its, to me I couldn’t picture the reason or figure the reasoning behind why they would do that against us. The fire department, you know, whenever you call the fire department is when they need us, and we’re there. We respond, we’re not going to wait around—you see some of these movies like Chicago’s Burning where as soon as the alarm goes on the guys are putting on their gear and rushing out the door—
B: Going down the pole.
S: —And that’s the way we used to do it here. We still got the pole! We’re still coming down and get dressed real quick and get out as fast as we can, and get there as quick as we can. So I really didn’t realize or know the reason why they were throwing things at us. After a while, people just said “the fire department is there to help you” and there was some kind of press release where they were reading more about the Fire Department as the city agency that helps you the most. And then, after so many years, I think it was also in the 1980s, where they incorporated the EMS Ambulance service with the Fire Department. So they’re both under the one commissioner which is the commissioner of the NYFD. So he’s responsible for the Fire Department as well as EMS, Emergency Services.
B: And that helped out with the image that you guys were getting.
S: Yea the image, I just couldn’t figure out why we were portrayed as the enemy. It never dawned on me what reasoning they would have for that. We always responded when we had to, and plenty of times we saved lives. We saved kids. One time I was going up a ladder in Harlem. t was raining, and the suits back then were made out of rubber. So it was raining, and I climbed up to the 5th floor, 6th floor on an extension ladder from the outside of the building and i went up and one of the guys handed me a baby. And the baby was maybe less than a year old, and I’m walking down, it’s raining, and I’ve got a rubber turnout coat, and the baby starts slipping on me, and I’m holding on with one hand and the baby in the other, and I’m holding on and i’m praying “Dear God, please don’t let this baby fall. Please God” all the way down until I came down to the turntable, and I handed the baby to one of the guys. Then I had to go back and get another one. But I was so afraid, you know. The image of a firefighter seeing a baby slipping from his hands and falling four, five stories you know its… So God was with me.
B: Was it typically as dramatic as that? Like everyday on the job was it getting that dramatic?
S: Yea. You know I can remember Howard Cosell telecasting the Yankees World Series game and there was a fire, you can see it on TV, and you can see the firefighters on the fire escape going up through the holes. I was one of those guys.
B: Oh you were one of the guys on the broadcast video?
S: Yea, ‘cuz when I came home and saw it I just said “Hey that was me up there!”
B: Wow. That’s a famous video now.
S: Yea so anyway, that was one of those times where he would say “Look! The Bronx is Burning!” and literally it was burning in those days. That was just one example. Everyday was something different. It could be, I’ve always told people: Not only do we extinguish fires, but we can help with first aid, we can help with heart attacks, we can help with a car accident, we’re there to help you. And eventually, educationally they became aware of it. If someone was getting a heart attack they’d call the Fire Department because we get the call, we say we need an ambulance here right away, and we get an ambulance there right away. You call from your home and say “My uncle’s having a heart attack” you gotta wait at least 5,6 minutes and after 4 minutes you’re clinically dead. But you call us we’re there as soon as possible and we administer first aid, cardiac compressions, or breath through your mouth until such time that the ambulance can get there and they take over. So that’s one of the reasons they incorporated the ambulance with the fire department, and right now the dispatcher with send out an ambulance and a truck, at the same time, and normally the truck is there before the ambulance.
B: So lets get into the 90s now: How did things start changing for The Bronx as far as you saw it, and how’d they change for you?
S: I retired in the 90s, late 90s.
B: You were working for over 20 years.
S: I was back into Engine Company 41, then I got hurt on the job, so i was an instructor, a Fire Safety Education Instructor on Ogden Ave. We used to have the kids come into a classroom setting and I would teach them about stop, drop, and roll, the hazards in the kitchen, not playing with matches, getting out and calling the Fire Department, don’t go back for toys or anything of value, just get out and practicing a fire drill with your family so in case there is an emergency you can account for everyone in one spot. So I did that for a couple of years before they, well, actually kicked me out of the fire department. *Laughs*
B: They kicked you out?
S: Well i became disabled.
B: Well, talk about what getting hurt on the job was like—When’d that happen and how?
S: Well I got hurt quite a few times, it wasn’t once. I had a couple operations on my foot and on my knee and doctors decided that I couldn’t do the job of a firefighter any longer. Even though I wanted to but, they decided I couldn’t. You get hurt, you get burned, I was burned a few times but Its a part of the job.
