The Mayor of Bank Street

Book Review: Growing Up Bank Street: A Greenwich Village Memoir, by Donna Florio, published by New York University Press, New York 2021. (5 out of 5 stars)

This is a wonderful, well-written memoir that any lover of New York City, and specifically Greenwich Village, will enjoy. Donna Florio is an engaging tour guide who’s knowledgeable, curious and articulate, while remaining appealingly self-deprecating.

I enjoyed the book especially because she is exactly of my generation – I was born in 1954 and Florio in 1955. She has always lived in Greenwich Village and is clearly a great explorer and walker. Her apartment is very close to some of my favorite West Village locations: Cafe Cluny, the Village Vanguard, etc.

Several other things made me really enjoy this book.

Short and sweet. First, since I’m easily distracted and not a super fast reader, I get bored with a really lengthy tome. That’s the reason why I’ve never read that weighty bio-brick about Alexander Hamilton – you know the one – or many Dickens novels. Florio’s book is only about 200 pages long. Just right! And it’s divided into bite-size chapters, most of them about specific neighborhood characters that the author has found interesting.

Helpful thematic organization. The book is divided into high-level sections including two Intro chapters, then eight chapters under the heading “My Building”, four under “Artistic Bank Street”, four under “Stylish and Splendid Bank Street”, three under “Secret Bank Street”, and ending with three under the heading “The Heart of Bank Street”. Easily digestible for somewhat memory-challenged seniors like me. This user-friendly and sensible organization fits the impression you receive about the author’s (narrator’s) personality. She’s the curious, articulate, carefully-observing, sensible “normie” in contrast to the many outsize, in-your-face characters she meets during her decades living in the Village, including neighbors John and Yoko Ono, Sid Vicious, “Auntie Mame”, and Bella Abzug. This “normie narrator” brings to mind a couple of other normies that are well-known from other books set in New York: the narrator of Damon Runyon’s stories, whose blandness allows him to visit and listen in on all kinds of eyebrow-raising and hilarious situations involving gangsters, bookies, et al., without getting himself stabbed or worse; and the young narrator Marco of Suess’s And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, who sees and vividly describes amazing imaginary things before reporting back to his dad that in reality he saw “nothing but a plain horse and wagon on Mulberry Street”. (I have always understood that the Mulberry Street of that book was the one in New York’s Little Italy, but today, reading Wikipedia, I found that the source of the name may have been in Suess’s hometown of Springfield, Mass.)

An opera family. Florio’s parents were opera singers, mainly in the Amato Opera, which had several homes in lower Manhattan from 1948 to 2009, when it closed down. Donna herself sang in many children’s choruses starting at age five. She tells many vivid, funny and poignant stories about this opera childhood, including not only singing in choruses but also playing a street urchin, altar “boy”, a junior sailor climbing the nets of a sailing ship, etc., depending on that day’s opera, and even singing an offstage solo as part of Tosca. Her parents were stars in the Amato Opera and eventually graduated to the Metropolitan Opera, but only as chorus members. Donna had both chorus and child-actor-singer roles at the Met. They all rubbed shoulders with famous opera singers, directors and conductors such as Renata Tabaldi, Maria Callas, Montserrat Caballe, Franco Zefferelli and Leonard Bernstein – with the addition of Rudolf Nuruyev from the ballet world – and they experienced the fascinating backstage “rabbit warren” of the old Metropolitan Opera building. By comparison, the new, boring backstage of the Met after the move to Lincoln Center in 1966 looked “like a hospital”, no longer “bustling” since it now had separate floors and corridors for soloists, chorus, orchestra, dancers and stagehands. She reports that she had no opinion about the front of the house “since I was never there”. Despite the prestige and higher pay of the Met, she – and likely her parents – missed the fun, intimacy and excitement of the old Amato Opera. When she hit puberty her opera career rapidly ended. Though she describes some unpleasant scenes of sexual harassment and the working conditions placed on child singers/actors were bordering on violation of child labor laws, overall her many opera stories – both Amato and Met, her parents and Donna herself – are both interesting and entertaining. And they keep popping up in later chapters, e.g. chatty 8-year-old Donna ingratiates herself with senior citizen neighbors by performing snippets of her opera characters.

