Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (xii)

In April and May of 1971, I also checked out some of at least two weekend street fairs/block parties that were held within walking distance of my Bronx slum apartment, which were sponsored by some of the local Catholic churches (to honor various saints) and the local small merchants/small shopkeepers in the neighborhoods. The street fairs nearer the Grand Concourse and Kingsbridge Road neighborhood seemed to be sponsored by some churches with mostly Irish-American Catholic parishioners and were held on weekend afternoons. There was some music playing in the background. But what I remember most about these afternoon street fairs were a block or two being closed to cars and the streets being filled mostly with culturally straight, family-oriented elderly and young adults who lived in the neighborhood, their children or neighborhood high school age teenagers and a lot of food vendors selling them food. Few single people or couples who were either college age students or people in their twenties without kids who looked culturally hip seemed to attend the afternoon street fairs which were being sponsored by the churches with the Irish-American parishioners.

A few blocks south of my apartment, on East 187th Street, east of Webster Avenue, was where the street fairs sponsored by the local churches with mostly Italian-American parishioners were held on weekend nights in April and May of 1971. These Saturday night street fairs in honor of some Saints were lavish street fairs and well-attended. The streets would be closed off to traffic for a number of blocks in the Belmont neighborhood, and rides like small ferris wheels would be set up in the street, along with a stage for street performers and musicians and singers. And set up by all the local small merchants on the street would also be booths which sold food and goods to the crowds of family-oriented parents, grandparents, children and high school-age teenagers who lived in the neighborhood and who apparently looked forward to hanging out for hours at these weekend night street fairs every year. Carnival-like booths, like those one might find at Coney Island, also were in the street, and people lined up to throw darts at balloons or balls into barrels or make some wager on a spinning roulette wheel in exchange for tossing in some money that would ultimately end up in the hands of one of the local neighborhood churches.

Not having grown up in the Belmont neighborhood like most of the other single guys my age who I noticed at the weekend night street fairs--and being one of the few long-haired, bearded hippies in the crowd that attended these events--I, naturally, didn't bump into anyone who seemed on the same cultural wavelength as me in 1971 at these weekend night street fairs. But hearing the laughter and observing the fun that most of the neighborhood people seemed to be expressing at the street fair--which seemed like a throwback to 1950s urban street life community culture--reminded me again that the 1960s and early 1970s TV images that assumed that most whites in the United States just lived in suburban neighborhoods whose streets were generally as deserted on weekend nights like the neighborhoods in eastern Queen that I had grown up in or the neighborhood in Indianapolis where I had lived for awhile when I was in high school in the Midwest, were not completely accurate.(Although to be fair to Midwest cities like Indianapolis, during the summer, at least, there were state fairs and county fairs held there on week nights and on weekends in the 1960s that were much more exciting than almost anything taking place on the same night on the streets of Long Island's suburban towns--even if Midwest towns couldn't offer its residents summer recreational hangouts during the summer like Jones Beach, Fire Island, Far Rockaway or Sunken Meadow State Park that Long Island provided its suburban residents during the daytime).

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (xi)

Being out of the 9-to-5 Writers Guild Office Boy cage during April 1971 also gave me the chance to get more of a sense of the Belmont neighborhood that immediately surrounded my $57/per-month slum apartment near East 189th Street and Cambreling Avenue.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Dion and The Belmonts--the vocal group that was from the Bronx's Belmont neighborhood and that took the singing group's name from the Belmont neighborhood--had become big stars in the pop music world. So, not surprisingly, when I would return home from my walks around the Bronx in March and April of 1971, I would often pass a group of different Italian-American working-class guys in their early 20s--most of whom were unemployed, returning Viet Nam veterans, who still lived wih their parents--singing a cappella the same hit songs of the late 1950s and early 1960s that Dion and The Belmonts had sung.

