My World…the Bronx
I grew up in the Bronx. I have no idea why it is the only borough in New York City that needs a “the” in front of it. It’s like “The Home Depot”. When you looked it up in the old phone books for Home Depot, you had to look under “T”, though nowadays you can find it in the “H’s”. Anyway, I lived across the street from Manhattan College. Again, why Manhattan College was placed in the Bronx has been a question that I’m sure scholars have been wondering for years; I know I have.
Across the street from the apartment I grew up in, was a New York City subway depot, where subways were stored or repaired when not in use. Next to the Depot and my street was Gaelic Park. This was a stadium that I assume was used by Manhattan College for some of their football or soccer games. I know this because, from the 11th-floor roof of my apartment, better known to us New Yorkers as tar beach, we could see the games. There were too many trees blocking the view from our 2nd-floor apartment to see the field from our window, but we could go outside and sit on the rocks above the depot to watch games.
We also got to see some other teams play games and they held concerts there. The only concert I remember was during my college years; the group, “the Association” came to perform.
If you walked down the block from my apartment building you came to the last stop of the Number 7 IRT line of the NYC subway system. If you crossed the street (Broadway) you ended up in Van Cortlandt Park. This was the place that I went to with my father to watch local men’s soccer teams play. It’s where my father would regale me with all of his experiences as a soccer player on the German National team Schalke 04 when he grew up in Germany. Note – The fact that he played for this team has never been proven, and I’ve tried. I even wrote to the team historian. Either my father was lying, after all, he did lie about how old he was when he came over to America; in fact, when my mother found out some 25 years later, she refused to ever give him a birthday present again. Then again, I don’t remember her ever giving him presents for his birthday before his real age was revealed either. The other reason his name might not have shown up in Schalke’s records is that all records of Jews playing on a German team in the early 1930s might have been purged by the political powers at that time, so no record would remain.
Van Cortlandt Park was just a nice place to go and play catch or take walks. You could also fly kites if the season was right and you happened to have a kite, which I rarely did. In addition to flat playing areas that one could play a pick-up soccer game, it had hilly areas you could roll around on. It had its own stadium also, where they would shoot off fireworks on the 4th of July. Again most of which we saw from the 11th-floor roof.
That’s where I grew up. I haven’t been back there since my mother passed away in 1998. But looking at street views on Google, I know that a lot has changed. But isn’t that true everywhere?
