Introduction
Tony Dalton lives two blocks away from the five-bedroom apartment that he grew up in, but the South Bronx of his childhood is a world away. Nearly all of the landmarks that ground the stories of his growing up – his apartment building stuffed full of large Irish families like sardines, the adjacent Catholic school whose bell woke him up every morning, and the creek he used to swim and hunt for crabs in – have been swallowed up by forces which displace urban populations, and spit out, now unrecognizable. Tony’s childhood home is now a parking lot for New York City Housing Authority’s massive Mitchel low-income public housing project. St. Jerome, the Catholic school he used to attend, shuttered its doors recently due to financial issues – perhaps there are less Catholics in the neighborhood now and perhaps those that are nearby struggle to pay the price of admission. As for the creek where Tony learned to swim: now it’s a CubeSmart storage facility.
Something that surprised me initially is Tony’s complete lack of distaste with his own displacement from the neighborhood. He doesn’t harbor ill will for the city government which gave his family nearly fourteen times their rent of – prepare for a jaw drop – thirty-six dollars a month for their five-bedroom apartment. Nor does he begrudge the Puerto Ricans and African Americans that sent the medley of white European immigrants flying from Mott Haven. In fact, in line with the contemporary, popular narrative of displacement of urban residents, Tony empathizes with the people of color in the 50’s who were forced into the South Bronx, as Evelyn Gonzalez says, as “Early slum clearance in black and Spanish Harlem reduced the housing available to African Americans and Puerto Ricans just when they began arriving in greater numbers.” In a city segregated by redlining, “they had nowhere to go but along the subway and the el into the low-rent part of the Bronx, which … had the least desirable housing”.8 Also in line with the popular narrative of urban displacement is Tony’s vehement hatred of this new force of displacement in the South Bronx: gentrification. He scoffs at the luxury lofts which used to be warehouses for the many manufacturing businesses, and the Asian fusion restaurant that opened up recently: “The thing that’s pushing them out is the greed”4
Tony’s perspective on the world – his insistence on self-sufficiency and boundless empathy for those who live in the South Bronx now – does not resemble the doctrine of either major political party, the Catholic church to which he is devoted, or the capitalistically governed metropolis where he has lived his whole life. He has a dually straightforward and thoughtful conception of how a good life is lived: “The fact that you’re trying is doing, regardless if you succeed … we have so much emphasis on winning and success in this country, and nothing on trying. I take trying any day of the week.”4 His is a knowledge shaped by the pragmatic tradition, that to know is to have done, and he is a man who has always been doing. In every phase of his life he has had an exhaustive schedule, a disproportionate amount of which has been dedicated to helping others who are less fortunate – and working out, of course. At the age of seventy-four, Tony spends two hours a day on an elliptical machine, one hour doing back exercises, and however long it takes to swim around 200 laps. His physicality allowed him to build the gym at St. Rita’s Church where he worked with kids in Mott Haven after their school let out, and make the beds at the homeless men’s shelter him and two friends started.
From an early age, “working out was a way to release tension, give you security, give you independence”.4 These benefits of physical fitness have been central to Tony’s lifestyle from a young age, and they are missing from the lives of so many who live in the South Bronx today. It is hard to imagine there is much release of tension for those living in the sixteen-acre Mitchel project, packed with buildings ranging from seventeen to twenty stories, collectively housing some 4,000 residents.11 It is hard to image feeling secure financially – when the jobs disappeared from Mott Haven with a de-industrializing economy starting in the 1950’s – or physically – when “in the last three years, eight or nine gifted young women and men ready to go off to college … were killed by shootings they had nothing whatsoever to do with”.4 And perhaps most tragically in Tony’s eyes, it is hard to imagine acting independently, when a confluence of factors spell out immobility for residents of the South Bronx: “Graduation is low. Self-esteem is low. Prison rate is…” Tony trailed off, but the rate of incarceration is abysmal, at more than three times the city average.4, 9 And these factors are only compounded by the gentrification of Mott Haven: “You see things, and you can’t touch them. Especially, if a condominium over there is 250,000 dollars, you’re living in the Grant projects, you’re working in McDonald’s, you’re making minimum wage which is 7-75 an hour, some shit like that. You can never touch that.”
Tony didn’t hold his family and friends’ displacement against the people who moved into the South Bronx in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, because he saw the bigger picture. He saw the larger cause: the wave of capital that was sweeping up all of the working class together and trying to pull them down to the seafloor. Luckily for Tony, he has hundreds of thousands of laps under his belt, and luckily for the South Bronx, he has been more than glad to teach people how to swim.
