Selección de velocidad de corte constante, G96

The deLemos apartment remembered

Few remnants remain of the home [of] my great-grandparents. As newlyweds in 1897, Adolph deLemos (b. 1872) and Hannah Morris deLemos (b. 1876) moved into a brand new “railroad flat” on New York’s Upper East Side, in an area known as Yorkville. They lived there for the entire duration of their more than 55-year marriage. When Adolph died in 1953, his youngest daughter Norma deLemos Loeb, my paternal grandmother, and her family moved into the Yorkville apartment with Hannah.

The Loebs lived in the deLemos apartment with Hannah for the better part of a decade; it thus became known as “home”, perhaps more than any other place for Norma’s children, my aunt [Judy] and my father.¹After more than [sixty-four] years, my great-grandmother finally moved with my grandparents to another apartment in 1961 – less than a year before her death and only a few years before the Yorkville building was demolished in the mid–1960s. Today, a luxury high-rise apartment building stands in its place.

Having spent most of her adulthood in the Yorkville apartment, my great-grand-mother’s story is inextricably woven into the history of the apartment itself. In this paper, 94 Adina Loeb

2 Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café, in Charles Clerc and Louis Leiter (eds) The Ballad of the Sad Café: Seven Contemporary Short Novels, 3rd edn, Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1982, p. 118.

3 Ibid., p. 107.

4 All information on Turner’s liminality and communitas is drawn from Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974, Chapters 1 and 7, although he has written of the concepts in many of his writings.

5 Material on the actual history of porches is difficult to find, and most of what is available is impressionistic – as is this article. The most serious scholarship on the front porch as signifi-cant domestic architecture to date is a mere two pages by John Michael Vlach, in The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts, Cleveland, Ohio: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978, pp. 136–8, Vlach has carefully documented the African and Caribbean origins of the traditional American front porch. Ruth Little-Stokes reported the same origins in “The North Carolina Porch: A Climactic and Cultural Buffer” [in Douglas Swaim (ed.) Carolina Dwelling, Raleigh: North Carolina State University, 1978], but her essay is primarily interpretive.

Davida Rochlin’s essay, “The Front Porch” [in Charles W. Moore, Katheryn Smith, and Peter Becker (eds) Home Sweet Home: American Domestic Vernacular Architecture, New York:

Rizzoli, 1983] reports the social significance of American porches but eschews history. In his classic history of architecture, Sir Bannister Fletcher [A History of Architecture, 17th edn, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983] acknowledges the ancient European origins of the

“grand porticoes” and galleries of the early American Southeast, but porches per se are beneath his concern. Other sources have undoubtedly mentioned perfunctorily the appendages on American houses, but the architectural history of porches is most significant for its invisibility.

6 Mary Mix Foley, The American House, New York: Harper and Row, 1980, p. 163.

7 Russell Baker, Growing Up, New York: Congdon and Weed, 1982, p. 42.

8 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959, pp. 106–40.

I will attempt to reconstruct and analyze the physical space of the deLemos apartment, based on interviews [with] my aunt and my father. In my analysis of the deLemos apart-ment, I will attempt to piece together a plan and provide a sketch of space utilization, while at the same time giving a sense of the actual family life lived within that space. My project will pay particular attention to the use of space over time, with a special focus on my great-grandmother, who lived there longer than any of the other apartment inhabit-ants. This focus will lead to a close study of Hannah’s favorite space in the house, a chair at the living room window […]

[My thinking has been] colored by my father’s and aunt’s stories as well as by family photo albums. [For me], the indelible image of that vanished existence is that of my aging great-grandmother sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair, before the over-exposed white of an uncovered window. In more than one photograph, she sits facing the camera, her chair angled perpendicularly towards the window, so she could clearly view the bustle of Second Avenue below …

Located at 1677 Second Avenue between 86th and 87th Street, the deLemos home was a third-floor walk-up, three-bedroom apartment that stood in the heart of Yorkville.

This area of the Upper East Side, between 72nd and 100th Street to the east of Lexington Avenue, was particularly known for the large number of German immigrants who moved there from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s.²My great-grandparents were both German Jewish immigrants, who came to the United States during the 1880s as children, settling with their families in New York City. Though not specifically a Jewish neighborhood, many German Jews who came to America before the Nazi regime moved to German neighborhoods, such as Yorkville, where they could comfortably communi-cate in their native language and live within a culture familiar to them.³

The deLemos apartment building was one section of a block-long set of four-story buildings on the west side of Second Avenue, with six entrances and a continuous façade, giving it the appearance of a single building. Standing between street-level storefronts, each entrance led to a separate three-story apartment building starting one floor above the street level, with two apartments per floor, one on each side of a central stone-floored staircase. Airshafts on either side of the six buildings divided them from behind the street-facing façade.

