The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx (18 page)

“Can this wait until I get home?” he asked patiently, imagining it was a mistake.

“I suppose,” she replied, though she sounded frazzled.

When he arrived home two hours later, he found that a number of neighbors had collected in the street, chatting with each other. Lucretia quickly showed him the notice that had been taped to their door. It stated that they were in the path of the new Cross Bronx Expressway. The proposed roadway cut a swath between 176th Street and Fair-mont Place, plowing through seven blocks of residential housing. Immediately he envisioned it: a man-made fault line opening from east to west—two hundred and twenty-five feet of concrete roadway coming right at them, tearing the earth in two.

According to the letter, all residents on the street, for blocks in both directions, had nine months to vacate their premises and find new accommodations.

“Hey, Paul!” he heard. His neighbor Robert Ward was crossing the street, holding up a road map. “Check out this freakin’ highway! It looks like the Bronx is getting circumcized.”

“We’re supposed to sacrifice our homes so that commuters from New Jersey and Long Island can get to work faster?” Paul responded.

“Paul!” he heard another voice shout over to him. “Your last name’s Moses. You’re not related to this clown, are you?”

It was Karl Stein from half a block down. He came over with another copy of the same letter. Glancing at the bottom of the notice for the first time, Paul saw that it was signed by his brother:
Robert Moses, City Construction Coordinator.

“No relation,” Paul replied swiftly.

“Too bad,” Stein said.

Lucretia peered down nervously. She’d never had any reason to lie to her neighbors and friends before. Paul excused himself and went into their house, then dashed to the upstairs bathroom and locked the door.

I knew it!
he thought furiously.
That cocksucker has tracked me down and now he’s coming after my family! I should’ve killed him when I had the chance!
He muttered aloud, “Teresa and that shrink said I was nuts! Well,
he’s
coming after
me!
Now who’s paranoid?”

When he heard Lucretia knocking around nervously in the bedroom, he splashed cold water on his face, took a deep breath, flushed the toilet, and came out to comfort her.

Over the next hour or so, as more neighbors gathered along the sidewalk, they started pooling their resources. One fellow across the street had a cousin in the mayor’s office; he worked for the Department of Transportation. Another woman’s brother was a lawyer, but he lived in Des Moines.

“We should organize right away,” Paul announced for all to hear. After watching so many other neighborhoods being ripped in half by his brother’s highways, he realized immediately what they should do to prevent this.

“What’s the point?” one of the more knowledgeable neighbors retorted. “No one’s ever been able to reverse eminent-domain law.”

“Politicians are motivated by public opinion. But we have to work quickly. We’ve got to make as loud a stink as we can.”

“What are we going to say?” Ms. Rice asked. “That the city can’t have a freeway cause we like our homes?”

“We have to tell people that if this can happen to us, it can happen to anyone in this city,” Paul replied. “And we have to show them an alternative route for the expressway that displaces fewer families.”

“What do you mean, like a tunnel?”

“No, they can just as easily run the highway north of the park,” Robert Ward speculated.

Although their street was filled with single-family homes, the next block over had a number of large apartment buildings. Paul pointed out that they must’ve gotten notices too. “We should go over there and start organizing people,” he suggested.

Ward, Stein, Rice, and some of the others agreed to head over on Saturday to garner support. Within a matter of days, three hundred people had joined an ad hoc neighborhood organization calling itself MCBE—Move the Cross Bronx Expressway. They agreed to meet on a weekly basis in the multipurpose room at the YMHA.

Two weeks later, everyone got a second letter stating that the Tenant Relocation Bureau was going to help everyone find new accommodations; indeed, they had already helped those in the “Section One” portion of the planned roadway.

Though he fervently wished to take a leading role in the committee, Paul remained in the background, fearful that he would be revealed as Robert Moses’s brother.

