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Last Post Article |
MEMORY LANE MEETS ‘ARTHUR AVENUE’
(David Hinckley, Critic At Large, NY Daily News 12/17/03)
I admire a professional photograph as much as the next kid who grew up with Life magazine in the house. But what I sometimes like even more is a box full of someone’s old family snapshots.
Blurry, off-center, awkwardly posed? Bring ’em on. I say that’s life, and that’s why I’m enchanted with a book called “Belmont & Arthur Avenue: Little Italy in the Bronx” by Stephen M. Samtur and Paula DeMarta Mastroianni…
For “Belmont & Arthur Avenue,” Mastroianni contributes essays and whimsical cartoons. She also dips into her family photo archive, which starts with a formal portrait of Marcellino and Nicolina Pepe Mastroianni taken at the Rialto Art Studio, 613 E. 187th Street, to mark the proud, long-ago day when they become American citizens.
In a sense, that’s also where the book starts -- with the people, mostly in this case Italians, who came to the Bronx and shaped the life and culture of “A-Hun-87th Street” and Arthur Avenue. But the focus of the book is the years when the author was growing up there, from the late ’40s up into the ’60s.
The stories are good, the pictures even better, like Paula’s sister Donna making the rounds on Confirmation Day wearing her white dress and veil. We see the exterior of Cinelli’s Savoy Theater, at 186th and Hughes, known as “The Dumps,” and Paula remembers ladies sitting in the back with colanders, shelling beans for the evening meal.
As this suggests, “Arthur Avenue” isn’t a book about famous people, though there’s a nice essay by Dion DiMucci, whose backup group, the Belmonts, was named for the neighborhood.
The charm here is the Packard dealership with the glistening cars out front. It’s Our Savior’s Church, on Washington Avenue, with dances on Friday and Saturday nights. It’s the old restaurants and storefronts -- the style of the lettering, the vintage of the cars parked in front, the cut of the clothes on people who just happened to be walking by when the shot was snapped.
Jimmy’s Candy Store, Prospect and 187th, sold pretzels three for a nickel and if Jimmy shorted you on syrup in your egg cream, you handed it back for another squirt.
The larger point here, of course, is that we all have stories. Maybe we grew up in the suburbs and our sunsets had silhouettes of trees, not rooftop antennas. But just as you didn’t have to grow up in Brooklyn to love the great TV show “Brooklyn Bridge,” this is the kind of book where you see the pictures and all of a sudden stories start telling themselves. |