The guys all sang the late 1950s and early 1960s repertoire of Dion and The Belmonts quite well. And, not surprisingly, they all dressed similarly to how Dion and The Belmonts had dressed, although in a slightly more casual way, and did not have long hair and beards. But, because they had been in 'Nam, they did smoke pot by the 1970s. And, despite being mostly unemployed and still living with their parents, the guys who hung out singing on the corner also mostly owned their own cars.

Being a long-haired, bearded hippie in my appearance in April 1971, I, obviously, looked much less culturally straight than the singing guys on the corner in my neighborhood--none of whom had beards, all of whom had short hair and all of whom got carefully groomed haircuts when they regularly went to the barber shop. The Viet Nam Veteran guys in the neighborhood who sang Dion and The Belmonts songs also were still into clothes and dressing sharply and in a slick way, whereas a hippie leftist guy like me usually wore the same pair of blue jeans and some shabby T-shirt or sweatshirt every day, and had little interest in clothes in early 1971.

So eventually, the guys on the corner noticed me and seemed to be, temporarily, slightly curious as to what I was into. And when I was on my way back to my apartment one afternoon, one of the guys on the corner walked up to me and quietly asked: "Can I use your apartment to smoke a joint there?"

"Sure," I said with a smile. "Follow me."

After we walked into the apartment building, up the stairs and into my second floor 1 and one-half room slum apartment at the end of the hall, I noticed the guy from the street corner started to glance quickly around my apartment. But after he realized how little I possessed in the way of clothes, furniture and material possessions--and noticed that, instead of a stereo, I only owned a portable phonograph, and, instead of using a bed and chairs, I just slept and sat on mattresses that were on the floor, and that I didn't even own a television set--he didn't seem that interested in learning much about the philosophy behind my lifestyle of "emancipated poverty."

So by the time he had finished sharing his joint with me, he seemed to have concluded that if moving out of your parents' apartment in your 20s meant living with so little material possessions in a sparsely furnished neighorhood apartment as I did, there was nothing in my "emancipated poverty/hippy" lifestyle for him and the other guys on the corner who still lived with their parents to be particularly envious about or attracted to, in the early 1970s.

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (x)

If you walked across the Grand Concourse towards Jerome Avenue, north past Lehman College and northwest of Lehman College, you'd eventually reach both Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. In the early 1970s, there were still a lot of Irish-American working-class families living in the houses around Jerome Avenue, north of Fordham Road. And the apartment buildings around Van Cortlandt Pak in the eary 1970s also still contained both Irish-American working-class families and the familes of office workers of Jewish religious background.

So when I walked around these neighborhoods a few times on weekends in the spring and summer of 1971, I'd often see young Irish-American high school working-class women returning to their then-culturally straight parents' houses or apartments, after going shopping, eating in restaurants, going to the movies or hanging out in the playgrounds or in Van Cortlandt Park. And in both the playgrounds and in Van Cortlandt Park, in the early 1970s, fairly large numbers of Irish American working-class guys and culturally assimilated guys of Jewish ethnic background in their 20s could still be seen playing basketball or handball in the playgrounds, just hanging out in the playgrounds and playing softball in Van Corlandt Park in early 1971. Yet compared to the Upper West Side, the Lower East Side or most campus towns of the early 1970s, the neighborhoods around Van Cortlandt Park and north of Fordham Road near Jerome Avenue seemed to have changed very little, culturally, from what they had been like during the early 1960s--except for the probability that more of the guys in their 20s who were hanging out in the playgrounds, besides still drinking beer, probably also smoked more joints now than did their counterparts in the early 1960s.

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (ix)

Walking north and northwest from my East 189th Street apartment in the Bronx for a long time one afternoon in April 1971 eventually brought me into the southeastern area of Yonkers and the eastern side of McClean Avenue. Walking west on McClean Avenue, the neighborhood began to look familiar, since, when I was a child in the 1950s, my parents had often driven through the same neighborhood whenever we visited one of my uncles and his family, who owned a house whose backyard was adjacent to the New York Central (later owned by Penn Central, ConRail and then MetroNorth and Amtrack) railroad tracks. In the early 1970s, all the streets and houses looked a lot smaller to me than I had remembered them being during the 1950s. The circular drive on which the front of my uncle's house was located, for example, seemed to now have a much smaller circumference than it had had when I was a little kid.

