Advertisement
Published: April 24th 2012
Used to be Met Life
Now ??? Charles Schwab?This was our West and East Greenwich Village day. We started at 23
rdSt and Madison Ave, at Madison Square Park, just west of the old Met Life building, where I got my first full-time job in 1967 as a Management Trainee. We had to be in college taking 12 credits or more to keep the job, so after work I’d take the subway uptown to Hunter College. Met Life had a very structured workday. Arrival times were staggered, since all 18,000 employees showing up at once would overload the transit system. My hours were something like 7:42 am-4:12 pm with a half hour lunch. Met Life served employees free hot lunches in the basement cafeteria. Management trainees were also given half-day training in insurance once a week. It was a very workable system. At one point, I was asked to help the HR Dept. put a training program together for my unit, an experience from which I got a lot of satisfaction. But my interest in the insurance industry itself would have to be measured in negative numbers.
Gracie and I took the bus into the Village near Washington Square Park and the arch. NYU students were demonstrating the presence
of a vendor that gives money to anti-gay causes, and we stood with them for a while. The Brown Building around the corner was the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 people died, giving an impetus to the labor movement in America. Here’s the link to a 7-minute video about this tragic event, preceded by a short commercial.
The Judson Memorial Church has historical significance as having been designed by Stanford White with stained glass windows by John LaFarge, but its congregation has been in the forefront of social programs that were uncommon at the time, such as drug treatment in the 1950s, abortion accessibility when the procedure was still illegal, and AIDS research funding in the 1980s.
We wandered from there to Christopher Street and the site of the Stonewall riots. The little park now has bronze sculptures by artist George Segal of two gay couples. From there we went toward Bedford Street, passing on the way a locksmith’s shop that had an exterior wall covered with keys welded into impressive designs.
We walked through Bleecker St and down to St. Mark’s Place in the East Village.
“The Village” and “the East Village” have very different vibes, but neither Gracie nor I can articulate what those are. I always feel very happy walking in the East Village, though. Maybe it’s the funky shops and crowded sidewalks, and different music coming from every doorway; the vibrancy and evidence of individualism. Within a block we passed a thrift shop that caters to customers of the anarchist persuasion, an Indian store selling saris, a kosher bakery, a 1950s-style white-bread dress shop, a store that sells Icelandic mittens and hats, a shop that appears to deal in transvestitic accessories, and about six tattoo parlors.
We checked out the Ukrainian Museum, which had a few special exhibits going on, including one of Borys Kozarev, a multi-talented modernist who expressed his art in a number of media. Gracie also liked the rugs. I’m proud of the 25% of me that is Ukrainian, and I wanted a nice souvenir, but I couldn’t bring myself to buy a woodblock print of a beet, lovely as it was. And remembering my many failed attempts at pysanki, those intricately dyed easter eggs, I wasn’t going to fall for buying those supplies again.
We
took the el back to Astoria and found the house where my grandparents and their three children, aged 2 (Mary Ann), 1 (Kathleen, my mother) and infant (Eugene Bernard), were living at the time of the 1930 census. The house is still there, but we don’t know the apartment number because it wasn’t listed in the census. The house is fenced in, and seems derelict, so it may be getting prepped to be torn down. The address is 39-22 29
th St, Long Island City, two doors north of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. The photo below was taken today, 4/19/2012. The Fitzpatricks moved back to Manhattan shortly after the census was taken. I say this because my mother had no memory of living in LIC, just remembered having being told they did when she was a baby.
And thus another day ended for Mad Mama and the Boboszh.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.135s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 10; qc: 56; dbt: 0.0453s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
anonymous
non-member comment
Love the History
I'm appreciating learning about your early life in the big apple. I'm so jealous of Gracie that's she's getting to see it all first hand. Keep the memories coming! I've got to lobby though: More pictures of food!