B: And where were you in your life, were your kids already born?
S: Yea my kids were already grown up. Well…not really. My son was still in high school, he went to St. Raymond’s high school in The Bronx. My daughter went to…hell I’m trying to think of what school she went to…It was a school downtown, I can’t remember…
B: So how was it for your son growing up here in Melrose?
S: He grew up close by, it was 165th St. and the Grand Concourse, right around the corner on Carol Place. I had a beautiful sunken living room, big bedroom, it was a gorgeous apartment. But, the neighborhood changed, and I had to move. So I went to Parkchester, I’ve got a co-op over there.
B: So let’s get back to that, how’d the neighborhood change?
S: Well the neighborhood started changing in the 1990s, you could see that developers started coming in and buying these shells of buildings for $1, renovating it, and maybe the occupancy was Section 8 or poor people who made sure to pay the rent—and I’m sure the developers got a tax break on it, but they also made some money. And now, these buildings are worth quite a bit. Then, slowly but surely, you have people who’ve never left this neighborhood, Marty Rodgers and his family never left, Father Scully grew up here in the Bronx, he became a priest and he’s the pastor of Immaculate Conception. You have some of the guys—In this area we have a stickball reunion also! That’s in September, and its on the second sunday. Some of the guys who grew up in this neighborhood—the Irish guys, the Italian guys, they come back. They’re all accountants and doctors and everything, they all come back and they reminisce on the old days. Remember this guy, remember that guy, remember that girl here, this girlfriend there, and its a good feeling to see the old guys, see how they’re doing, they bring their children, and show the kids where they grew up, how they used to play in the streets of the City of New York, the games we used to play here in the City of New York. We don’t have those anymore.
B: So were things for your son growing up here similar to you growing in East Harlem. Did he have similar experiences?
S: No i don’t think so. He was more, there just wasn’t much street games for them to play. So for him—one thing we didn’t have was organized little league. So i got him into organized baseball, and he went to a college in Long Island on a baseball scholarship. I brought him up as a catholic, always in catholic schools, him and my daughter. As soon as he went to college—Stony Brook University— so he went there, and he was playing 3rd base there, liberated from the parent. He was by himself, living in the dorm, party, party, party, and he let it get to his head too much. So he didn’t follow up on his baseball qualities. But he was a good ballplayer. He still is.
B: And what were you up to at the time?
S: I was basically still working, starting off retirement. We just did things differently. It was a different era with the advent of cellphones and computers and we didn’t have those things in the old days. You can’t really compare us growing up without a dime in our pocket to make a phone call. Now everyone’s walking around with a cellphone and a headset, and they can make a call from anywhere. In the old days we didn’t have the communication they’re experiencing now.
B: Did you end up leaving The Bronx at any point?
S: Well I wanted to, I wanted to go to North Carolina. My daughter’s living there now, and I still might, I still might go down to North Carolina. But I don’t know. You can take the boy out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the boy.
B: You were getting this desire through the 90s, early 2000s? When was it that you started getting the idea that you wanted to leave The Bronx?
S: It was in the 2000s. 2002, 2003.
B: What would you say caused that—
S: Like why would I want to leave?
B: Was it something that you saw changing in the neighborhood? Was something missing? Did you want something new?
S: No…I think it was just…I started taking up golf. When I was growing up i used to run marathons, I’d run track for Aviation High School. So I was very athletic. So when I retired I needed to do something other than sit on the couch watching TV, so I started playing golf. Down south is where you have most of your golf courses. I don’t want to play where Trump has his golf leagues in Throg’s Neck. Because of the name I’m careful.
B: So if you left the Bronx, what would you miss the most about it?
S: The people. The people in The Bronx. Growing up in the vicinity where you know a lot of people and they treat each other as human beings. Down south, even here in the City of New York nowadays, you don’t know who your next door neighbor is.
B: Neighborhoods don’t exist anymore.
