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Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Amy Starecheski
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Carol Zakaluk
OHMS Object
This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer)
https://motthavenhistory.org/ohms/render.php?cachefile=Zakaluk_Carol_20171214_session2.xml
OHMS Object Text
This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka
5.4 Unknown Date Zakaluk_Carol_20171214_session2 2:14:10 Columbia Oral History MA Program Carol Zakaluk Amy Starecheski 1:|1(4)|16(8)|32(6)|43(4)|59(4)|72(3)|85(2)|95(11)|105(16)|117(3)|125(13)|137(7)|153(5)|164(9)|177(9)|187(10)|198(10)|208(8)|221(7)|231(9)|240(4)|250(5)|262(14)|272(7)|281(10)|291(4)|306(7)|316(10)|333(5)|343(2)|352(13)|362(7)|371(14)|381(3)|392(6)|404(7)|414(14)|424(5)|433(13)|442(10)|451(11)|461(7)|471(4)|479(14)|504(17)|514(12)|525(3)|534(15)|545(16)|554(14)|564(5)|575(4)|595(4)|604(5)|613(10)|622(7)|632(14)|641(11)|652(8)|662(6)|673(2)|682(11)|693(4)|702(12)|713(2)|722(7)|732(5)|742(7)|752(2)|761(7)|771(11)|781(8)|792(4)|802(2)|812(10)|832(15)|845(9)|855(2)|863(14)|873(11)|883(9)|891(2)|899(13)|909(15)|921(13)|930(7)|942(6)|956(9)|966(2)|975(9)|986(3)|997(7)|1007(2)|1017(9)|1026(10)|1037(2)|1045(14)|1056(7)|1068(7)|1078(8)|1088(10)|1098(6)|1109(5)|1119(16)|1130(9)|1140(2)|1150(8)|1161(8)|1172(15)|1185(6)|1196(3)|1206(16)|1216(2)|1226(11)|1237(14)|1246(11)|1256(9)|1270(10)|1280(16)|1291(11)|1304(2)|1314(12)|1325(3)|1339(2)|1352(10)|1371(7)|1382(5)|1392(4)|1409(2)|1420(6)|1439(5)|1456(12)|1475(12)|1490(13)|1510(5) 0 SoundCloud audio < ; iframe width=" ; 100%" ; height=" ; 300" ; scrolling=" ; no" ; frameborder=" ; no" ; allow=" ; autoplay" ; src=" ; https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/1426380937& ; color=%23ff5500& ; auto_play=false& ; hide_related=true& ; show_comments=false& ; show_user=true& ; show_reposts=false& ; show_teaser=false& ; visual=true" ; > ; < ; /iframe> ; Amy Starecheski: This is Amy Starecheski. I' ; m interviewing Carol Zakaluk. This is our second session. It' ; s December 15th - 14th, 2017. Carol Zakaluk: 14th. Amy Starecheski: It' ; s Wednesday-- Thursday. I am addled today. It' ; s freezing cold outside and we' ; re in the middle of the holiday season. So we were just talking about where we should pick up and I will turn it over to you and I' ; ll jump in with questions. Probably more this time than last time but go ahead and- and yeah. Carol Zakaluk: OK. So my thought in the second session, just in general, is that I' ; m going to talk more about my life with John in the house. My experience growing up with and living with Ann has- what happened as she grew up, and then to kind of give a summary of my work life, to John' ; s work life, and Ann' ; s work life, some of which involve Mott Haven and then to finally talk about my actual experience living in Mott Haven and my life out in the world, not so much inside the house. Amy Starecheski: Yeah, go ahead. Carol Zakaluk: So I think I left off with me taking Annabelle up on the bus to P.S. 83 which was in - what was the name of that neighborhood-- Morris? Park. Amy Starecheski: Morrisania - Morris Park? Carol Zakaluk: Morris Park. Yes. I don' ; t know if I mentioned, but at some point when she was in pre-kindergarten which was, like, right after I moved back from San Francisco, she was about three years old. And as she aged into four, it was suggested that I might like to put her into pre-kindergarten locally because P.S. 30, where my mom taught, had an annex building, and that had a ESL program for adults at which I could teach at the same time as Annabelle [whose name was then Ann]. What I' ; m going to do, I think I mentioned this last time--if I' ; m talking of before she changed her name, I' ; m going to call her Ann and after she changed her name, she' ; ll be Annabelle-- so Ann was invited to join the Pre-K program and she would be in Pre-K and I would be with a group of 20 or 30 adults who were, let' ; s say there were 25 of them-- I don' ; t think we ever had 30. 24 of them were Spanish speakers and one was a French speaker and I was the assistant teacher and I got to - there' ; d be three groups, one worked with the tachistoscope, one was silently reading and studying, and the third group was a conversation group, so we had the teacher and the assistant teacher which was me and we would rotate all these groups for the - the time- I think it was half a day, that pre-kindergarten went and it was a blast. I loved teaching ESL and I had done it in San Francisco. One of the jobs that I had when I was there was in Chinatown, and all the kids that I had, who were third and fourth graders, were either Chinese or Vietnamese and one Mexican and I loved predominantly working with small groups who really needed extra help, working with teaching English. And I loved it in the Bronx with adults too. But it was even more - it seemed more important to me because these were people who were really needing what I was teaching them to go about their daily business. They were learning how to ride the subway, how to buy tokens, some of them had really just arrived, how to use a MetroCard. I' ; m not sure if we had MetroCards at that point but - Amy Starecheski: Tokens. Carol Zakaluk: It was tokens back then. Amy Starecheski: Yeah the MetroCards came late 90s. Carol Zakaluk: OK. So there we were learning all these important things. I had three students whose job during the day, they worked