[…] My Aunt Judy’s … first memory of her grandparents’ apartment is of “schlepping groceries up and down stairs”, to and from the third floor.⁴Although the kitchen was equipped with a dumbwaiter, it was used only for garbage by the time the Loebs lived there and is said to have had a terrible smell. Judy’s descriptions often deal with sensory impressions of remembered odors, the darkness of the rooms, the summer heat, and sounds within the apartment and outside. To Judy, the already compact apartment felt smaller because there were simply “too many people” living within its confines. […]

The division and use of space

To deal with the crowdedness of the apartment and accommodate a multiplicity of needs, the members of the family used its spaces in different ways. The division of space according to function was based primarily on temporal considerations. Rooms served different purposes at different times of day and night. The bedrooms, bathroom, and kitchen were more singular in purpose than the living room and dining room – notably the two largest rooms in the apartment. Moreover, the utilization of space depended on the generation. While my great-grandparents, who spent most of their time in the Excavation and reconstruction 95

apartment, had established territorial spaces in the living room and divided the use of space by gender when entertaining guests, my grandparents did not make such designa-tions [Fig. 12].

When asked where adults went for privacy, my father responds that there was no real privacy in the house. Yet certain times and spaces did allow for private moments.

Somehow, personal issues were resolved either in front of the family or in the quiet of night, the only time when the family members were in separate spaces.

[…] My father remembers that the living room had no door and [therefore] did not physically delimit a private space for his parents even during sleeping hours. However, Judy recalls that she and my father did not go into the living room at night, thus respecting the temporal privacy the space assumed.

Within the apartment, play, work, entertainment, and eating all took place in the shared spaces of the living room, dining room, and kitchen. The living room was the primary gathering space for the family, but much time was also spent at the dining room table, where they ate meals together … Phone conversations took place in the dining room, as the apartment’s only phone was located there. My father describes doing his homework at the dining room table and sometimes taking friends there to play board games. […]

For more active playing, my father would go to the urban outdoor playground of the street. Played on the three concrete steps of the building’s six-foot wide stoop, stoopball became a favorite, albeit dangerous, pastime alongside the busy traffic on Second Avenue. In the winter, my father and his friends used to chase trucks down the street and throw snowballs at them. He also frequently joined a larger group of boys on 87th Street for games of stickball.

[…] Most of my aunt and father’s memories take place in the multi-purpose space of living room, which, not coincidently, happened to be the largest room in the apartment.

This space is also of greatest interest to me because it served more functions than any other room. It was not only the main familial gathering space by day, for playing, reading, interacting, listening to the radio, and, later, watching the television, but the living room also served as my grandparent’s bedroom for a decade. […]

The living room and Hannah’s window

The living room was also the space where my great-grandmother spent her days.

White-haired and with wrinkled hands in the photographs we have of her in the apart-ment, Hannah sat at the living room window for as far back as my father and aunt can remember. From her space by the window, Hannah read the newspaper and met with friends, but mostly watched the goings-on of the people along Second Avenue and told stories about them.

Approximately three feet wide and six feet high, Hannah’s favorite window was the southernmost of two, cut into the east wall of the living room. Coming down nearly to lap level, the two unbarred living room windows, when opened, were the cause of considerable anxiety for Norma who worried about her children and elderly mother falling out. A [BB bullet], shot from the elevated train that once ran up and down Second Avenue, punctured a neat hole nearly at the center of each window. Long after the Second Avenue rail line was taken out in the 1930s, the small holes remained in the windows, never to be repaired.

Directly opposite the entrance to the room, Hannah’s chair stood near a stand-alone 96 Adina Loeb

wooden radio and a floor lamp, facing the sofa along the south wall, which doubled as my grandparent’s bed at night. Adolph sat in a chair immediately adjacent to Hannah’s, against the portion of wall between the two windows and facing west. When my father initially described the position of the chairs, I was surprised by their orientation:

Hannah, in fact, sat with her back to Adolph’s armchair. Though close in proximity, the chairs hardly encouraged direct conversation. My father remembers that his grandpar-ents did sometimes interact while sitting in their respective chairs, yet he does not recall much conversation between them nor either of them ever turning their chairs or bodies in order to face one another. Quiet by nature, my great-grandmother was also hard of hearing, which necessarily would have made extensive spoken conversation difficult.

While Adolph met with his friends or played cards in the living room, often “smoking cigars like a chimney”, my father explains that Hannah would often sit in her chair, some-times participating in their conversation but usually looking out the window. According to my father, she spent so much time at the window, Hannah “probably knew everybody in the street by sight”, whether she knew anything of them personally or not. Unsure if any of her stories were true, he recalls that Hannah’s tales were a creative and lasting source of entertainment … Not only did Hannah craft stories about the people she saw, but Judy recalls that her stories were ongoing, like the unfolding narrative of a novel. Of the various sequences, Judy remembers a tragic story of a sailor whose wife had died and who was raising his motherless children alone.

Women at windows: pastime, liminality, and power

Having lived there for more than a half century, my great-grandmother did in fact know many of the people who frequented her block of Second Avenue. For Hannah, the window was her portal to the outside world. As a young woman, she participated in that outside world, walking with friends, running errands, going to visit people in their homes. In her older age, however, as she became more feeble and her ability to walk more limited, Hannah spent increasingly more time by the window [Fig. 13].

