2006.002

Staff / Collected by

Collected by Staff

Museum Collection.

Fretz, Sada

2006 - 2006

Date(s) Created: 2006 Date(s): 2006 Level of Description: Item

Notes: COMING TO HOBOKEN BY SADA FRETZ [Section 1] First Impressions "Hoboken! You're moving to Hoboken?" Our suburban neighbor was not merely incredulous. He seemed downright offended. The man had grown up in Hoboken, and when Curly and I said yes, we were looking for a house there, he stood up from his perpetual lawn trimming and stabbed the air in our direction with his garden shears. "Do you know how long I had to save," he shouted, "to get out of Hoboken?" Our friends, once they realized we were serious, were more polite. But they too seemed to question our stability. Some of them commuted to New York, as we did, and knew Hoboken as the crotch of bistate transit, where residents of greener places transferred from their cars and trains and noxious diesel buses to the PATH tubes that ran beneath the Hudson River to Manhattan. Twice a day tens of thousands of us speed-walked through the Erie Lackawanna terminal, an impressive Beaux Arts structure that is now a national landmark. Today commuters stand in line for monthly tickets under a Tiffany stained-glass skylight that takes up a dazzling 2500 square feet of the stately waiting room's elaborately plastered ceiling. But then the skylight had been painted black since World War II, and anyway commuters on their lemming marches scarcely saw the building under decades of accumulated crud. What people did see as they approached the station were a grimy railroad yard, a potholed road, and across the road a stretch of dying factories and rubble-strewn vacant lots. The first realtor we saw couldn't believe us either. "A house in Hoboken? Do you want it for investment purposes?" At that time, in the early 1970s, almost every rowhouse block we walked contained at least one building with the door and windows boarded up. Some blocks seemed half deserted. More people had been moving out than in for half a century, and most newcomers were still immigrants-or, by then, islanders from Puerto Rico-who saw Hoboken's cheap flats as the first step on their way up and into the real America. To make the return trip from grassy Republican suburbia seemed nuts. Our future neighbors weren't encouraging. The women in dusters who stood watch on their stoops took sour pleasure in informing us that Hoboken, once a lovely town, had been "going down" for decades, and that we newcomers were mistaken if we thought we could reverse the slide by planting trees or restoring crumbling facades. "We had trees once, all up and down the street," a hefty fiftyish bleached blond in fat pink hair curlers told us as we peered past a "for sale" sign at the patched cement and peeling paint next door. "But right behind the trees came dogs and caterpillars, swahms and swahms of caterpillars. Ugh, it was awful! So the neighbors all went in together and got rid of the trees. No, no one wanted to keep them. Now you say the city's giving out free trees again? It won't work, wait and see. They'll just come and swing on the branches, snap them right off." It wasn't clear from the rest of her diatribe whether "they" were children in general, Puerto Ricans ("that element"), or the dogs and caterpillars of the infested past. None of this deterred us. Having lived at nine addresses in five states during eighteen years of marriage, we took a perverse pride in settling in a place the natives had given up on and the rest of the world knew chiefly as a one-word joke. Of course that wasn't why we moved, or not entirely. We were both tired of commuting on the weary Erie railroad, with its un-air-conditioned cars and unexplained long stops on the way home that last hot summer. But rush-hour driving to New York was not an option, especially for me. I drove before we moved; I had to; but I have always feared and hated cars for all the different kinds of damage they're to blame for. So when I found a square-mile city where I could get around on foot or hop a PATH train for Manhattan, I was home free. As for Curly, it was Hoboken's wall-to-wall waterfront bars that first lured him out of the station. He had finished up his engineering degree at Cooper Union night school in Manhattan; and on his way home he often waited for his train, and sometimes missed a few, in the old saloons along what sailors and longshoremen knew for generations as Hoboken's Barbary Coast. "If I were a writer," Curly used to say, "I'd write a novel about the tough old dames who run those waterfront bars. I'd call it 'Harpies of the Shore.'" He wasn't a writer; he just liked the phrase, had kept it in his head since memorizing Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Old Ironsides" in high school. And he was through with school some years before we thought of moving here. But he wasn't through with bars. And though the Barbary Coast establishments had since been torn down for a drab highrise