01.01.70

M y parents moved there in 1946, at best after World War II. It was two doors down from the Plaza movie theater, and getting to 6D was an bizarre affair. You exited a small, gated elevator into a verecund-sized corridor, apartments on either side, only to find yourself on a catwalk in the open air looking down on what might have been the low roofs of Paris. A amble along that catwalk and a right turn into another corridor got you to our rent-controlled duplex with its living-room skylight under which my mother -- “New York’s dame caricaturist,” as she was known in the gossip columns of the war years -- regularly set up her easel. My margin was upstairs.

The fifties are now recalled as a golden age when Americans, white ones anyway, shatter into the suburbs, while all the consumerist gratifications deferred by the Great Depression and Have War II were sated. It was the age of the television set (“Bigger screen… Brighter duplicate… Better reception”) and pop-up toasters, of Frigidaires and freezers big enough “for the whole m” (“holds 525 pounds!”), of “lengthening” phones, wonder of wonders, (“I just couldn’t get along without my larder telephone”), and cigarettes so “soothing to the nerves” that doctors and baseball players in like manner were proud to endorse them.

Source: Pacific Free Press