in a plastic fork and knife and spoon factory in Queens, and they came especially early so that they could kind of leave a little bit early and go to their jobs and they were my best students and they studied when they were home and they worked with each other during the week and they were really fun. So my favorite part was conversing with all these students, and one day the French speaker decided that he would ask me for a date. He was the only one in the room, including the other teacher- the other teacher didn' ; t know how to speak French so he - he asked me for a date in French across the whole room. And all the other students like turned around and looked at each other - " ; What' ; s going on? What is he saying?" ; And I- I, you know, politely told him that I had a boyfriend, and I wasn' ; t available, and he should really behave himself and why wasn' ; t he studying? [laughs] But that was a memorable moment. Anyway- Amy Starecheski: What part of the world were people coming from, mostly? Carol Zakaluk: Oh I had Dominicans. I had Mexicans, the - my - my three students who were the best studiers were Mexican. I think the French speaker was from the Cote d' ; Ivoire. I cannot remember too many of the other locations, but anyway that was my first work experience after moving back to New York after living in San Francisco. And Annabelle, when she was in - Ann - when she was in Pre-K. One of the teachers recommended that I give her an IQ test. So I did. Which was the same thing that had happened to my brother my sister and I. So I wasn' ; t surprised. And you just had to find an independent testing service. And so her IQ was high and I was able to then get her, when she started first grade, into school at Morris Park. So that' ; s how that worked because she tested into a gifted program. So I' ; m just going to take a minute and just mention all the different schools that she went to. And because I had to take her to them, there was no bussing back then for this special privilege, really. If you wanted to put your child in a gifted program, you were on your own to get her there. So it may be different now, and someday we' ; ll have a conversation about that, but she started at P.S. 83 in the Bronx for first, second, third and fourth grade. That was an hour to get up and an hour to get back. Then she went - because it stopped in the fourth grade, I had to then find a place for her to go to fifth grade desperately, and I found a program which still exists called the Anderson Program which is at P.S. 9. I think it' ; s 84th Street and Columbus and it was the initial year for the Anderson program and she got into that because that was like 99th percentile students only. So that was almost a shock to me. How can they have a program that' ; s just for 99th percentiles? But they did. And that was really neat for us to have the experience of going across Central Park and the warmer weather when we had extra time especially after school. We would go home across the park and she had a best friend whose mother was an Egyptologist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So on some days she would ride across town with Carrie on the bus and they would go directly to the Museum of Art and they would run all over the place around, especially around the Egyptology wing by themselves, and all the security guards knew Carrie and it must have been like The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler or something, and because Annabelle - Ann - would come home with great stories and just had a great time hanging out with that particular family. Lots of the families that lived in that neighborhood were really cool and had interesting lives. And then after P.S. 9 [the fifth grade was the final grade for the Anderson Program so she could only be in there for fifth grade]--. So then I had to hightail it across town to East Side Middle School which was her choice- Ann' ; s choice. There were several gifted programs and she was able to visit all of them and then she picked that one. So she was in that one for sixth grade and then she aged into an intermediate school which was-- I' ; m going to have to look this one up later-- but she went to an intermediate school also in the east 80s - Wagner Junior High School. And she was in a gifted program there and then she went to Stuyvesant High School. So that' ; s the - the story of Ann' ; s education. And I would like to say that it was absolutely delightful to share her educational life with her - it was one of the great pleasures of being a mom. There was lots of homework in every single program she was ever in and it would often require special projects. And I was proud that I had saved a lot of junk. That is very, very useful when you need a sudden project like a Science project that' ; s due tomorrow! It' ; s great that you have empty egg crates and oak tag and glitter and all the things that you - your brain can muster from your larder of junk lying around the house because you cannot run everywhere at the last minute to get special things for every project. So if you' ; ve got your - yourself a larder you' ; re ahead of the game. So that' ; s the story of taking Annabelle back and forth. I think at this point I would like to kind of divert to the story of my work life and John' ; s work life and then wrap back around to more about what it was like being with John and living with John. John and Ann were - are of course the most important things, some of