Adolph, who remained active outside of the apartment, had relatively little interest in looking out the window. When at home, he was oriented towards home, as his chair and attention faced inward. Inside the apartment most of the time, Hannah, on the other hand, seemingly longed for greater contact with what existed outside. From her chair at the window, she interacted with the city below, mostly by watching the world of the street and creating a semi-fictional model of that world by crafting stories about what she saw.

Sue Bridwell Beckham, in her 1988 essay, “The American Front Porch: Woman’s Liminal Space” [this volume], examines the implications of the front porch for women in nineteenth and early twentieth century American culture. Beckham utilizes Victor Turner’s model of the “liminal state”, during which participants in a ritual are in a tran-sitional space that is “betwixt and between” two cultural states. […] While the interac-tion between a woman three floors above street-level and the world outside certainly had limitations, it was a space from which my great-grandmother remained connected to the life of the street. Even at the age when she could no longer frequent the city below, she often opened the window and called down greetings to friends or requests to relatives passing by.

My great-grandmother’s construction of this liminal space took place over time, the window ultimately serving as her enclosed urban front porch, a viewing space onto the Excavation and reconstruction 97

lives of those outside. Though indoors and therefore not in the semi-exposed position of an actual front porch, Hannah’s window functionally served as a front porch not only for viewing but also for participating in the life of the street.

Sometimes, my father, playing stoop-ball on the stairs of the front stoop or on his way home from school, would yell up to Hannah to check in and see if she needed anything.

Though hard of hearing, she would often see his approach, open the window and call to him, asking him to pick up bread or cakes from a nearby bakery or the like. Occasionally, Hannah threw keys down to friends or relatives, so they could let themselves into the apartment. My aunt also recalls that Hannah would often remind her from the window, as she left the building, to wear her scarf because of cold weather or to come back up to take an umbrella for a forthcoming rainstorm.

This use of the window as a front porch, overlooking and communicating with the street, was not unique to my great-grandmother. As my aunt explains, she and my father interacted from the street with cousins Willy and Hansie through their living room window as well. According to Judy, Willy worked for what became “Time-Life magazines or something”, and used to give them comic books. Judy remembers calling up to Willy and Hansie’s front window, and yelling, “Throw us something!” or “Throw us a joke book!” Their request was commonly met by a comic book flying out from the living room window down to my father and aunt below.

This kind of interaction was probably even more frequent in the early years of the apartment, when there were no buzzers to let people into the building electrically. My father recalls stories of Hannah using buckets to lower money down to street peddlers, who were selling goods from a carriage or pushcart. The peddlers would then take the payment and place the sold fruit or vegetables in the bucket for the family to pull back up to the apartment.

Hannah’s … framed vision of Second Avenue functioned as a source of unending enter-tainment. While there was eventually a television in the apartment, aside from a soap opera or two, Hannah hardly watched it during the day. Nor did she seem to listen to the radio.

Perhaps as a result of her poor hearing or simply a greater interest in seeing and partici-pating in the actual life unfolding on Second Avenue, Hannah found what seemed to be her greatest fascination through the somewhat removed view from the living room window. At night, when the excitement on Second Avenue diminished, Hannah would more frequently watch the television, always from her chair by the window.

Hannah’s window became a locus of controlled and empowered looking. From her chair, my great-grandmother not only commanded the view of the street and entryway to the building from the window on her left but also of the threshold to the apartment itself with a direct line of sight to the front door on her right. In her essay, “The Split Wall:

Domestic Voyeurism” [this volume] Beatriz Colomina examines a comparable viewing space in the raised sitting alcove of Adolf Loos’s Moller house. Colomina explains that the occupant of the couch placed against the window in this interior space is empowered to act as a sentinel of sorts, able to guard the space, [as] Hannah could, by detecting movement both at the threshold of the house outside and in the interior itself. However, Colomina argues that the covered window in the case of the Moller house is only a source of light, rather than a frame for a view outside, thus turning the eye of the occupant of the space towards the interior. I would suggest the opposite case for my great-grandmother, whose position would certainly allow for watching and participating in the interior space of the house, but whose gaze was nonetheless directed to the exterior.

[…] Hannah’s privileged position, with access to a view within the apartment and to 98 Adina Loeb

the outside, also recalls the empowered liminality of the portière in nineteenth century Paris, as examined by Sharon Marcus in Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nine-teenth-Century Paris and London [this volume]. Marcus explains that the porter’s lodge was a space at the seam of the Parisian apartment building, with visual access to both the public and private realms. From there the female porter possessed [a] certain power in her ability to act in that space as a mediator between the public street and private home(s)

the outside, also recalls the empowered liminality of the portière in nineteenth century Paris, as examined by Sharon Marcus in Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nine-teenth-Century Paris and London [this volume]. Marcus explains that the porter’s lodge was a space at the seam of the Parisian apartment building, with visual access to both the public and private realms. From there the female porter possessed [a] certain power in her ability to act in that space as a mediator between the public street and private home(s)