Parkchester: An Interview with Jeffrey S. Gurock
Interview by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva talks to Jeffrey Gurock about his recent book, Parkchester: A Bronx Tale of Race and Ethnicity. In it, Gurock combines his personal experience growing up in Parkchester with research into the history of this planned community in the Bronx, and offers an interpretation both of Parkchester’s uniqueness and what it reveals about the broader city.
Parkchester: A Bronx Tale of Race and Ethnicity
By Jeffrey S. Gurock
New York University Press
304 pages
What got you interested in pursuing a project about Parkchester?
Until now, all of my books on New York’s history have placed the Jewish experience at the center of my narratives. At this point in my career, I wanted to tell a story where Jews were but part of a large reexamination of racial and ethnic life in Gotham. In fact, there is only a limited consideration of the internal life of Jewish people in the work. For those interested in how Judaism was doing in Parkchester, after the book appeared, I wrote a side-bar piece called “The Jewishness of Parkchester” that appeared on the NYU Press’ blog.
As you undertook the research for this book, were there times that your personal experience of Parkchester conflicted with what you were hearing from other people or finding in the archives? How did you navigate that?
One of the great challenges in writing this book was to test what I call “my truth” with “the truth” of life in the neighborhood where I grew up (1949-1974). So I constantly tested myself. I looked at memoirs, read newspaper reports, interviewed dozens of alumni and present residents and when so many people--without prompting--told me similar stories that cohered with my recollections. I felt confident that I was on the right track. The book has been out for several months and I am gratified by the number of people from Parkchester--members of its several alumni associations--who have written to me saying ”You got it right!!”
What was something new or surprising you found while writing this book?
MetLife, which owned Parkchester from 1940-1968, has an archive that was opened to me for my research. In looking through the documentation, I was struck by how unabashed the leadership was about its discriminatory policies towards minorities even though MetLife’s public statements always denied racism. But then again, perhaps I should not have been surprised since long after World War II our city was de jure and then de facto segregated. It is a point that I want my readers to understand.
How does Parkchester complicate the narrative of “white flight” out of the city and into the suburbs in postwar New York?
In the period right after the war, communities like Parkchester and its sister neighborhood Stuyvesant Town were affordable and bucolic alternatives to suburbanization; places where lower middle class white folks could move to without the hassles of commuting. For five and then fifteen cents, Parkchester people could travel back and forth into “the city,” as we called it. These folks were not running away from Gotham. Later on, in the 1970s, second generation Parkchester people—like myself—more affluent than their parents, moved on to better neighborhoods, but did not flee the neighborhood. I also address what I call “black flight” in the 1970s, as New York City declined. I think that I am the first scholar to write about the migration out of the South Bronx and elsewhere of solid working and lower middle class African Americans and Latinos to Parkchester. They resembled in many social and economic ways the place’s first white residents in the 1940s.
As much as it was celebrated as a successful, stable community in its early years, Parkchester was also notoriously discriminatory, remaining racially segregated until the late 1960s. Do you have any personal recollections of what residents thought about that while you were living there? Why did it take so long for Parkchester to integrate?
I honestly admit that we were comfortable and privileged to have been chosen to live in Parkchester—MetLife screened its white residents--so many of us were oblivious to the issue of race. Minorities literally lived on the other side of the tracks—the subway tracks, that is. The express subway train skipped over the South Bronx. I wrote that as a boy it never dawned on me that when I went to the playground, there were only white faces in the area. Importantly, the fight against MetLife to integrate Parkchester did not take place on the streets of the neighborhood. Rather, activists within the NAACP and the Urban League fought in the courts and in the offices of MetLife. MetLife used so many clever subterfuges to avoid opening up the neighborhood--with the “benign neglect” of municipal officials--until 1968.
What explains Parkchester’s longevity and success as a community?
As a scholar I looked at the community with a critical eye. But I am also a Parkchester partisan. For me, a “get along” spirit has been the hallmark of the attitude of the groups who have felt really good about their opportunity to live in that area. Back in the day, it was the Jews, Irish, Italians and white Protestants who shared comparable family and social values. Coming “back home” in doing my research, I found the same attitude among the Bangladeshis, Indians, Malaysians--Muslims and Hindus etc. etc. The demographics have changed but the residents remain closeknit and proud to be living there.
Jeffrey S. Gurock is Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University in New York City.