So many characters and stories. After opera was no longer dominant (her dad took a sales job to make ends meet and Donna grew out of children’s roles), the Florios’ lives took on more variety – and more stories. One might ask whether any novelist has come up with a more fascinating set of characters, as well as picaresque adventures, than those the author encounters on Bank Street. As she gets older she starts to find out about the residents of her street and their interesting lives and personalities. This includes stories of celebrities, or former celebrities, like Sid Vicious, John Lennon and Yoko Ono (while watering a window box the author accidentally watered John and Yoko’s heads as they walked by) , Charles Kuralt of CBS TV, Franz Bendtsen (a well-known stage actor in the first half of the 20th century), Earl Browder (head of the American Communist Party in the 1940s), Marion “Auntie Mame” Tanner (later enshrined on Broadway and in a movie), Charles Van Doren of Quiz Bowl Scandal fame, dancers & choreographers Alvin Nikolais and Murray Louis, avant-garde composer John Cage, actor/singer Theodore Bikel and actor Alan Arkin.

Secrets, Mysteries & Intrigues. The number of stories Florio tells about secrets, mysteries and double lives among the denizens of Bank Street is remarkable. Some of the stories involved became famous, like Charles Kuralt’s multiple wives & families (discovered only after his death) or Charles Van Doren’s quiz show scandal, but Florio dishes about several equally interesting secrets, mysteries and intrigues:

The Silent Jester. This gray-haired fellow often walked by in the late afternoon wearing a suit and a “glum expression” as if on his way from home from work, “looking like a Connecticut commuter”. But in the evenings, sometimes the neighborhood kids would see him again – they swore it was the same guy, with same glum expression, but now dressed like a Court Jester. “Silent Jester wore medieval motley sewn with colorful velvets and satin. He had striped leggings, a droopy, many-pointed hat, and cloth slippers with jingling bells sewn to the toes.” Eventually he disappeared from the block. Adding to the mystery, a retired dry cleaner told Donna that the man was his customer and was a Kellogg’s cereal heir.

Actor, Off-Broadway director and 63 Bank St resident John Lavery, who the author’s father surmised was from an old New England family of artists and academics. He became a good friend to the family, but after a few years started to have persistent health issues. He mentioned that he had inherited a lighthouse from a relative and was planning to move there to write his novel. He moved out and the Florios never heard from or about him again.

New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph Crater, who lived on Bank Street with his wife before he stepped into a midtown taxicab and disappeared in 1930. He had been presiding over sensitive cases involving gangsters including Legs Diamond and Dutch Schultz, and may have been killed by one of these gangs. Suicide was also considered a possibility, but no proof has ever been found pointing to any of these conclusions.

Artist Yeffe Kimball, an early indigenous-imposter in the 1950s. We’ve heard in recent years about multiple cases, often in academia, in which someone passes her- or himself off as indigenous or black, building a decades-long career, before they’re outed as some variety of standard-issue Caucasian person. Well, apparently this was happening long before we may have thought. As Florio explains: “I read in Vogue magazine that Yeffe, the socialite, Osage artist, cookbook author… and advocate for Native American rights was actually Miss Effie Goodman, a Missouri farm girl.” Despite her ruse, Yeffe was in many ways a good person, as chatty young Donna discovered when she talked her way into becoming Yeffe’s gardening assistant. (See below for more on this story.)

The book is also very well-written. Specifically, Florio writes in an economical, energetic style – I never thought “OK, please get to the point…” – while including a wealth of colorful, specific descriptions. A couple examples of these descriptions:

The old Metropolitan Opera House. “The old Met had been built in 1898. Backstage looked like a haunted house that went on forever. I was afraid I’d get lost and no one would find me. It was all dusty carved wood and splintered floors, a rabbit warren of lopsided steps with cast-iron banisters leading to dimly lit corridors and strange, hidden rooms. Thick metal pipes ran everywhere: in dressing rooms, through rehearsal halls, and high above audience view onstage. Roman soldiers lumbered by, checking the Daily News for the racing results at Belmont.”

