Stuyvesant Town
For a “Reporter At Large” piece in the April 20 New Yorker, Berton Roueche visited the 60 acres of New York tenements and factories being cleared for Stuyvesant Town, three years after Mayor LaGuardia had announced the project. Since then, under its power of eminent domain, the city had evicted 11,000 residents of this 18-block, century-old working class neighborhood bordered by Fourteenth and Twentieth Street, First Avenue and Avenue C to allow Metropolitan Life to build a privately owned, high-rise project to house 13,000 middle-income residents. Metropolitan Life purchased an additional fifteen adjacent acres of industrial buildings from First Avenue to FDR Drive, from 20th to 22nd from Consolidated Edison for the non-subsidized, higher-rent Peter Cooper Village.
The evictions began in March 1945. According to Roueche’s article, about one-quarter of the buildings in the area had been demolished by early April in a random pattern, which gave the site the appearance of a war zone. Roueche wrote that all of the former inhabitants had departed from the site. This was not exactly accurate. According to newspaper reports, the last of the evicted families, Mr. and Mrs. Harry Delman and their ten-year-old son Gerald, vacated their apartment at 441 East 15th Street in May to take up residence in Parkchester, a Metropolitan Life middle-income project in the Bronx. The congregants of Christ Lutheran Church, short of the money they needed to build a new church, still were meeting in their sanctuary standing amid the rubble at 406 East 19th Street. They also left in May taking up a temporary home at the Presbyterian Labor Temple on Second Avenue and 14th Street.
On the west side of First Avenue, Roueche wrote, shoppers went about their evening errands and lights were on in apartment windows. On the east side of the street, the boarded-up shops were missing their plate glass, and the window panes on the floors above had been shattered to discourage squatters from settling into the vacated apartments. First Avenue had long been a dividing line. Until 1942, the Second Avenue El, ran down the middle, up to 23rd Street where it jogged over to Second. The area to the west of the El was a transition zone to a more affluent Manhattan. Inside the demolition site to the east, already being called Stuyvesant Town by many New Yorkers according to Roueche, feral cats, stray dogs, rats and derelicts had taken over. The derelicts, as well as sightseers and vandals, were a problem. Sixty watchmen, many of them newly returned vets, worked in three shifts to keep them out. The watchmen with the hardest jobs had the “bedtime shift” when unauthorized visitors were most likely to make their appearance. Neighborhood kids had broken bones playing in the rubble. Frequent fires had been a problem that previous winter, some of them serious. On Christmas Eve a blaze destroyed the old section of abandoned P.S. 104. A five-alarm fire swept through a six-story industrial loft on East 16th Street, followed by a three alarm at a former cigar factory on East 17th, a block from the East River.
Roeuche visited two of the watchmen in a guard shack set up outside a tenement at 16th and First. Pasquali was a middle-aged blond Italian who had been a tile setter until the war had brought a halt to construction. The other was O’Brien, a tall, tough young Irishmen who had served in the Merchant Marine, then worked as a bartender and bouncer at a bar in Jamaica, Queens, before taking this job. O’Brien wore a dark blue turtleneck, dungarees (which is what jeans were called back then) and a gray hat with its brim turned up in front and back and worn at an angle, much like Ed Norton in “The Honeymooners” on TV in the Fifties. He entered the scene singing “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” while Pasquali sat on a battered, backless chair. A small coal stove provided warmth in the chilly, early spring night and a kerosene lamp dangled from the ceiling. A print of a naked dancing girl that O’Brien had found in one of the tenements adorned a wall.
On his evening tour of the site, Roueche noticed the evidence of hasty abandonment. Faded pillows sat on windowsills. In another window, he saw an empty bird cage. A “Welcome Home, Frankie,” banner framed with cluster of faded red, white and blue streamers fluttered askew over one tenement doorway. A forlorn dog scratched at another, whining to be let in. Roueche witnessed several encounters with drunks, some of them violent. His guides took him into an apartment that squatters had furnished with castaway furniture. The watchmen told him of finding dead bodies that had been gnawed by rats. At Avenue C, he smelled the river hidden behind gas towers, the Con Ed plant and the Willard Parker Hospital, the best known of the three hospitals in New York at the time that had been set aside for the treatment of infectious diseases.
The decision by Robert Moses and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to tear down the tenements of the Gashouse and replace it with a privately-owned middle-income development set off a political battle. Moses and Mutual Life won and the evictions began as thousands of people, three churches, three schools and hundred of businesses were forced to move.