2243 Ryer Ave.

Bill Flynn

OK, it’s a picture of my elevator. What does it have to do with Ryer Ave.? Am I showing off? Yeah, probably. Actually, in my coastal tourist beach town of Emerald Isle, NC elevators are becoming pretty common. The big fancy beach rental homes are all having them installed for both a touch of luxury and to allow the top floor, with the best view, to be the main living area.

When I ride my elevator I can’t begin to tell you how many times I flash back to 2243 Ryer Ave. It is a five story walk up in the Bronx where we grew up and it came with its own free Cross Fit gym called stairs. I basically live my life being grateful and this elevator is just a small reminder for all the good things I have received. Let me tell you more of what our actual building and apartment was like. This won’t be the most exciting thing you ever read but if you want to know about a common frame of reference that the 60’s plus crowd in our family has, this is definitely a part of it. Most of us grew up in apartment houses. 2243 Ryer Ave was home to two families, the Cullinans and the Flynns. Aunt Betty and Uncle Eddie and their three children, Ellen, Edmond and John lived in the basement as Supers (Superintendents) and eventually moved up to the third floor. Aunt Bridie and Uncle Dave and their seven children, John, David, Kathleen, William, Patrick, Mary and Ann lived on the fifth floor which was the top floor. Apartment 18 was their two bedroom apartment. Jack Flynn had left for the seminary before Ann was born so there were only six children in the apartment for the most part at any one time.

Remember now this building was a walk up, no elevator. There was a stoop, an interior hallway stairway to the first floor and four floors with a turn around set of eight stairs each in between them. My best guesstimate is a total of 76 stairs. Can you imagine looking at 76 stairs every time you went home. How about Aunt Bridie with a brood of kids and an armful of packages tackling that challenge everyday. I remember her saying in her old age that she attributed her longevity to the stairs in Ryer Ave. I’m sure there was some truth to that. I remember on Saturday mornings my mother and father would go food shopping at the A&P on the Grand Concourse and we would go down to help them carry up all the food packages from the car to the apartment. We were like ants and I remember the reward was a box of Anne Paige (A&P) glazed donuts for us to fight over when we were done. By the way, we were an exception by having a car. My father had two jobs and his joy in life was his car. When he wanted to get away from it all, he would go downstairs and work on his car. I inherited this from him. I’m always putzing with my car. I’m forever washing it and rearranging my gear. It’s a getaway for me too.

Back to the two bedrooms. One was for girls and one was for boys. When you walked into the apartment you looked straight down a hallway that eventually opened up on to two rooms, the dining room and the living room. Immediately, when you stepped into the apartment there was the girls bedroom on the left and the next door after that was the one and only bathroom. Let me just say it simply. You never used the bathroom without knowing that someone else was probably waiting. To really make it interesting, outside the bathroom door was the hallway which was lined with bookshelves on which the dial up phone sat. The phone had a long chord that stretched into the bathroom. So, the only way to get privacy in a phone call was to sit in the bathroom. Going to the bathroom in this house was always a challenge.

The next room was the dining room that had primarily a big table and a high rise bed that slept two. The kitchen was to the left of this room and what made it different from living today was that it had a dumbwaiter. The dumbwaiter was used to remove garbage from the apartments. Uncle Eddie as the Super would pull the roped manual elevator on a certain schedule and eventually put the garbage at the curb for the garbage men to pick up.

As you moved toward the front of the building you came to the living room that had a pullout couch. This is where Mom and Dad slept and located off this room was the second bedroom. The living room is where we eventually got a TV and gathered around in the evening to watch. I remember the Jackie Gleason Show and the Ed Sullivan shows as being my favorites. Both the living room and the front bedroom had windows that looked out the front of the apartment. The view from the front windows was actually impressive. The Bronx is a series of hills and the apartment building sat on the top of one of them and there was no tall building facing it to hamper the view. If you looked to the south you could see the Tri-Borough Bridge and straight out you could see all the way across to the East Bronx.

Of course there was a fire escape attached to one of the windows in the front but as tempting as it was on some of the rancid hot summer nights to sit on it, this was a 100% no no. I never saw this rule broken and besides you would have been disrupting my mother’s garden. She was a farmers daughter and all her life there was some kind of plant growing going on and the fire escape was her green house.

The girls had the first bedroom and that never changed. The dining room high rise and the boys front bedroom was always subject to change. I don’t know what kind of a schedule my mother had but every so often you were reassigned to a new bed and that was just the way it was. I don’t know when I first heard of the concept that kids had their own room but I honestly remember being surprised by it. Your own room, really?

My father managed to hook up a clothes line from the kitchen window to the window of the girls bedroom. He also rigged up a washing machine in the kitchen and my mother’s life became a lot less arduous. I can’t tell you how many trips I made to the alley between the buildings to pick up a fallen piece of clothing. This was the same alley where homeless men would appear occasionally and start singing a song. My mother and other ladies would wrap up a coin in newspaper, put a clothes pin on it and toss it out for the down on his luck singer. I remember one guy who was a repeat visitor because he came with a ukulele and he belted out “Won’t you come home Bill Bailey, Won’t you come home. I cried the whole night long…” In the echo chamber of the alley way, he really sounded good.

This top floor apartment of course had the buildings black tar roof immediately above its plaster ceiling. In July and August you could have hatched eggs on some nights. There was a little relief with a couple of fans blowing air around the apartment but not much. Every now and then, I remember sneaking out on the roof after dark to try and cool off but the tar was soft under your feet and that didn’t last very long. I don’t have any, but I know there are a lot of photos floating around of all the kids that were taken on the roof. In particular, it seems to have been a ritual of your first communion to have a roof photo taken.

Marilu Henner, the actress from the TV show “Taxi”, has a photographic memory for the days of her life. I never heard of it but apparently it is a phenomenon that allows her to remember what she was doing on any given day of her life by simply recalling the date. I saw her doing this on TV and I was amazed. I mention this because I kind of have this for some of the artifacts in our old apartment. There is no logic to this but I remember a picture of a bird in a frame that was composed of real feathers. There was a stand ash tray. Boy would that be a novelty today. There was a full size mirror in the living room, a stand lamp in the dining room, a bird cage where that we constantly resupplied as the critters perished. There were spoke chairs in the kitchen that we used to flip over and sit in and presto, racing cars. There was the rough plywood closet that my father built in the boys bedroom and unpainted dressers as well. I could go on and on and make this piece even more boring than it is but it’s coming to an end.

The end did come in the mid to late 1970s when my mother and father moved to Breezy Point full time. It was time to move the furniture from Ryer Ave to Breezy Point and to close the door for the last time. I got a hold of four or five of my FBI buddies, a truck and the rainiest day we had had in six months. It rained the entire day and at both ends of the move. My friends were and are great people. They sucked it up and we just did it. By the way, one of my helpers that day was Louie Freeh who went on to become a Federal Judge and eventually the Director of the FBI. It is kind of a nice tribute to the apartment that served us all so well to know that it had at its send off a person of the import and quality as Louie Freeh.

I am a better person for the experiences I had in that Bronx apartment. I knew I eventually wanted out and it motivated me. I am able to savor what I have today because of the humble beginnings I come from and I will never get tired of riding my elevator.