He met up with three neighbors that Saturday to check on the progress that had been made thus far on the first part of the expressway. As they drove eastward toward Section One, they could hear jackhammers and see clouds of dust rising in the air. Just before they spotted the hills of rubble and the earth-moving machines, they came upon rows of barren tenements and empty single-family homes. They parked in front of a condemned apartment building. Broken furniture and garbage, including long shards from a shattered mirror that once lined the hallway, covered the floor of the defunct lobby. The stink of human excrement filled the large room. Several of the men stepped inside.

“Hey, get out of there!” yelled Karen Farkis, one of the older members of the committee, pinching her nose. “You’re gonna get mugged.”

As they exited the wrecked building, they passed a hard-worn blonde in her twenties pushing a stroller inside. Two toddlers followed slowly.

“Where are you’re going, young lady?” Mrs. Farkis asked, fearful for the petite woman’s safety.

“Mind yer damn business!”

“Pardon?”

“Who the hells are ya anyways?” said the young woman with a thick local accent.

“Allow me to introduce us,” Mrs. Farkis replied. “We’re from East Tremont. We all live in houses that are in the path of the Cross Bronx and we wanted to find out how the planners dealt with homeowners further down the line.”

“Oh, you’re in for a real treat, sis,” the blonde said, chuckling snidely.

“Were you evicted?” Paul asked.

“More like evicted
to
here. We were kicked out about six months ago from our home further east of here, but the Relocation Bureau couldn’t find us no place so they stuck us in this dump. The owners had already gotten kicked out of here.”

“They’re actually letting you live here?” Paul asked in dismay.

“Not for nothing. We have to pay rent. And we have to be able to leave within seventy-two hours.”

“You’re actually paying rent?” gasped another East Tremonter, Pauline Kennedy.

“Oh yeah, we’re paying more than we were in our old apartment. In fact, there’s another family living up—”

“You mean the city evicted the original residents from this building and now they’re housing other evictees here?” Paul couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“Yeah, there are about a hundred families who were moved here. Hell, some of them have been moved two or three times. They just kick them like old cans up the eviction route,” the young mother explained, then barked at her two children who were playing among shiny shards of broken glass.

“Have you at least asked to get into one of the new public houses the city is building?” Paul asked.

“We were told to get in line. There’s a six-year waiting list.”

“What kind of apartments did the Tenant Relocation Bureau offer you?” asked Bill Lawrence from the committee.

She let out a sharp breath in order to keep from crying and said, “You wouldn’t put a dog in those places. I ain’t fooling. And you can see my family is living in this hell hole. I mean, I’ve come down in the morning with my kids and found a bum taking a shit in the corner, so believe me, we’d take damn near anything.”

“It’s criminal!”

“Of all the families they evicted,” she went on, “I don’t know a single one that got housed permanently through that bullshit Re-Eviction Bureau. They just want to get you the hell out.”

The group was aghast. The fact that a government agency in a democratic country could treat it’s citizens this way was unthinkable.

Paul took five dollars from his wallet. Others pitched in, and without saying a word, they offered the money to the young mother, who quickly snatched it and moved along. They walked around the vicinity and spotted at least a dozen other empty apartment buildings. Windows had been broken, doors were hanging off their hinges, piping had been vandalized, yet people were still living in some of the apartments. As the group drove back to East Tremont, terrified of what lay ahead, not one of them spoke.

Soon, another flurry of mimeographed letters arrived offering all owners and renters the generous incentive of two hundred dollars if they moved within the next six months. The letter reminded everyone that they would all be evicted anyway, so resisting it would only cost them unnecessary legal expenses.

The committee countered with fliers posted on street corners:

We Have to Hang Together
or We’ll Hang Alone.
Don’t Move an Inch,
MCBE’s Fighting for Your Home!

Yet within a month, as word spread about how the city had treated the people of Section One, a third of all residents along the projected route had grabbed the offer and moved out.

“The wires are dead,” Uli said to the scorpion-spined boy, referring to the electrical cables dangling precariously from the rectangular hole, still connected to the fallen fuse box. “You don’t need to worry about getting shocked.”

Uli hoisted the kid’s malformed body into the chiseled rectangular space. The boy was able slip his head inside, but his shoulders were slightly too broad. After pushing painfully for a minute, the kid climbed down.

