Eastchester Road and Mace Avenue—at these crossroads you
could find so many of life’s necessities, from a box of Band-Aids to a pair of
socks, from a meatball hero to infant wear, from an egg cream to a real estate
agent to a head of lettuce to a haircut or a wash and set.
It was a frequent if not daily destination for anyone living nearby, many of whom came on foot. (In the 1960s most families in this neighborhood owned one car only—the one your father drove to work.) A typical round of errands could include going to the bank, getting your hair done, buying shoes, and picking up groceries, all in the space of a few steps. Eastchester and Mace is where commuters caught the Number 9 bus to Westchester Square (and later the Express Bus to Manhattan), where the boys played king, queen, jack against the wall of the deli on the southwest corner, where kids bought a piece of Bazooka at the candy store, where teenagers met up for pizza.
In the 1930s and ’40s, Tom and Louie Forte established truck
farms on undeveloped land from Westervelt and Mace Avenues south toward Pelham
Parkway. (Local kids recall carrying
salt shakers in their pockets for their tomato-pinching forays.) Their fertile fields yielded such abundance
that they opened their own vegetable store near the northeast corner of
Eastchester Road and Mace Avenue, right between a real estate office and a
vacant space that later became Frank’s butcher shop.
After World War II the Kruger family purchased the grocery
store on the other side of the real estate office, next to the vacant corner
lot. Eventually they purchased the vacant lot as well, expanding their store to
the corner. As ownership changed over the years the store came to be known by
different names: Associated, Pioneer, C-Town, Met Foods…
The Forte brothers made a significant impact on the shopping
district at Eastchester Road and Mace Avenue. In 1941 they broke ground for an
apartment building on the southeast corner of the intersection. But the
enormous, fenced-off hole in the ground was to languish under four years’ worth
of rain, snow, mud, and dust. For four years, patrons of the neighborhood bar
or Pete’s drugstore, located just south of the excavation site, had to pass the
gaping eyesore to reach their destinations. The U.S. entered World War II, and
work on the building that would become 1500 Mace Avenue halted until the war
ended in 1945.
The residential entrance to the three-story building faced
Mace; the side that faced Eastchester Road offered retail space for six stores.
The Forte brothers moved their vegetable store to their new building, expanding
it into a general grocery store.
Other original merchants are unknown to me, but I can tell
you about the ones that I came to know well in the 1960s and ’70s.
Before there was a Co-Op City, there was an amusement park,
Freedomland U.S.A. Before Freedomland—more than 300 years before—there was
Vreedelandt, or Land of Freedom, so named by the Dutch West India Company,
which purchased the land from the Siwanoy people in 1639.
Once the early settlers cleared parcels of the wilderness to
reveal level ground and rich soil, they began to establish farms. Generation
after generation, family farms were continued and others were created, and the
area became known for its farming.
The upper end of the Co-Op City apartment complex stands
where Nathan Johnston grew cucumbers and built a pickle factory in the 1800s.
Toward the end of that century Nathan’s son William inherited the farm, and
soon after a blight killed off the cucumbers. William turned to strawberry
farming. He did well until 1918, when the quality of his strawberries began to
deteriorate. An attack of worms in 1929 finished off the crop, ending William’s
farming career.
William then sold the property to an aircraft company, which
proposed building an airport. When that plan was scrapped, the next proposal
was for a racetrack. That plan failed, too.
In the late 1950s, near the place where the Hutchinson River
emptied into Eastchester Bay, William Zeckendorf filled in about 200 acres of
wetlands on the west side of the river. Taking in the former Johnston farmland
as well, Zeckendorf built an education amusement park, fully expecting it to
compete with Disneyland. Freedomland U.S. A. opened on June 19, 1960.
Laid out in the shape of the United States, the park
featured live scenes from American history. Beginning with a stroll through the
streets of old New York, complete with horses and buggies and people in period
costumes, patrons walked through different regions of the simulated country.
They watched reenactments of events such as the Great Chicago Fire and
gunfights in the Old Southwest, and visited San Francisco in 1906, the year of
the earthquake.
To think that an amusement park in the Northeast could
compete with Disneyland in California is to ignore the climate factor; unlike
Disneyland, Freedomland could only be open for five months of the year.
Another downside was the number of visitors to the park
during its first year; it fell far below the five million its promoters had
projected. Suspecting that the educational/historical theme did not appeal to
the masses, they ramped up the entertainment aspect with features like roller
coasters and pop-star concerts. Things did not improve. And then the World’s Fair
in nearby Queens opened in April of 1964, delivering the fatal blow to
Freedomland U.S.A. It closed for good on September 15, 1964.
