Growing Up Bank Street. Donna Florio

shifty guys couldn’t grab me and drag me into an empty hallway. A nodding heroin junkie was a harmless obstacle to avoid. Roaches ran down the grocery store’s walls. I bought my Hostess cupcakes elsewhere.

      I needed those new street smarts. My girlfriends and I were hitting puberty, and our young breasts and hips suddenly made us walking targets. Men shouted from cars, licking their lips, or blocked us on the sidewalk. One jazz musician mother, realizing that we’d caught on to her recipe, now boiled chamomile instead of marijuana to make tummy tea for our new ailment, menstrual cramps.

      The rotting Bank Street pier changed completely on summer weekends in the late 1960s and ’70s. It became a noisy, laughing party, packed with gay men reclining on beach towels, rubbing baby oil on their sculpted bodies. My girlfriends and I quickly learned that the men were safe to be around and far more fun to boot. We joined them, pulling down the shoulder straps of our bikinis and gossiping, playing our transistor radios in peace.

      • • •

      Bank Street had its share of grumps and jerks, but many others were wonderful. Sabine, the artist who lived in 5C of our building, collected money and furniture for our teenaged black super and his pregnant wife, recent arrivals from rural Mississippi, who were too poor to furnish their basement apartment or pay for prenatal care.

      When they moved to a bigger building, we got feisty little Ramiro, a retired merchant marine who could fix any leaky pipe or worn lock and kept the halls hospital clean. As my grandmother in apartment 1A started weakening with what eventually turned out to be brain cancer, Ramiro looked in on her several times a day. When I stayed with Grandma, I did homework with cotton in my ears as the primal therapy group next door in 65 Bank screamed themselves to release. Blocked chakras sometimes kept them howling long after New York’s 10 p.m. quiet curfew. Ramiro, obscenely fluent in several languages, reserved some of his best cursing for them.

      Charles Kuralt traveled the country doing his On the Road TV shows, which profiled Americans from all walks of life with respect and dignity. Marion “Auntie Mame” Tanner broke the locks on her brownstone doors so that anyone who needed shelter could walk in at any time. Lawyer/politician Bella Abzug of 37 Bank Street spent a night hiding from the Ku Klux Klan in a Mississippi bus stop bathroom to plead with the state’s governor to spare the life of a black inmate on death row.

      In college, I thought about the many artists and social idealists on my street who rejected day jobs. If they’d come from money, or married a worker bee, like Roger, the artist whose wife was a secretary, they got to pursue their passions full time. If not, they scraped by, waiting tables or driving cabs and their older years often brought hard choices between buying food and paying the rent. Their plight was what made me grit my teeth, bypass the writing and philosophy departments I longed to join, and endure boring education courses until I got teaching degrees and grimly took a job in a New York City public school.

      I didn’t have the self-confidence to chase my artistic dreams like they did. Plodding on, I ignored my doubts and married my high-school sweetheart at a ridiculously immature twenty-four years old because it seemed inevitable. My parents were moving out, and we took their 2B apartment. As teenagers we’d been crazy stupid in love, but we’d already grown apart. Bank Street life together became a jail for some crime we’d unknowingly committed.

      When we divorced two years later, I used the teaching degrees and fled, taking a job in a Thai university in the 1980s while a musician friend sublet the apartment. Although I was never going to fall in love again, I eventually did, this time with a Thai-born Dane, a Thai TV celebrity. I spent six magical years as a TV producer expatriate with a teak house, mango trees in the lush garden, and live-in servants. I thought I was done with Bank Street, but the magic died when his hidden alcoholism resurfaced and wrecked our lives. I flew home, crying, to divorce a second time and be a New Yorker again. Teaching again was the fast solution and it worked. I had friends, traveled for months every summer, and even touched some kids’ lives. I got an administrative degree. Life on Bank Street was OK.

      Still later, on 9/11, when I’d been at work in a small downtown school with devastatingly clear views of the World Trade Center towers, Bank Street became both refuge and mental ward. I fought to regain my sanity, screaming myself awake over and over as the victims I’d seen clawed at my windows, pleading for rescue. Bank Streeters and Village friends saved me with meals, walks to doctors, and soothing words when I panicked, sure every time I heard a siren wail that another attack was underway.

      For many years after that I shared the apartment with my late husband Richard, in a wholly unexpected later-life marriage. We met when a mutual friend asked me to help Richard, who had been practicing medicine in Africa, find a New York apartment. We kayaked and grew vegetables at our weekend place and trekked through foreign countries. Children, we agreed, might have been wonderful, but we weren’t together when that might have happened and that’s OK.

      And I still have Bank Street, past, present, and future.

      2

      Opera on Bank Street

      A squib in The Villager for October 1955 bore the headline “Opera Baby Arrives.” We were opera people. Like a child of the circus or a farm, I couldn’t imagine any other life. New York has had live theater since the 1700s, when a downtown theater entertained General George Washington with Shakespeare’s plays, comedies like The School for Scandal, and farces with white actors in blackface.

      Even if the performers were awful, it was probably a jolly crowd. English immigrants had imported their cheery custom of letting prostitutes ply their trade in the upper balconies of theaters. Policemen pocketed bribes and looked the other way while theater critics warned readers that respectable wives and daughters might be mixed with “the abandoned of the sex.”

      My parents, Ann and Larry, met during the Metropolitan Opera’s 1945 season, both twenty, eyeing each other on the cheap seats line for weeks. Ann and her friend Rose went to every Saturday matinee. Ann was a petite, raven-haired stunner with a dazzling smile who favored short, curled coifs, mascara, black eyeliner, and vivid lipstick. On theater day she wore her one elegant coat and spike heels.

      Larry Florio, an aspiring theater director from Hoboken, New Jersey, was there with friends. He’d just left the army, a slim charmer with wavy brown hair, big brown eyes, and an easy laugh. “My goodness, how good-looking your father is, Donna,” fluttered Miss Scher, my sixth-grade teacher, after parent-teacher night. “Very handsome indeed.” Marie in apartment 5A, my first babysitter, who was a teenager in 1955, still says that he was a dish.

      Their 1950 wedding lasted ten hours, because all of the performer-guests were determined to out-sing each other. They’d arranged a dude-ranch honeymoon but realized on their first morning that it was a ridiculous destination for theater people like them. They sneaked around New York that week, going to every show they could afford and avoiding their friends.

      My earliest memories are the dusty smells of painted canvas and wood-framed scenery leaning against brick walls at the Amato Opera at 159 Bleecker Street, a former movie theater, where Tony and Sally Amato coached students like Mom through roles like Mimi in La Bohème. If it wasn’t your turn for the lead role, you sang in the chorus, painted sets, and worked the box office.

      The theater was scarcely chic. Winos snored and peed on the sidewalk outside the lobby. Dad bribed them to move away with coffee and doughnuts during shows. It was a place for Dad to learn stagecraft with no budget and on the fly. When he rigged a fountain for one scene, he begged the cast not to use the backstage toilet. Inevitably someone forgot. The audible flush was followed by a drooping spray, while the audience tittered.

      The Amatos’ idea of nurturing opera singers in the States was radical in the 1940s. Europe, the birthplace of opera, was the place that produced singers. Impresarios from American theaters like the Metropolitan Opera wouldn’t even audition Americans for lead roles. Aspiring singers, many of them first generation from Europe anyway, joined regional companies in Italy, France, Germany, or Hungary. Suitably exotic stage personas were concocted. With a few years of coaching and leading roles under her belt, a Miss Frances O’Brien of Cleveland might return