development, Hoboken was still a bar town. Life would be simpler, Curly felt, if he could just walk home after knocking down a few. The idea probably struck him in the sixties, when we read in The New York Times of artists moving to Hoboken's cheap cold-water flats above the Barbary Coast dives. We weren't artists, any more than Curly was a writer, and we were surely not inclined to live without hot water over sad saloons. But a few years later when The Times ran a feature on home buyers discovering the square-mile city's cheap Victorian brownstones, I agreed to take a look. To be fair, it wasn't just the beer that Curly found alluring. The river had a pull on both of us. We had both grown up in gritty river cities, he on Detroit's East Side where, he said, the kids really did say, "Let's go down to the river and slug rats"; I in Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a thousand miles from Hoboken and so many miles from anywhere that the U.S. Congress long refused to fund a canal there because, said early nineteenth-century Congress member Henry Clay, it was a place beyond the moon. But it wasn't too remote to be polluted. On the banks of the St. Mary's River, near where Chippewa and voyageurs once shot the rapids in birchbark canoes, a Union Carbide plant spewed soot that kept our snow a dusty black from first fall to slushy spring. Fumes from another river-powered industry, a leather tannery, would periodically flood the air with a revolting stench. Still, I remember waking up to the river: sitting up in bed to watch the ore boats gliding past between a narrow park on our side and our twin city, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, across. As children my sister and I tobogganed in that park and cartwheeled through the rainbow-colored spray of a fountain near the famed Soo locks. I learned my alphabet, or some of it, from the long ships' smokestacks-to this day "H" stands not for "hello" or "house" or "hand" but for the Hutchinson line-and at night I fell asleep to the comforting low moo of foghorns and ships' whistles signaling for passage through the locks. By the time we started looking in Hoboken, its industrial waterfront was fast becoming history. For a hundred years or so the city's mile-long stretch of shipyards, piers, and drydocks had employed skilled craftsmen in shipbuilding and repair and kept unskilled workers by the tens of thousands busy loading and unloading cargo. During both world wars the shipyards operated round the clock, and millions of our country's troops embarked for Europe from Hoboken piers. (Hence General Pershing's famous promise to his troops in World War I that they would be in "Heaven, Hell or Hoboken by Christmas.") In peacetime, immigrants from Europe had got off the boat in Hoboken, and tourists bound for Europe boarded luxury liners from the same docks. It was from Hoboken that President Wilson set off with his Fourteen Points to forge the Peace of Paris. But now, we knew, the liners and the cargo ships were gone. The only motor humming round the clock belonged to Maxwell House, and that was not a sign of shift work. Since the thirties Maxwell House had processed coffee in a complex of art deco buildings just above Eleventh Street; and its landmark neon sign still beamed across the Hudson, a giant glowing cup forever tipped and spilling out that Good Last Drop. In fact we would be waking up to smell that roasting coffee for another twenty years or so, but even in the seventies the work at Maxwell House was winding down. Still, it wasn't jobs that we had come for, and the river wasn't going anywhere. We could fancy living nicely in a brownstone like those featured in the paper. And I can't pretend the artists that we read of didn't give the grime an aura of bohemian allure. As it turned out it was one of those artists, a droll and witty storyteller who would come to captivate the whole Fretz family, who pretty much clinched my decision. I was working then as juvenile editor of Kirkus Reviews, a subscription book review read mostly by librarians. My title notwithstanding I was essentially a drone, charged with writing short reviews of hundreds of new children's books each year. It was an okay job. It suited me to sound off with my reactions to the books. But there were so many of them, and so many of the many were so dull and flat and simpy, that I started having nightmares about floods and landslides made of gooey stuff called namby-pamby pap. It was coming at me fast, with elves and fairies somehow prancing on the waves. (I'm not making this up.) But among the new works that caught my fancy were some doodle-y little picture books and offbeat but empathic stories by a new guy with the unlikely name of Manus Pinkwater. (For his readers who might wonder at the given name, let it be said that he'd soon change it to Daniel in compliance with a self-described "non-religion" called Subud.) So when I read on one book jacket that he lived in Hoboken, I broke a self-made rule