S: They don’t. In the old days it was a little town, It was un pueblo, everybody was there. One of the reasons I have the reunion is because I want to give back to the community. I want to give back to where I grew up. So I go back, I organize it, and I give. Same thing here in this neighborhood. I come back, I come to church every Sunday. Even though I live in Parkchester, I come here because of the people I met here. The community, the firehouse is right there, the church, the sisters, etc. Just walking down 3rd Avenue, or even driving up here I see all these brand new buildings, store after store after store. You go down south and what you have is malls. You don’t have those street stores anymore. No matter where you go down south you have to drive too.
B: And also here, everyone has the one store or place that they have that relationship with. You don’t even get that in most places here in the City anymore.
S: No, you don’t. In the old days we used to really—I remember my parents used to go to the bodega and do the food shopping, make a compra, for a whole week. And the owner of the bodega used to put it in his little book, how much that shopping cost, and he would put it down y’know ‘$20 and 30 cents’ and when my father got paid he’d come back and pay that $20.30. We could literally go downstairs to the bodega and tell the guy “apuntamelo” you know, “put it down” and he’d put it in his book, no problem. Then at the end of the week when you’re squaring off, your father would go and pay for whatever the family took that week, and pay the bill all at once. That was the old days, now you can’t do that.
B: I actually grew up with that same experience which is funny.
S: Really?
B: Yea, and its funny because I’ll mention it to other people, my age especially, and Its obvious that that type of trust is foreign in most places. Its a special bond that the communities here share especially.
S: Yes, you don’t see that anymore. Those are the things that…our kids are not experiencing. Its very difficult.
B: Theres a disconnection.
S: Yes, nowadays its a cellphone and playing the games on the computer and…I don’t know, go to a concert maybe. The old days we used to see three bands and actually dance to the music. Now you sit and listen and pay $80 just to sit and listen to these guys playing music. We used to pay $2 before 7, go in, get a nice table, wait for the girls to come in and we’d be dancing all night ‘till 2/3 o’clock in the morning.
B: So how do you feel about the direction the Bronx is heading in?
S: Its…you still have…you really need a lot of community involvement. One of the things that you have now that we didn’t have, well one of the things that we had that you don’t have now is policing. Policing is a big problem here because the police are in the cars, they police in their cars. In the old days you had the beat cop, and he’d come around and he knew every store owner, most of the family that lived on the block. If he had three blocks he knew everybody, and everybody knew him.
B: And they could trust him, most importantly.
S: Yes, and theres this funny story i keep telling: In the old days we used to play stickball and the cops never wanted us in the streets so they would break the bats. So we used to have one of the guys at the corner on the block in case the cop came by. So they would say “La Hara”. “La Hara” means “cop”, but really it didn’t. What it meant was “O’Hara” because O’Hara was the beat cop. So “O La Hara” was the cop. Nowadays you don’t have that. They’re trying to do it again; sometimes they close this block on Thursdays and the cops won’t let the cars use the street because they know for about 4/5 hours this street is closed.
B: That’s right now?
S: Yup, every Thursday you come over here and they close the street off. We have a new commander in the 40th Precinct named Hennessy, and he’s an excellent, community-minded commander, he’s really good. You get some guys that they’re only here for the money, they get paid and they’re gone. They don’t give a shit about your neighborhood. They go upstate or wherever they go, they have their own neighborhood. But nowadays you’re getting—well hopefully you’re gonna get more boots on the ground. You get more boots on the ground you get back to the old days. But there is a difference. I was at a meeting the other day where a cop explained that the reason why you used to have policing in the old days and you don’t have it now is because nowadays these kids have guns and knives. In the old days they didn’t have the guns or knives. If anybody had a gun it was what we called a zip gun. All a zip gun was—you take an antenna from an old car and it was hollow in the inside, and you put it on a piece of wood—2x4 or whatever—frame it like a gun, and you put a nail with a rubber band. You put a bullet in there, snap the rubber, and the bullet takes off. That was the old days. Nowadays you have a machine gun, its a big difference.
But basically, I’d say its policing and community involvement. If you don’t get involved, the neighborhood gets taken over and taken advantage of. You’re going to be literally gone from this neighborhood, and they’ll do it. Right now, the influx in this neighborhood and East Harlem is Mexicans. At one time it was German, then Irish, then Italian, then Puerto Rican, and right now its Mexican. And thats…well then you get gentrification, because they can’t pay the rent they pay on 96th St. So they here, and you can see the flow. You get on the subway, as soon as you get off its nothing but blanquitos getting on.
