A Few Minutes with the Mayor – by Paul Becker

This month, I ask your indulgence to wander a bit from my usual reflections over City happenings to devote some thought to… nostalgia. This idea came to me when I ran the movie, THE ROARING TWENTIES. In the film’s preface, the author wrote… “Bitter or sweet, most memories become precious as the years move on.” This film is a memory—and I am grateful for it. So powerful was it, that I was prompted to recall some memories of my own from that era.

I grew up with the people who came out of the aptly-named “Roaring Twenties.” Their children were the children of my generation. And, in the same way as Jimmy Cagney, the actor, I grew up as a tenement child on the streets of New York. Only the children in high rises missed that experience.

It’s quite an education. Cagney learned how to play gangsters by watching them in his neighborhood. I wasn’t so focused, though I saw gangsters… even having one offer to “take care” of somebody who had been harassing me. Managing to hold on to my coffee cup, I politely declined, resolving to put as much space as possible between him and me in the future.

With the end of Prohibition, many of the speakeasies it spawned disappeared. Those that survived became nightclubs, a source for daily gossip about supposedly important people by a new breed of reporter, such as Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist. His column was the most read in the nation. Today, we have People Magazine, but Winchell created the concept.

The floor shows in these watering holes never started before 9pm so people were out much later. At 4am, while on my newspaper route on the upper West Side in Manhattan, it was common to see lovely ladies in satins and furs with their tuxedo-attired escorts coming home. How elegant they appeared to me alighting from their taxicabs. My mother never owned a gown in her life.

Today, it may seem difficult to believe, but streets were generally safe in those days. Around the corner from our tenement, two young women who worked in those nightclubs would come home from work at late hours and never be bothered by the unseemly characters that seem to proliferate our big-city streets today.

It was a mixed Irish-Jewish neighborhood, but oddly enough I never met or knew of a Jewish cop… they were all Irish. They walked their beat so they knew everybody in the neighborhood. As kids, if we started to get in trouble, they would be quick to steer us on the right path, so I have had an admiration for police officers ever since. Indeed, I wonder if the rise in crime began when the cops stopped walking their beat and rode in patrol cars.

Finally, there is one memory I could never forget. My best friend had a sister. She was no ordinary girl… think Ginger Rogers. Every young male for blocks around were aware of “Ginger.” They would hang out around our tenement in the hopes of striking up a conversation whenever she appeared. Her effect on them was almost hypnotic. As for me… she let me know in no uncertain terms that even though her brother and I were friends, she saw no future in me. She was aiming higher… much higher. “Ginger” wound-up marrying a top surgeon fifteen years her senior and climbed out of our tenement neighborhood.

And that gangster I mentioned above? He was the surgeon’s cousin.

Posted July 4, 2013