the most important things in my life-- and then my life has been a delight having both of them in my life. So let me go back to - I went to college in Binghamton and I have a degree in English Literature and a minor in Theater History. And then I, out of the box, got on a train with a friend - did I tell this story already? Amy Starecheski: Yes. Carol Zakaluk: Ok I went to San Francisco. While I was living in San Francisco, I worked for Friends of the Earth Books. I talked about this already? Amy Starecheski: Mhm. Yep. Carol Zakaluk: OK. Then I - The San Francisco Bay Guardian where I was a proofreader. I worked as an ESL teacher for third and fourth grade in Chinatown and that' ; s when I moved back to New York. I was then a- briefly- the ESL teacher for adults in ' ; 85. I became a book designer for a company called Sarabande located at Houston and Broadway in The Cable Building, which was a wonderful location to be able to go to. And that' ; s kind of the brief period for which I worked. And John took Annabelle back and forth to school and it was a really intense, interesting atelier where this company got overflow from big book companies like Abrams and Random House and there were only four book designers, it was really pretty small and we were all in the same room so we got to talk to each other all the time and compare. I mean walk up to somebody with a couple of different designs. " ; Thumbs up, thumbs down? What do you like? What don' ; t you like?" ; And you would get, at the end of the design of the book, the book would arrive and everybody would stop what they were doing and come around the box and give you a little cheer and there would often be, like, a party when the book actually came to print which was very exciting and I really am grateful that I had that job. Let' ; s see where am I after that? Between ' ; 91 and 2002 I did a lot of assistant tour managing, not for money, mostly-- I actually get paid once for doing this. John would be the sound engineer or the tour manager for traveling bands and usually, as a matter of fact, all the time they gave me permission to go too, not constantly, but if he was out for four weeks, I would be allowed to go for one of those four weeks. And I think I' ; m the only girlfriend that ever was allowed to do that. Amy Starecheski: You said a little bit about this. Carol Zakaluk: I mentioned that already. Well I' ; m going to read the list - when I get to John, of the bands that he worked with because I' ; m very proud of him and it' ; s a very impressive list to me, and I would like it to go down in posterity that I lived with a real- real professional touring guy! At the end of that period, in 2002 to 2005, and this is around the time when artists started moving to Mott Haven, I met a sculptor named Timothy Blum and he mentioned to me - I met him in connection with trying to get a free sculpture placed in Brook Park and he thought that I was looking to buy a sculpture. So we had a meeting and he was just flowing with his ideas and his pictures of his sculptures and all the awards that he had won and finally - I kind of got the sense that he was, thought that something different was going on than actually was going on, so I said, " ; You know, I' ; m really looking for free - a freebie here." ; And he said, " ; Oh! Well in that case, I think we can the conversation. Boy, I wish I had a grant writer, my grant writer that I - I' ; ve had for a really long time just moved to Florida. I don' ; t have anybody because I could really use the money." ; And I said, " ; Well you know I think I can help you with that." ; And who knows why I said that, but I liked the guy, I liked his ideas. I thought he had really exciting ideas and I thought maybe I could help him. So I became his grant writer for two years. No, three years and it became really clear almost immediately that he did not have enough help, that he didn' ; t have people to help him, because I would be writing a grant for half an hour. And no sooner had I started when he would say, " ; Carol I really need you to come in and hold this while I weld" ; or, " ; Could you please stop what you' ; re doing and go through this 4000 square foot studio and find me the nuts that go with my welding machine?" ; So then I became his, kind of, studio assistant, particularly in charge of ordering stuff, making sure everything was in its right place, knowing where everything was and often fielding phone calls or being the middleman between him and people that were looking for him to pay them back or people that he needed to liaise with in order to make projects. So that was a- and I can go on and on about this tangent for a very long time and be really specific about unbelievably wonderful projects. And if there' ; s time at the end we' ; ll come back to what I did with Tim Blum. After that, after those three years, he got an offer to go teach at Hong Ik University in Korea, which is like the Yale of Korea, and has a really forward-thinking art program. So he thought about it for a few months. He wondered, " ; Should I go, shouldn' ; t I go? It' ; s a great opportunity, I' ; ll be brave." ; He didn' ; t speak Korean. He really is- was--the kind of person who would get lost walking around the neighborhood. He had a kind of problem with directions. [laughs] Amy Starecheski: Was his studio here? Carol Zakaluk: Yes, his studio was on Rider and, and 141st - between 141st and 142nd, and so walking to work was great for me. I would