Just Kids From the Bronx (20 page)

My mother would say to me,
Never worry about what other people tell you
.
Don’t ever buckle to authority. Don’t think that if you’re getting good grades that means you’re doing well. Don’t be under the illusion that everything that is being fed to you is the truth.
My father was also very strong. He was very mild, very quiet, but he was very principled. We were not practicing Jews, even though my mother came from a very prestigious Hasidic dynasty, the Gerrer Rabbis. They were like the popes of Poland. People used to fall on the ground to kiss the ground, literally. My cousins are all in Mea Shearim, the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Israel, with their fur hats and their payes. My cousins—first cousins
—
have sixteen kids each. My parents rejected this. My father was completely unreligious. Even to his dying day, when religious people came to his hospital room to speak to him or to say prayers, he’d say,
Don’t come in
. And yet when he died he saw Hebrew letters. He saw aleph, gimel. He was a Yiddishist.

In Poland, where I was born, I started playing music on the accordion, very early on. My parents were afraid to bring in a piano because of the neighbors and their anti-Semitism. Even though it was after the war, my parents were afraid of bringing attention to themselves. The accordion is like a piano, but it’s portable. I wound up playing that strange instrument and I wound up playing in classical venues because I played only classical music, which I transcribed myself. Mostly baroque music, Bach and so on. Even though I was very short I had this very large accordion with four octaves.

When we were in Israel, I won a competition sponsored by the American Israeli Foundation, which brought me to America with my family. Itzhak Perlman won that same year. I remember that Isaac Stern was the head of the jury. Stern said to me, “Why are you playing this small piano?” But, you know, it’s strange, when you play vertically, like on the accordion, it’s hard to play horizontally, like on the piano. Then my interests drifted, because I loved art. I loved painting.

One of the first people I met in America was an Italian American, Tony Roccanova. I met him in junior high school. I didn’t speak a word of English. He was sitting next to me, so I’d pick up something.
What is this? It’s a pencil. What is this? It’s a bottle. What is this? A cup.
So I had a list of all these words, and that’s how I learned English.
What do you call this?
I had this list, which I memorized. We became friends and he became an architect as well. I’m still friends with him.

I found that people were not fake in the Bronx. I never met anybody with pretentions there. I never met anyone who was phony. People were very down to earth whether they were Jewish or Irish or Italian or African American.

If you’re born here, you take what you have here for granted. My father was a Holocaust survivor. Until the day he died, and he was ninety when he died, he said, “If Americans knew what they had here, they would kiss the ground.”

My father was very talented in art, but he never had a chance to explore it. He never had any education. When I was in the Bronx High School of Science, there were a lot of bright kids, doing experiments in genetics and physics. You had to bring in a project that you were working on. This was the height of the Cold War, so I decided to build a perfect model of an ideal nuclear shelter. I don’t know why I thought that would be a great project. My father was a brilliant miniaturist and he built these exact replicas of cans of soups, which he painted and which I then used to stack the shelves. I also had a miniature mother, a father, and their two kids in the shelter.

Our apartment in the Bronx was small, and when I went to Cooper Union we had to make models and drawings often using a T-square. In our kitchen, there was one Formica table, with large rounded corners. I never knew if my T-square was on the right angle or if it was on the curve of that table. Those rounded edges began to play a big role in my thinking about architecture. Everyone always talks about the straight edge. Why are other angles so neglected?

I loved the Bronx. Maybe once I went on a trip to Brooklyn. That was like going to a place as far away as Africa. Even Manhattan seemed to be a distant country, but of course the subways were very cheap and the city offered so many ways to educate yourself. Museums were free. You could go to lectures. You could go to concerts. My education was in this cultural arena. Before that explosion of culture in the city, I remember being in the Museum of Modern Art virtually alone. I was also in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in these huge rooms, where I would sketch. I loved the building itself. I thought I was in Rome.

My upbringing was totally influenced by the fact that my parents were Holocaust survivors. Totally. I grew up in the void. I was born in Poland after the war. There had been millions of Jews before the war and there was no one left. I was walking with my father when I was a little boy in Poland. We would meet somebody who he didn’t know and he would say in Polish, “Are you Amhu?” using the Hebrew word for Jewish. If they were, they’d immediately break into Yiddish. It was like a password. A secret code to find out if the person was a Jew.

We’re now finishing a building in Warsaw. The tallest residential tower on the site of a former Stalin-era Palace of Culture building. It’s right next to where my mother was born. It was an old Hasidic neighborhood and of course it was all bombed out. My new building is right across the street.

When we used to go to Warsaw, that Palace of Culture was the dominating symbol of the city and it was such an oppressive symbol, because it was built by Stalin to oppress the Polish people. And now my building is a totally different form. It has nothing to do with what was there. It’s something
free
. And right near there is a memorial to my mother’s family, a memorial to Rabbi Alter of that Gerrer Hasidic dynasty. It’s a significant memorial. It means a lot to me to be able to come full circle.