Becoming Yeffe’s garden assistant. “I watched excitedly as Yeffe prepared her front garden during the early spring of 1965. I was nine, and all we had at home was a window box. City gardens were enchanted places to me… I pestered her with the fervor of an acolyte as she gruffly explained soils and planting seasons. As she spoke, I sidled over to her gate and opened it. When she finally asked if I’d like to help, I rushed through, throwing my book-bag on the ground and kneeling next to her… She reached over and guided my hands, helping me place the crocus and daffodil bulbs just so. ‘Not too deep or they can’t reach the sun,’ she explained. ‘Not too shallow or they’ll freeze.’ I tried to be perfect, feeling like a spring goddess in training. Yeffe kept frowning at first, but started nodding as I prattled on about school and the opera and asked more gardening questions. ‘Do you know what, Donna?’ she finally asked after we’d planted everything. ‘You discovered something you love to do today.’ She smiled. Emboldened, I asked for a crocus to grow in a cup at home. Yeffe frowned again. ‘OK, she replied, ‘but don’t tell your friends because I’m not giving one to every kid on Bank Street.’”

The book’s emotional peak is the chapter about one of Florio’s neighbors in 63 Bank Street, John Kemmerer. He was a senior citizen and Donna a teenager when they started getting to know each other. Turns out they were both bookish. They first started talking when he noticed her carrying library books into the building and asked her what she thought of Carson McCullers. They gradually got to know each other, but it was after Kemmerer’s death that Florio started to understand more about him and regret that she hadn’t gotten to know him better. He had been a structural engineer but had also published a book of creative writing, Along the Raccoon River, and some poems. Thinking about Kemmerer, books and creative writing leads Florio into discussing her experience on 9/11, when she was an administrator in the New York public school system:

“I stood facing the fourth-story window of a Lower Manhattan school on 9/11, holding a girl as her mother, a security guard in Tower 2, died in front of us. The schools were on emergency lockdown and I’d had no place to hide. None of us did. White ash, all that remained of people I may have passed on the street that day or gone to school with, drifted into our eyes.”

This experience caused Florio to begin writing herself and to be more inspired by Kemmerer. Later, in the preparation of the book, she researched Kemmerer and was able to read a journal that had been kept in the archives of his alma mater, Grinnell College in Iowa. This gave her much more information about him and led to him becoming a model for her later writing.

Toward the end of the book Florio talks about Billy Joyce, the live-in butler for Bank Street residents Alwin Nikolais and Louis Murray, who were the leaders of an innovative dance company, Nikolais Dance Theatre, which was known worldwide. Joyce had been an adept chorus dancer in many Broadway productions. On Bank Street though, as a butler he had plenty of spare time. He was known for sitting in front of his employers’ town house on a lawn chair and chatting with many who passed by. One day when the teen-age Florio was chatting with him, a passing dog walker told her “Billy’s the Mayor of Bank Street”.

Florio calls herself shy, but I doubt this assessment and I think she only says it once in the book. As a child she had many friends on Bank Street and she tells an amazing number of stories about not just the kids but also chatting with adult neighbors. She visited Yeffe Kimball, Marion “Auntie Mame” Tanner and other adults regularly in their gardens or homes, full of inquisitive and, I’m sure, charming questions. She and her teenage girlfriends got to know the gay guys who sun-bathed on the banks of the Hudson and figured out that they were safe to hang out with. It’s hard to imagine that she was really shy; in fact I think her life on Bank Street, along with the entertaining profusion of stories in this book, seem to prove the value of being an energetic extrovert! One thing I’m certain of is that Donna Florio now deserves to be called the Mayor of Bank Street.