B: Claro. And that brings me to my next point: Seeing all these developments going on, are you hopeful for the future of The Bronx? Do you think we’re heading in the right direction or are we going to lose our identity?
S: Of The Bronx itself?
B: Mhm.
S: No. You’ll never lose the identity of The Bronx. The Bronx will always be “The Bronx”. What you’ll lose is in the transformation of different ethnic groups moving…well that depends if Trump doesn’t stop the immigration ban. I know my neighborhood in Parkchester theres a lot of asian people moving in. But that’s inevitable, you’ll always have different groups, different ethnic groups move into your community. As you become a professional and want more money you’ll want better things for yourself and you’ll move to find that home. You want the backyard, the barbecue. That’s gonna happen, and thats basically whats happened all along. The ethnic groups come, they stay, then they continue to move for something better. Like you’d want for your children, your parents for you, and me for my kids. I think The Bronx will always be “The Bronx”, just with different ethnicities. But you’ll always have your stalwarts, your Marty Rodger’s and Father Scully’s and this guy Tony—one of the guys being interviewed, he swam the English Channel three times. He still does it, he goes to St. Mary’s park every morning and swims for 2, 3 hours. Then he gets on a treadmill for 2, 3 hours. He’s an old man, but he’s still…
B: From The Bronx.
S: Yup, From The Bronx, and he’s not leaving it! He’s got a nice apartment on 138th St, and he’s happy. He’s got his little piece of ‘grass’. Not marijuana, real grass. He can do whatever he wants. Thats his home, he’s got his place to swim, and he’s here to stay. You’ve got some guys—we just buried a friend of ours named Charley Levi, and Charley Levi grew up in the Bronx, he used to be a gang member. He used to be warlord and he’d could tell us stories forever. But in the 90s, people in the neighborhood knew who Charley Levi was, and he used to go around “Hello! Hey!” and he knew everybody. That was his personality, thats how he came about. He passed away about 2 months ago, but he was a really nice person, and he took with him so much history of The Bronx. I always told him “Charley you should put it down on paper or in a book” in those days, and he never did. But he knew a lot of history. You got a lot of people like that who have a lot of history, but don’t pass it on, and they die with all that information.
My father he was…When my niece graduated from New Paltz College—or University I don’t know which—but she sat down for three days on a weekend and my father, and did like you’re doing with me, and she wrote a paper on the immigration of my father coming from Puerto Rico to New York City, sending for my mother—and in those days it took about 13 days to cross from Puerto Rico to Ellis Island by boat— and he said that my mother was sick on the trip, only eating cookies. So when he saw her coming down the gangway, she was so skinny that he said to himself “I think I’ll send her back”
*Laughs*
That was his humor, thats the way…I grew up with 13 brothers and sisters, all in the same apartment on 117th St. Everybody knew everybody, and everybody respected everybody. That’s whats good about that neighborhood. That’s what was happening in The Bronx, and we’re trying to instill that community-minded spirit and culture in this neighborhood regardless of the ethnicity of the people coming in. Just mingling together and rising together. I think its more of a challenge than it is a reality, its quite a challenge.
B: Do you think the kids will make their lives here in The Bronx?
S: A lot of them yes. The building we’re at now—The Bronx Documentary Center—this building is preserved. Downstairs is used for exhibits, here for teaching in the second floor library, and you get the kids that come in and they’re building what we used to do in the streets inside here. You need more of this, more centers, more CYO’s or YMCA’s, places where they can gather and get out of the streets. Nowadays if you’re in the streets, you’ve got problems because its not easy being led by other kids that all they want is to create mischief for others. By getting them into places they feel wanted and can contribute, its really good. In the old days we didn’t have those official places, like organized little league. Some of those guys that played stickball were so good, so great—
B: Could’ve been major leaguers.
S: They could’ve been major leaguers if it was organized its true.
B: That’s a great note. Any last words, last stories or remarks to get in the interview.
S: No thats about it. I’ll gather some photos and maybe we’ll meet again and give ‘em to you.
B: I think that’s a wrap my friend!
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Sam Marquez
Subject
The topic of the resource
Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
Sam Marquez recounts his first hand experience of being a firefighter throughout the 70s/80s in The Bronx.
Creator
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Brandon Cris
Date
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April 2017
Language
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English, Some Spanish
Interview