Architecture isn’t about stones and concrete. It’s more about storytelling. Everybody has a story. Architecture beyond its being a science, an art, is a storytelling profession. Every building that’s meaningful tells you a story. Only late in my life I discovered from my father that
his
father was an itinerant storyteller. He went from village to village telling stories. That was his job. He walked from shtetl to shtetl sitting in the market, telling stories.

I’ve had four lifetimes. There was a lifetime when I was a musician.

And there was a lifetime when I was a student and theoretician.

The third lifetime was when I was in Berlin for the Jewish Museum.

And the fourth lifetime was when I won the competition to oversee Ground Zero. Four lifetimes.

It’s not a fake idea, America, New York, the Bronx. It’s not some myth. It’s a reality.

VALERIE SIMPSON

Pianist, singer, composer

(1946– )

Both my grandmothers lived in the Bronx and had pianos, but nobody in the family could play them. That was the setup for me to learn, because everyone could sing. I can only think that the pianos were there, just waitin’ for me to come along—destined to play them because of the musical gift that was given to me. My grandmother put me in front of the upright and I just kind of knew it. I was four or five when I started playing piano by ear.

When I was about eleven years old I took piano lessons and learned to read music, but for a long time I fooled the teacher because she’d play the song and I would just remember and repeat it. Then she got hip to me and stopped playing, so I had to learn to read the notes. I played Bach and Chopin—classical music—and then I got a scholarship to a place called Chatham Square. It was at that time I realized I was never going to be a classical pianist and that I didn’t want to be one. I quit and started playing more on my own.

I was raised on Jackson Avenue in a three-story building that my grandmother owned. When it came time for junior high school, our neighborhood school wasn’t that great, so I was bused to Junior High School 22, which was a better school about fifteen or twenty minutes away. We were the first black students to go to that school so I felt a big responsibility because I was going to get this good education and I was going to represent the whole black race.
Don’t mess up now!
I wanted to do well. Nobody told me that, but I felt it on my own.

In that junior high school a lot of good things happened. They had musical programs, and when the teachers found out that I played the piano I got out of class a lot. That worked out really well for me. I was recognized for what I could do musically, and they made a way for me to do it. Some of the kids saw me get that special treatment, like getting pulled out of class, so I wasn’t exactly a favorite among my peers. I can remember almost getting into a fight with a girl because she thought I was stuck on myself, you know. Teacher’s favorite. The girl was bigger than me, so my younger brother, who was bigger than both of us, intervened and got me home.

Because I was such a standout in junior high school, when I got to high school I became almost like wallpaper. I disappeared. I didn’t want to be the one that got called out in that same way anymore, so I played very little piano in school in those days.

But I loved playing handball in the Morris High School yard, which was right across the street from us. I was really good at it. I’d hit those low balls, you know. I still have a great affection for handball even though I don’t play anymore. I play table tennis. I have a Ping-Pong table in my home that looks like a piece of art deco furniture and I’m real good at that game too.

One of my grandmothers was a minister and she gave me the job of being her church pianist. As a church pianist you come across many people who get up and sing but often start in one key and end up in another, so I learned how to follow. From that early training where the ladies get up with those big hats, full of the spirit and end up not where they started, I could play even if I didn’t know the song. My grandmother paid me to be the pianist. Even when she didn’t have enough money because the congregation was too small, she’d pay me from her own pocket. And she’d make sure she paid me what she agreed upon, because she said that a deal was a deal. She instilled certain values in me. A deal is a deal. Keep your word.

My grandmother was married and owned this house that we all lived in. I always liked the fact that although she was this minister when she came home she was the wife who cooked for her husband. She changed her roles and put on the hat that she needed to wear and didn’t have a problem with that. She didn’t have to be the head honcho at home. She was an interesting study for me to see—a woman who did many things and handled each thing in its place. Later on I could see how hard that was because some men might get jealous and not want a woman to be in control. She handled all of that really well.

It was through a church in Harlem, not my grandmother’s church, that I met Nick Ashford. He was homeless and had come to New York to make his fortune as a dancer, but that didn’t work out too well for him. He came to the church where he was told he could get a free meal. In addition to his dancing Nick wrote gospel songs, and since I played piano we were like a natural pair.

We all get honored in so many different ways as we go along, but the one that really got to me was when I was honored by the Bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr. to be part of the Bronx Walk of Fame. It touched my heart in a special way because it’s where we come from. It’s where we started. When I think that I represent the Bronx to such an extent that my name is on the Grand Concourse—that gives me a sense of real pride.

ARTHUR KLEIN

Pediatric cardiologist, president of the Mount Sinai Health Network

(1947– )

I spent a good part of my growing up listening to family immigrant stories—who brought whom to the United States, how they got there, how they ended up in the Bronx, which in those days they thought was nirvana. The immigrant stories always had adversity. There was suffering. There were bad times in Russia, and there were the Depression and the recessions when they finally got to the United States. But most of these stories were colored with humor. I think that was a very important cultural influence on me.