against kid-lit hobnobbing and made a point of going to a meet-the-authors party thrown by his publisher. It was easy to spot Manus in the crowd. He was standing in the center of the room and he must have weighed at least 300 pounds. His wife Jill was beside him-she had a teenage cookbook in the works with the same publisher-and she was fairly hefty too, though nowhere near his order of magnitude. I still remember walking through the door, still see the two of them, and only them, in bright relief, while the other authors and reviewers and the people hosting the event fade into drab clusters round the edges of the room. I picked up a glass of wine and headed for the Pinkwaters. When I told them I'd come expressly to meet them and get their take on Hoboken, I saw them light up to their favorite subject. Their editor edged away unnoticed and the three of us stood, wine glasses in hand, while the party waxed and waned around us and Manus sounded forth on the exasperating urban village that had provided so much grist for his wiggy anecdotes and children's fantasies. Now and then Jill interrupted him, or he her. At one point he clapped a hand over her mouth, determined that he'd be the one to tell the story his way. She seemed to accept that. I suspect that Manus had been honing his Hoboken stories since the late sixties, when he first crossed the river from Manhattan to create prints and sculpture in a sixty dollar loft above a Hudson Street saloon. But by the time I met him he had given up the fine arts to do children's books, and he was living in his own loft building, purchased with some kind of relocation grant he came by when the Barbary strip was bulldozed. Yet he still told stories of that first cheap space and all the wild musicians who came with the neighborhood. Days, he said, he could look out across a littered courtyard at a bunch of hippie squatters, mostly rock musicians, tending marijuana plants in their rear windows. Nights, another bunch, a no-talent rock band, played all night at top volume in the saloon downstairs. I have only a dim memory now of his descriptions of the characters he claimed as neighbors near his new space. I think one sold mail-order weapons. Another, if I've got it right, trapped cockroaches to feed his pet tarantula. It's the drinking water, Manus said at one point, that made these people so eccentric, out of step, unruly. "What Hoboken needs," he added later, "is for every resident to spend a year, or two years, somewhere else. Anywhere else." Of course, if that ever happened Hoboken would no longer be the place he mined so gleefully for stories. Jill told about her dealings with a shifty plumber. "Trust me," he kept saying. "I knew your father." (Jill grew up, I believe, on Long Island.) And she told of going to the Board of Ed to ask about a teaching job. The Hoboken schools were then so desperate for special reading teachers they were hiring applicants without credentials, and Jill had an NYU master's degree in the subject. But the woman at the front desk screened her out with just one question: "Who sent you?" "No one sent me," Jill said. End of story. She filled out an application on the spot, but without a godfather in the system she was never called in for an interview. It seems they didn't know her father after all. I could have stood and listened for another hour, but the crowd had thinned and now the bartender was packing up. "See for yourself," Manus called as I was leaving. "Come over with your husband Saturday. We'll give you a tour." So that Saturday Curly and I rang the bell to the Pinkwaters' third-floor loft in their five-story building just across the street from the PATH entrance. It was a great, expansive space, and they couldn't have been closer to Manhattan without getting wet. I learned later that the New York art critic Hilton Kramer had been a tenant in the building in the early sixties. Who knows how Manus's career might have developed had they overlapped? As it was, he and Jill rented out three floor-through lofts to artist friends and kept the street floor for their own dog training business. Their own dog could have used more lessons. When we went through their apartment door that first time I was all but knocked back down the stairs by what both owners insisted was a friendly greeting from a huge Alaskan malamute named Arnold. My legs were scratched and my skirt ripped, but no one seemed to think much of it. So I went on in and met a second malamute and Jill's two cats. While I took in the bare-brick walls and wicker furniture and lush green hanging house plants overhead, a tenant, Don Yee, came to the door and Manus asked him in to say hello. "You'll be reading about him pretty soon in Wingman," Manus said, and he read us some bits from his completed manuscript. The book begins with the boy Donald (Ah-Wing at home) escaping his miseries at school by playing hooky to read comics high in the girders of the George Washington Bridge. "All true," said Manus. (The