Displacement of European Residents
Never did I see nostalgia seize Tony so visibly as when he talked about the German Bakeries of his childhood: “Oh man, I just get crazy when I think about it.” His eyes glazed over and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he rubbed his stomach and licked his lips. “You think the crap that you bought across the street, at Dunkin Donuts, with no filling in it, and paid a dollar and ten cents, when you could get one German jelly donut, weighing a quarter of a pound, with more jelly in it than a dozen donuts in Dunkin Donuts for a nickel!” He talked about Italian Heros and Greek restaurants, too4. His Mott Haven was a multicultural one, certainly, but a very white one. According to the 1940 census – Tony was born in 1943 – the tract he lived in was 99.4 percent white12. In the ‘40’s, however, whiteness was not the singular, ethnic-inclusive catch-all it is today. The white Anglo Saxon people (WASP) were the upper-class whites, and the Jews, Germans, Irish, and Italians that migrated in a wave during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were somewhere along the way to shedding their stigma as second-class citizens. As Nina Bernstein puts it in her account of the reform of the discriminatory New York fostercare system of the ‘70’s, Lost Children of Wilder,
The immigrant poor of [the late nineteenth century] were overwhelmingly Irish Catholics. Between 1854 and 1860, an average of 69 percent of relief recipients and almshouse residents were Irish, as were half the residents in the city’s lunatic asylum and most of those in jail. In a period when African Americans did not figure at all in concerns about poverty, it seemed obvious to native-born reformers that Irish destitution and dependency were caused by deeply ingrained cultural shortcomings, if not by outright ‘racial’ inferiority.3
So what did the so-called white ethnics do to climb the social ladder? They climbed the economic ladder, assimilating the capitalistic mindset of turn-of-the-century, industrializing America. Blue-collar jobs were a dime a dozen for the residents of Mott Haven. “We had a brewery, we had tattoo factories, we had piano factories, we had paintbrush, furniture factories, we had dairy milk, we had Crystal Spring water, we had Coca-Cola, y’know, plants. So there was a variety of jobs,” said Tony of his neighborhood growing up. He goes on to say, “You never even had to leave the neighborhood. There was plentiful jobs within this neighborhood in the South Bronx when I was growing up. There was no reason to go down to Manhattan.”5 An interesting comment when viewed through the lens of a “spatial division of labor” that Doreen Massey authors: in the relationship between the stigma against white ethnics, factories, and physical distance can we observe an intention to segregate the working class in the South Bronx from the upper class living Downtown?10
For Tony’s family and friends, their timing was perfect. They came to the United States when “If you really wanted to work, there was no reason not to have a job.”5 When an influx of Puerto Ricans and African Americans to the South Bronx started in 1943, in a practical sense, it was prime time for Mott Haven’s residents to vacate, in the sense that they had been able to aggregate some wealth, and the city was on the brink of de-industrializing. Tony seems to play into this idea of the white ethnic population outgrowing the South Bronx: “We moved out because we got educated, our standards of living went up, our kids were going for better education – they were going to Fordham University, they were going to City College, they were going to Rutgers University”5 Perhaps Tony underplays the distaste that the South Bronx’s residents felt for the new second-class citizens of the day, and the way the development of public housing forcibly evicted many people from their long-time homes; after all he was only seventeen. Or maybe it is because he has gained perspective: he knows that the white ethnics – now just plain, old white Americans – came out on top. His people have joined the ranks of the middle and upper class, while the Puerto Ricans and African Americans who displaced them are now under threat of displacement themselves, and are only worse off for their time spent locked in the Bronx.