Although I walked by my uncle's house where I had played around in as a child on numerous weekend visits, whenever my father chose to drag his wife and two kids to spend the afternoon with his older brother and sister-in-law, I did not ring the bell or knock on the door of my uncle and aunt to say "hello." By early 1971, my uncle and aunt in Yonkers realized that I had rejected nearly all of their culturally straight, materialistic, lower-middle-class values and, despite having gotten good marks in the public school system, I did not now look like I was going to become a lawyer, medical doctor or an accountant and become very rich in monetary terms. And by early 1971, I, in turn, felt very distant from them on a political, philosophical, cultural and personal level. On issues like white racism, they seemed very backward politically and morally; and they seemed like they would be very much opposed to the kind of revolutionary change in the United States that I was hoping to try to help create in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 21st century.

So despite the fond childhood memories from the 1950s that I had of my uncle and aunt who lived in Yonkers, I quickly walked by the 1920s-built house where they still lived that they had purchased and moved into from the South Bronx in 1949. And I only saw and spoke to them on two more occasions in the early 1970s when they were both still alive: once, when they visited my parents' apartment in Queens when I also happened to be visiting there; and on the day and evening of my mother's funeral. 

Aside from seeming smaller to me than it had seemed when I was a kid, Yonkers in the early 1970s still looked pretty much the same, on the surface, as it did in the 1950s. It did not seem to have been affected very much by any of the 1960s social, cultural, and political turbulence; and it still seemed culturally straight, although it's possible that there had been some kind of urban rebellion incidents and some kind of local Civil Rights Movement protests in the African-American section of the town at some point during the 1960s or summer of 1970.

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (viii)

Around the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road there were at least three movie houses in the Spring of 1971. And it was in a movie house on the Grand Concourse in April or May of 1971 that I first saw the movie Catch 22. Around the same time, on a Saturday night, I also saw Costa Gavras’ Z movie and the movie about a police cover-up and police corruption in Italy during the late 1960s, Investigation Of A Citizen Above Suspicion. Since the Bronx movie house was filled to capacity on the Saturday night I saw Z and Investigation Of A Citizen Above Suspicion, and most of the audience consisted of culturally straight white working-class residents from the Bronx neighborhood who were over 50 years old, I mistakenly assumed that even the Hollywood film distributors were now going to be willing to market politically radical films in the 1970s; and that this was an indication that, if even Hollywood was recognizing how politically corrupt the System was, Revolution was still going to happen in the 1970s, as quickly as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin had indicated it was going to happen.

Yet when I heard Jerry Rubin speak at Fordham University one afternoon before an anti-war student group in the student union building on Fordham’s Bronx campus in early May of 1971, Rubin seemed less upbeat about the prospect of Revolution happening quickly in the USA than he had been during the previous academic year—despite the fact that his follow-up book to Do It!—the book We Are Everywhere—had just recently been published.

Observing that, for the first time in four years, there had not been a “spring anti-war offensive” by U.S. anti-war students on U.S. campuses in the Spring of 1971, Rubin attributed the relative U.S. campus calm during the 1970-1971 academic year to “the four deadly bullets at Kent State.” In Rubin’s view, although anti-war yippies were “everywhere” in 1971, the realization that Pig Amerika was willing to kill its own white children rather than end its war in Indochina had scared large numbers of the rebellious white students of the 1969-1970 academic year from continuing their rebellious anti-war activism on campus during the 1970-1971 academic year, in the aftermath of the Kent State and Jackson State Massacres.

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (vii)

When I wished to mingle more with people in April and May of 1971, I would walk west along Fordham Road, past Webster Avenue and then to the Grand Concourse and towards Jerome Avenue. Sometimes I would take a left and walk south on University Avenue towards the NYU Uptown campus in the Bronx, which still hadn’t yet been sold to CUNY and renamed Bronx Community College, and stop at a local branch of the New York Public Library around there. A few times I walked around the NYU Uptown campus, but I can’t recall talking with anybody there or noticing any political activity going on there in the Spring of 1971.

