"It takes a village"

“The saying “It takes a village to raise a child”: it was absolutely true in the Patterson Houses.” -Victoria Archibald-Good

Mike credits his grandmother’s “old values” to his success in Patterson, as well as all the community organizations he was able to take part in. He sang in his church choir, ran track, and would hang out at after-school programs where kids could play basketball until late.

“Most of us were enrolled in programs that occupied us from dawn to dusk.” Jones affirms. “We would go to school from 8 AM to 3 PM, then run over to the after-school center, where the boys played pool, table tennis, table hockey, and basketball, and the girls played music, danced, or made crafts.”

Having such programs offered youth in Patterson a bit of structure, but mostly they were places to explore their talents, build self-esteem, converse with friends.

Archibald fondly remembers “the camaraderie and the supportiveness and the nurturing that I got from not only my own family but from folks in the building who weren’t blood relatives…but they also let you know when you were doing something wrong. They didn’t hesitate to speak to you about dropping garbage in the hallway or talking too loud. All a neighbor had to do was say, “Don’t let me tell your mother.” That’s all it took for us to rethink what we were doing because we knew we were going to have some problems if they told our mothers. And usually they didn’t.”

Abner spoke of giving his old Easter clothes to kids who didn’t have any. Archibald remembers a girl who in her building who was unexpectedly orphaned, and “the whole project came together to make sure she had food and enough money to bury her parents. They took up a collection, and that was typical of what went on in Patterson. When somebody died, it was customary to bring a card with some money because people assumed there was no insurance.”

Though money was tight for many families in the Bronx at this time, the networks of support between friends and neighbors helped to create a kind of safety net for everyone.