Because I was very young, I only vaguely remember my one and
only visit to Freedomland. I remember the Old Southwest and the show girl in
the flouncy red dress who pushed open the saloon doors and danced out, singing.
I remember the startling (and loud) gunfight that followed. But what I remember
most clearly about Freedomland are the fireworks that I watched from my bedroom
window. I can’t remember if they were a nightly event or held only on weekends,
but I had an unobstructed view of the display that spangled the northeastern
sky with light and color.
In just a few years, that part of the sky would lose forever
its wide-open aspect. It would be partly obscured by the buildings of Co-Op
City.
My eighth-grade classroom windows overlooked the rising structures of Co-Op City. Our teacher, Sister Mary Ellen, would often gaze out at them and repeat a dire warning: “Those apartment buildings are standing on marshland. They won’t last 20 years. You’ll see.”
The builders hoped to save the enormous old tree on the eastern side of Westervelt Avenue, but soon realized it had to be cut down to make room for four new homes. Photo by A.F. DiSalvo, May 1948.
New homes built by Ben Caravella taking shape on the eastern side of Westervelt Avenue, June 1948. Houses visible in the background are on Kingsland Avenue. Photo by A.F. DiSalvo.
Before the homes across the street went up in the 1940s, this was the view from our bedroom windows. The Forte truck farm is in the foreground; the Hutchinson River Parkway drawbridge is at left; the towers of the New Haven Railroad trestle are toward the right. The trees in the background are part of Pelham Bay Park.
Jonas Bronck lived in the northern hinterlands of the Dutch territory of New Netherlands for only four short years, but in that time he made enough of an impact that his name became permanently attached to the region.
Jonas, a Scandinavian sea captain, was the first non-native to settle and farm part of this vast expanse of wilderness. Arriving in 1639, Jonas cleared land and built a farmstead consisting of a main house for his family, housing for his indentured servants, a tobacco plantation, and a barn to store the abundant crop. He died in 1643.
In school we were told that “The” became part of our borough’s name because the area had been widely known as “the territory of the Broncks’ homestead.” More officially it was called Broncksland or Broncks Land until 1697, with the first recorded usage of the spelling Bronx.
Long before the Dutch purchased the land from the Siwanoy
people, the area east of the Bronx River and the Bronck homestead had been
known for its rich, fertile soil. A number of farms prospered in the area, but
the rest of the land remained undeveloped.
In 1912 the New York, Westchester & Boston Railroad (NYW&B, or “the Westchester”) began operation, giving residents of Manhattan and the south Bronx a new way to commute to their jobs in Westchester County. Speeding northward on its approach to the Westchester County border, the train gave commuters glimpses of a sparsely populated, rural landscape. The “rustic charm of the northeast Bronx”—as the real estate developers called it—appealed to those ready to move from the crowded streets further south.
The late 1920s brought streetlights to Eastchester Road, a major thoroughfare. As yet there were no paved streets or sidewalks, but there were enough houses in 1925 that residents joined together to form the Eastchester Home Owners Association. One of their first objectives was to get sewer lines installed. The population increased still more when the Eastchester Road bus began running in 1927. Another surge followed in 1933 with the Gun Hill Road bus route that connected Manhattan commuters with the Eighth Avenue subway station.
In the area bordered by Pelham Parkway to the south, Gun Hill Road to the north and east, and Eastchester Road to the west, the 2500 block of Westervelt Avenue marked the eastern limit of the borough’s full blocks in the 1930s and early 1940s. A row of 30 two-story, red-brick attached houses, built around 1930 and selling for about $4,000 each, lined the western side of the street. From the sidewalk, the approach to each home was via a walkway that ran alongside a small front lawn enclosed by a privet hedge. The walkway led to a stoop consisting of five steps and a landing just big enough to hold the milkbox and perhaps a small lawn chair.
Drawing by Sal Lardiere.
The front door opened to a foyer with a coat closet. Passing
through a French door brought you into the living room with its fireplace,
staircase to the second floor, and a double-wide doorway to the dining room.
The homes featured living room and dining room walls of a mellow,
amber-varnished stucco, and except for the kitchen floor (which was linoleum)
and the bathroom floor (which was tile), hardwood floors throughout. A small
kitchen off the dining room completed the first floor. Styled in the latest
design of the 1930s, it featured a double porcelain sink in a Youngstown metal
cabinet; a four-burner gas stove with oven and broiler; white, subway-tiled
walls; and a breakfast nook with built-in shelves and a window overlooking the
backyard, the driveway, the alley, and the back of the row homes on Mickle
Avenue.