Near West 184th or West 183rd St. and the Grand Concourse, however, there was still some kind of a Movement storefront run by a collective of a few ex-New Left student radicals who had joined either SDS’s Weatherman faction for a short time, before it disappeared into the underground, or PL’s SDS Worker-Student Alliance faction. I stopped in there once and spoke with a white Movement woman in her mid-20s who was staffing the storefront that day.

She seemed to be anti-war and socialist in her politics and someone who would be considered physically appealing by most men. But by June of 1971 she seemed to have gotten discouraged about the possibility that ex-New Left student radicals like her were going to be able to have much success interesting anybody in the Bronx neighborhood surrounding her collective’s storefront in getting involved in the Movement. And she seemed to be on the verge of burning-out herself as an activist.

Not feeling any personal warmth or enthusiasm radiating from her in the storefront, I wasn’t tempted to volunteer to work politically with her collective in the Bronx in June of 1971. In addition, by June of 1971, I was starting to worry again about where I would get some more money to survive economically during the Summer of 1971, and I did not feel the gradualist approach to building a Movement, that her collective still seemed to be into, would provide any kind of relief to my developing personal economic survival problems, as the Summer of 1971 approached.

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (vi)

Sometimes I would continue walking eastward on Pelham Parkway, a few blocks east of White Plains Road. But if I wanted to explore the neighborhood much further east on Pelham Parkway, I would usually wait till the weekend and just hop on the bus that took you to Pelham Bay Park, and look out the bus window at the culturally straight people, walking out of the culturally straight-looking Pelham Parkway apartment buildings and houses to get into their cars, go shopping or enjoy the springtime weather on the weekends. On a few occasions, both during the week and on weekends, I would spend some time walking north on White Plains Road, under the elevated IRT line tracks, to explore the Allerton neighborhood—which I later learned was apparently not far from where Stokely Carmichael a/k/a Kwame Ture lived when he attended the Bronx High School of Science in the late 1950s as a teenager, before later enrolling at Howard University during the early 1960s. But I can’t recall ever talking with anyone during my walks along White Plains Road, north of Pelham Parkway, during the spring and summer of 1971.

When I returned to my apartment from walking eastward, I would often take a return route that led me through the Bronx Park forest area that surrounded the Botanical Garden area which was both north of my apartment and adjacent to the back of Fordham University’s campus. By 2:30 in the afternoon during the week and all day on Saturday and Sunday in the spring and summer of 1971, Bronx Park would be filled with enough people sitting on blankets with their children or with their friends, walking around and enjoying the green park space, making out with their boyfriend or womanfriend, enjoying the sun, picnicking, reading (or studying if they were Fordham students), so that you usually never felt there was much risk of being ripped off there.

If I had a small paperback book in my pants pocket (or was carrying a small knapsack with a hard-cover library book in it) during the spring of 1971, and the spring weather and air was giving me spring fever and making me feel I just wanted to sit outside in a lazy way and spend a few hours reading on the park grass, I would sometimes pretend that the Bronx Park and the Bronx Botanical Garden was my estate, while stretching out on the lawn and reading book. Feeling lucky that I wasn’t wasting the nice spring day during the weekday afternoon having to be stuck in a 9 to 5 wage-enslavement cage.

I can recall spending a few hours reading one of the volumes of Simone De Beauvoir’s autobiography stretched out on the lawn of the Bronx Park in April or May of 1971 on one of these beautiful spring days. Around the same time I also was reading her The Second Sex book, so my political and intellectual consciousness became even more feminized in a more deeper way than previously by the spring of 1971—many years before most of the male chauvinist, middle-class academics at the various patriarchal elite U.S. corporate universities finally learned in the late 1970s which politically correct words needed to be used, in order to shield themselves from being criticized by the middle-class feminist liberal academics for not having enough of a feminist intellectual consciousness.