fantasy, of flying over China with a Chinese superhero, would come later.) Don didn't say much but confirmed that it was his story. In fact, though this wasn't in the book, Manus told us that Don had paid his way through college by mortgaging his outstanding comic book collection. When Don left, Manus took us to his car, a converted checker cab he seemed quite proud of. He drove us up and down the nearby avenues-Hudson, Bloomfield, Garden, Park, the only ones deemed worth buying on back then -while Jill warned us off the numbered cross streets (small houses, no back yards), cautioned against fake brick facades (they could be covering frame firetraps, she said), and pointed out the raucous corner bars we wouldn't want for neighbors. "And now," said Manus, "I'll show you the most beautiful art in Hoboken." We drove way uptown, past the old Tootsie Roll factory, now a warehouse where Macy's artists worked all year creating the balloons and floats for the store's Thanksgiving Day parade. But that wasn't the art that Manus had in mind. From there he swung a little south and west and stopped the car outside the factory yard at Ferguson Propeller works. There we sat a while just gazing at the huge new ships' propellers gleaming in the sun, as graceful and sublime as anything in MOMA's sculpture garden. There was one more attraction to check out. The Pinkwaters' drove everywhere-I suppose he needed wheels to drag that weight around-but when we left them near the station the two of us decided to walk north along the waterfront to see if we could get down to the river. The notion seemed to shock a white-haired woman we helped over to a bus with all her shopping bags. "It's worth your life to go down there after dark. Broken beer bottles everywhere!" But then that same woman, when I asked for conversation's sake if she'd been shopping in New York, said "Ooh, I never go there. I was almost mugged once in New York, right near the Ninth Street tubes stop." Anyway it was then well before dark, so we took her cue to stop for cold beer at a package store and started off up River Street. There were sidewalks on the first four blocks but no pedestrians in sight. The old bars and tenements that had at least brought people to the street were gone, the Marineview towers weren't yet open, and the parking structures, I think, yet to come. (Not that they would add much life to River Street.) "Right about there is where I used to fuel up for the train ride home," said Curly, pointing, but all I saw was a weed-grown vacant lot. Across the street, on the river side, the Port Authority shipping piers I knew from On the Waterfront still sat behind their tall black iron fence. There was the shapeup yard where dockers fought for chits to work…the floating shack where Johnny Friendly barked his orders…the enormous shed where Marlon Brando's Terry led the men to work in the finale-and where real longshoremen had done real work for generations. But now the whole facility was still as ghosts. What had happened here in twenty years? "One word, containerization," Curly explained. Around 1960 the industry had started packing cargo in huge steel boxes that machines could lift from ship to truck or back the other way. This cut down on pilferage and labor costs, but both the boxes and the trucks required so much storage and maneuvering space that Hoboken's piers were rendered obsolete. But now it seemed another mob controlled the docks. While we stood looking through the fence a pack of ornery and unkempt dogs came snarling, barking, jumping up on the black iron bars. Curly said they were not Port Authority guard dogs, though they might as well be, but feral dogs who lived out on a pier. In any case there'd be no getting to the water here. So we kept going, in hopes of gaps or breaches further on. We swerved east with River Road at Fourth Street where the sidewalk ended, so when a car went by we had to sidestep onto narrow strips of weed and rubble that ran sometimes on one side of the road, sometimes on the other. But pretty soon a snatch of Latin music and a whiff of roasting meat came wafting from an old abandoned dock site. The spot was no Caribbean beach, but as we came near we saw a dozen or so transplanted islanders who seemed content to make do. Men who must have grown up near cleaner waters fished from a decaying wooden pier. Two couples danced to scratchy radio on crumbling concrete decking near the water's edge. And on a ring of lawn chairs near the road a family that looked well fed already attacked grilled sausages and beer and soda with appetites you'd think they'd worked up battling the surf. While we stood looking for a way in, two guys with sixpacks who'd been working on their cars showed us where to duck through gaps someone had cut in the old wire fencing. From there we easily stepped over rotted railroad ties and rusty spikes and, sure, broken beer bottles, to uncap our own beer bottles on the rocks that jutted from the river. So when we saw a realtor's