The back of the homes on Mickle Avenue, the driveways, backyards, and the access road. And my brother Arthur shoveling the driveway in the early 1960s.
Three bedrooms and a bath comprised the second floor. The bathroom featured white subway tiles on the lower half of the walls, a floor of one-inch hexagonal tiles, a wide pedestal sink, a cast iron bathtub, and a separate shower stall. Inside the closet of the large front bedroom a steel ladder led to the trapdoor to the roof, a fire escape as well as a portal to “tar beach.”
The walk-out basement opened to a fenced-in backyard. Almost every backyard had a clothesline of
some sort. A driveway adjacent to the backyard connected the back alley to the
garage.
Newcomers to the neighborhood maneuvered their cars along dirt roads that could be dusty or muddy depending on the season. They swerved around the cows from nearby dairy farms that drank from the creek on Allerton Avenue, the first cross street to the north, which was little more than a clearing in the woods.
Mace Avenue, the first cross street to the south, ended at
Kingsland Avenue, a half-developed block of two or three houses east of
Westervelt and south of Mace. Behind Westervelt (to the west) was Mickle Avenue
with a similar row of attached brick homes, then Woodhull Avenue, followed by
Eastchester Road, the shopping district.
From our upstairs bedroom windows, we looked eastward over farmland and marshland that sloped downward to Gun Hill Road at the bottom. In the distance we could see the city dump, a vast expanse of marshlands, the towers of the New Haven Railroad trestle, the Hutchinson River Parkway, and the Hutchinson River. Not quite visible was Eastchester Bay and the Long Island Sound just beyond.
A walk to the south end of Gun Hill Road, to the paths that
ran under the Hutchinson River Parkway, led to Eastchester Bay and its creeks
and inlets. For $2 a day you could rent a rowboat from Stark’s Dock. Those who
attached their own outboard motors and had a couple of hours to spare could
easily cruise to Orchard Beach or to City Island, or spend the day picking blue
claw crabs off the pilings of the City Island docks.
Despite expectations that the NYW&B would turn the northeast Bronx into a bustling metropolis, the line declared bankruptcy during the Great Depression. Around 1940 the City of New York purchased the tracks that ran north of the E. 180th Street Station to the city limits at Dyre Avenue and joined those stations to the Lexington Avenue subway line. Until 1957, a two-car train shuttled passengers between Dyre Avenue and E. 180th Street, stopping at Baychester Avenue, Gun Hill Road, Pelham Parkway, and Morris Park Avenue along the way. At E. 180th Street, riders transferred to the main line into Manhattan. The little train had a covered platform at each end through which passengers entered and exited. Local residents called it the “Dinky” after the Toonerville Trolley, a dilapidated feature of a favorite comic strip of the day called Toonerville Folks. Even as late as the 1980s—more than 20 years after it became a 10-car direct line into Manhattan as the Number 5 Lexington Avenue Express—long-time residents still referred to it as the Dinky.
During the 1930s, truck and dairy farms, cows and chickens were common sights. Tom and Louie Forte cultivated several truck farms, one of which covered about an acre of land directly opposite our house. (One of the original residents recalls youthful behavior: “We carried salt shakers with us during the summer so we could pick Tommy’s tomatoes and eat them on the run.”) Others overspread the area south of Mace Avenue to Waring Avenue, the next cross street. The Fortes grew enough produce to stock their vegetable store on Eastchester Road until home construction expanded in the 1940s, obliterating all but a few family farms.
Over the course of the 1940s, homes were built on the eastern side of Westervelt Avenue, the road was macadamized, streetlights installed, and more homebuyers came to this region of eastward expansion. Further east, more streets were paved and houses were built all the way to Gun Hill Road, which, by its southeast to northwest trajectory, formed the northern and eastern boundaries of the newly established neighborhood. The southeast end of Gun Hill Road ran parallel to the New England Thruway (I-95), which was under construction in the late 1950s. Terminating at the Hutchinson River Parkway, it developed rapidly with gas stations, ice cream shops, and other off-the-highway conveniences.
Now the panorama from our bedroom windows was constrained. All that was left of our farm and marshland view were the towers of the New Haven Railroad trestle and the drawbridge of the Hutchinson River Parkway, visible through the narrow spaces between the houses. But just behind the drawbridge, the rising sun, whose beams pierced our window shades each morning, still gilded the unseen meadows, creeks, and salt marshes all the way to the edge of the continent.