“I got an idea,” Uli said. He went out to the stock area and located a small can of machine grease. “Take off your clothes and rub this on.”

The kid removed his filthy button-down shirt that hung over his midsection like a dress. Uli was distressed to see the severity of his deformity as the kid slathered his shoulders and midsection with grease.

With Uli’s help, the boy slowly worked himself into the stone opening. It was almost like watching a small animal trying to free itself from some trap. Then, suddenly, the kid vanished completely.

“You okay?” Uli yelled into the rectangular window of darkness.

“Yeah!” the kid called back.

“Want a candle so you can see what’s up there?”

“Yeah.” A little hand reached out of the hole and Uli passed him a candle and some matches.

When the kid struck a match, Uli asked, “What do you see?”

“It goes straight up, then turns right, then …” The kid’s voice grew muffled as he moved further inside. The faint glow disappeared.

“Is it wide enough for me to climb through if I can get in there?” Uli called out.

“Don’t think so,” he heard back.

“Does the tunnel continue?”

“It goes over there,” the kid explained; he was obviously pointing at something.

“Can you climb
up
the tunnel?”

“I need something to hold onto. There are two thingys with holes in them.”

“How high up can you see before it gets dark?”

“Can’t tell.”

“Well, what can you see?”

“Don’t know.” The kid’s voice was clearer now.

“Can you see past my height?”

“Oh yeah, about three or four times your height. That’s when it gets black and kinda narrow.” If the boy’s sense of scale was at all accurate, that distance was already higher than all the tunnels in the Convolution.

“All right, come on back out here.”

When Uli helped the youth out of the hole, he asked, “How narrow does it get?”

“Don’t know. I saw two lines of holes running up the back of something big.”

“The elevator shaft?”

“I guess, but I don’t know how I can climb up and hold the candle at the same time.”

“How far apart are the holes?”

“Don’t know, maybe …” The kid stretched his hands about two feet apart.

“And you can push your back against the wall?”

“Yeah.”

“How big are the holes?”

“About …” The kid curled his fingers to roughly an inch in radius.

Uli collected a bucket of water and a bar of brown lye soap and let him scrub off all the grease. The boy started talking about his family again—he wanted to get resupplied and take Uli to look at his brother and mom, as promised.

All Uli could think about was the possibility of escaping from this underground tomb.

33

D
uring the following weeks, Paul watched his neighbors walking around like zombies, their eyes downcast, their postures hunched. Some complained about being unable to sleep or eat. The elderly who hadn’t yet abandoned their apartments stared sadly out their windows as though on a sinking ship. Those still motivated to put up a fight converted MCBE into the East Tremont Neighborhood Association. The elected head of ETNA, Lillian Edelstein, lived in one of the nicer buildings on the street with her sister’s family and their mother. During one of their early meetings at the YMHA, they came up with a plan to enlist local politicians in their cause. Within a week, State Senator Jacob Gilbert, Assemblyman Walter Gladwin, and Congressman Isidore Dollinger had all vowed to help them.

Bronx Borough President James J. Lyons was the linchpin. He had a seat on the Board of Estimates, which needed to sign off on the project before Robert Moses could get final approval for his precious highway. Unfortunately, Lyons seemed to constantly be elsewhere. His secretary suggested that they confer with the Bronx Commissioner of Public Works, Arthur V. Sheridan, who Mr. Lyons said had much more clout. Sheridan, in turn, sent them to someone else, who referred them to Edward J. Flanagan, who ushered the little group into his office.

Flanagan launched right in: “I’ve been following your situation very closely.” Pointing to a wall map of the Bronx, he indicated the proposed route. “I don’t understand why they don’t just run the expressway along Crotona Park North.”

“Brilliant idea!” Lillian Edelstein replied, not mentioning that they were already lobbying for this alternative.

“It looks even shorter and more direct,” added Mr. Lassiter, another ETNA member.

“We need an engineer to make an assessment and demonstrate that this route would be more efficient and cost-effective that the planned one,” Flanagan concluded.