office on our way back near the station, we didn't have to talk it over, just turned in. Which is how we wound up talking to the guy who took us for potential slumlords. "A house in Hoboken? You want it for investment purposes?" "No," I said. "To live in." He didn't seem to get it, so Curly added: "We're interested in moving to Hoboken." The realtor, a paunchy and slow-moving guy in sour middle age, shook his head and said with a great show of scorn, "You must have been reading the New York Times." He finally told us he would call if anything came up, but I was not surprised when nothing did. Still, Hoboken kept turning up. In a doctor's waiting room I picked up a New Jersey magazine and found a piece by Don Singleton, a Daily News reporter who had bought a brownstone there a few years earlier. He and his wife Maureen were so happy with their new urban-village lifestyle that she acquired a real estate license in order to share the find with others like themselves. The old style realtors, they'd decided, didn't realize what they had. I called Maureen that day. Sure, she said, she'd line up some homes to show us. She went on a little breathlessly about the "media people" who were moving in, attracted by what she called Hoboken's "funky" charms. One couple was converting an old church. Another newcomer would be opening a shop, "The Jeans Scene." She made all this seem hip and happening, in keeping with the aspirations of the time. In the next several weekends, with Maureen or with another of the younger realtors she passed us on to, we saw a dozen houses, at least from the outside. We didn't bother to go inside a shabby redbrick on a block the agent himself said was flood prone. We whipped through just the parlor floor of one on downtown Hudson Street: a smelly, dark, cold-water former rooming house that had been stripped of mantles and partitioned off into a maze of cubicles with sinks in odd locations. The salesman rattled on about another client who had pulled up worn linoleum "just like this" and found good parquet floors; but I was sure this place would yield up only endless layers of grubbier linoleum. There was one gem, for someone who could take it on. It belonged to a woman in her nineties who'd just been packed off to a nursing home after living her whole life in the same house. On the parlor floor, still filled with her parents' Victorian furniture, every inch of wall and ceiling was ornately plastered, painted, gilded, or embossed. Archways were embellished overhead with intricate carved wooden lace, work the Old-House Journal would identify as fretwork, grilles, or spandrels, maybe all three. But even if you took to the decor you'd have a monster fixup job. Upstairs I walked across rain-damaged floors and looked up at blue sky through big holes in the roof and ceiling. Below on the kitchen level an old black coal stove stood on a bare dirt floor. How recently, I wondered, had the old lady cooked on that? Was she aware that the dirt floor was strewn with mouse droppings? Once outside and gulping air, I asked myself another question: Could it be that I was not cut out for brownstoning in Hoboken? Then Maureen called with a new listing on a "good" uptown block. It was a good house too, with original wedding-cake plaster moldings and what the listing sheet described as excellent new mechanicals. Too good, it turned out. We looked, we gulped, we made an offer, then found another broker's client had outbid us. Instead of being disappointed, though, I realized that I felt relieved. I still can't say if it was cold feet about Hoboken or just doubts about my bonding with that ornate molding. Yet perversely, losing that one set us up for the next: the patched and peeling number next door to the blond tree hater (I'll call her Rose), on a merely middling block on midtown Bloomfield Street. Why did we go for this one? I heard no chiming bells or inner voices shouting "This is It." I think I was just tired of all the looking and deliberating. But the house was a wide one; we would stucco the façade a brownstone color; and the sellers hadn't been there long enough to muck up all the graceful nineteenth-century features. As for the mechanicals, we knew they would require some investment, but we didn't realize how much cash and fortitude we'd need. Besides, Maureen had news: The city had a program that would help with the mechanicals. She took us to an agency called HIP, for Home Improvement Program, that could set us up with a federally guaranteed loan. (The guarantee was crucial, since banks had redlined the entire city and owners were abandoning their property as not worth keeping up.) Better yet, a federal subsidy reduced the interest on the loan to three percent from the prevailing twelve percent. And if perchance your grandmother died and left you just the right amount to pay for the improvements, you could go through the motions anyway, pay back the loan straight off, and still collect the interest differential, in a check for-well, in our case, seven thousand dollars. (Remember this was back when a spacious but neglected house like ours would sell for forty thousand, and all the work we had done came to less than twenty thousand.) Then, for an added sweetener, the improvement would be tax abated for five years. Thanks, Grandma and HIP. I'd learn later that our little gift came from an anti-poverty program, called Model Cities, paid for with Great Society funding and open only to a chosen few especially needy cities. Hoboken was then so badly off that the Urban League in 1970 named it one of seven American cities that might well be past saving. So desperate that then-Mayor Louis de Pasquale took the unheard of step of hiring an unconnected out-of-towner, Michael Coleman, to administer the federally funded programs. By the time we got here Coleman had focused in on housing and launched three major programs: rehabbing strips of rundown buildings for low income tenants; converting an abandoned factory, where Keuffel and Esser had made Curly's slide rule among other now-quaint instruments for engineers, into subsidized apartments for "moderate" income renters; and, for homeowners, the HIP loans, a deal the city's longtime planner Ralph Seligman referred to scornfully as "bait for brownstoners." Well, yes, I thought when I heard that. Someone has to pay those skyhigh taxes. Lord knows the city needed help. "It's often said here," Maureen told us, "that Hoboken never came out of the Depression." That wasn't just a flippant line. The 1970 census found the population disproportionately old and poor, the housing stock worse than that of any comparably sized city in the northeast, fourth worst in the entire nation. I remember when Rose, that dour sentinel next door, stood behind her gate and pointed to the houses on our block where families still lived without central heating or hot water. Tenants made their own heat with a system known as "gas on gas." "It's accurate," Rose shrugged, meaning (I think) adequate. "Most Hoboken apartments get their heat that way. You only light the heat stove when you need it because you pay for it on your gas bill. When you see an apartment ad with 'make own heat,' that's what it means." I began to understand why so many people in Hoboken seemed to nurse a bitter sense that they'd been left behind by the machines of progress. Take the dockers. The first morning that I left for work from our new house I ran into clumps of middle-aged longshoremen on the downtown sidewalks near the piers. They were there the next day and again the next, some in the same wool plaid jackets-or dead ringers-that they'd worn in On the Waterfront. But I couldn't fathom why so many were still congregating every morning, when I knew they hadn't seen a day of work for years. I got my answer when I overheard one of the men, weeks later, talking to a couple of young guys on a corner. "Seventeen thousand dollars a year," he said, "but I have to be ready for work." An old dockworker Curly drank with in a bar on Sixth Street confirmed that the longshoremen's notorious union had done its rank and file some good after all: Their contract guaranteed that they'd be paid until retirement age as long as they kept showing up for work. No doubt a few guys cheated and went on to real work somewhere else, but most seemed to have nowhere to go beyond the sidewalk. Harder cases, be they retired seamen or beached drifters, were already gathered at the nearby bars. These places never seemed to close. I had to swerve to miss drunks stumbling out the doors before I'd had my morning coffee. The rowdy Barbary Coast was only legend now, but the blocks around the station still looked like a skid row for old men who had abandoned hope. They got their calories from cheap booze in downtown bars and slept in cheap single rooms upstairs. At any hour of the day or night you'd see a few of them outside the Victor Hotel on Hudson Place, sitting on the sidewalk with their backs against the building. When I walked past in the morning they seemed to feel obliged to summon up half-hearted macho calls like "hey, babe" or "lookin' for me?" It was all so feeble and perfunctory it would have been ridiculous to take offense, but after a few days I started to avoid that corner. But other vestiges of former times were downright fetching. The first day that I stayed home from work to meet the plumber, I was watching for him from the stoop and saw the women gather on the corners, just as they had probably done for generations here and maybe centuries in their Italian villages. They were clustered at both ends of the block, small groups of middle-aged and older women all in black from kerchiefs to thick hose. Almost every day, I found in time, they came together on the sidewalk or in the middle of the street, exchanging news and gossip at great length although they never seemed to visit in each other's homes. Instead, they made the street a common parlor. The only spots... [truncated due to length]