just walk 15 minutes and I' ; d be there, and it was funny because I always kind of had a premonition that I would work in that--sort of--industrial zone at some point in my life, I' ; d have some reason for being there. And lo and behold, I wound up spending a lot of time in a giant studio. After he went to Korea, there was an opening at - in the same building where he had his studio, there sprung up an art gallery called Haven Arts, which used to be in a very tiny, little space, like one and a half rooms. And they needed a person to - a third person to help run the gallery and spend time sitting there and writing press releases and answering the phone and being interviewed and setting up shows and all the things you do with an art gallery. So I did that for Haven Arts at that location, and then they moved to a much, much bigger location on Bruckner Boulevard. I think the address was 49 1/2? I can' ; t remember the address exactly. So then I was there for two years, and I was one of three co-directors there also. And that' ; s pretty much the last formal work that I' ; ve done. And at the moment, what I do is I assist a kind of rich guy who bought four apartment buildings - not apartment buildings, they' ; re brownstones that have been turned into apartments. So I am assisting him--[his name is Jonathan Brandt] in finding people to be his tenants. So at the moment I' ; ve done that for a building that' ; s right next to - near where I am now in 418, and I' ; m working on 295 Alexander which is half rented and half un-rented. And they are working on 280 Alexander and 279 Alexander as we speak, bringing them up to rental prowess, you know, rental condition. So that' ; s kind of the story of my work life. My volunteer work life is also interesting and it has lasted 17 years, which is the same amount of time you have been in this neighborhood, also! So we met at about the same time that you were getting started with Cherry Tree, and I met Lisa Westberg because she had - Lisa Westberg of the Cherry Tree Association-- because she had posted in The New Yorker an ad for a bike tour of the South Bronx, and I thought: " ; South Bronx bike tour. This sounds interesting. Lisa Westberg. Okay I' ; m going to call this number and see what - what she says." ; So I call up and you know, we talk about the South Bronx, she' ; s got a Swedish accent and at the end of it she says, " ; Where are you located?" ; And I said, " ; East 136th Street." ; She said, " ; That' ; s funny! I' ; m on East 136th Street. [laughs] Where are you, exactly?" ; And we found out that the Cherry Tree Association was in a building at Cypress and 136th and I was at 136th between Willis and Brown Place, and we decided that we would meet the next time they were doing some gardening on my block at Ranawqua Park. So that' ; s how I wound up meeting Lisa Westberg, Harry Bubbins, and what was the Scottish woman' ; s name? Amy Starecheski: Oh, Ariane Burgess? Carol Zakaluk: Ariane Burgess. Yes. So I met the three of them and some other volunteers on my very own block. They had been successful in reclaiming a number of empty lots, vacant lots, in the South Bronx, --along with Rafael Bueno and other people who were part of the Cherry Tree Association, and local volunteers, and I was really amazed because I had spent my whole life walking past those empty lots and seeing them full of weeds and heroin addicts passed out in those lots, and sex going on behind some of those bushes, and I thought, " ; Wow, these are some of the only people I' ; ve ever met who have been successful in rallying local people to actually take a stand, do something, and create something out of what was pretty much a rubbish heap," ; and they had done it in six or seven places. So I was floored. And I decided that I wanted to know more and I wound up going to meetings in their large, abandoned apartment building at Cypress and 136 known as the Cherry Tree building, and becoming a board member. So for the past 17 years I' ; ve been either a board member of Cherry Tree Association or what followed it, which is an organization called Friends of Brook Park based on one of those parks that they had worked on before, at 141st and Brook. " ; Brook" ; because underneath is running The Millbrook which is the name of a local apartment complex, as well. And so we can talk about what I' ; ve done and the Cherry Tree Association and at Brook Park. My predominant contributions at Cherry Tree were- I decided that I would be most useful being a waterfront advocate. So while I was there I made a million phone calls. It felt like a million phone calls. I called every local university, every landscape architecture program I could find in New Jersey and New York, and finally I found a professor at the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design at CCNY, Professor Lee Weintraub, and he was willing to have his class kind of pretend that I was aware of land in Mott Haven and I would go to the class and I would talk about bringing maps and bringing other Cherry Tree Association people with me initially. We would talk about our needs for waterfront access and talk about where we thought it was possible to create waterfront access, where it didn' ; t exist already. Because this is of course a borough that' ; s surrounded on three sides by water, and there are very few places even today where it' ; s legal for us to put canoes and kayaks on the water, and we had canoes and kayaks to go in the water. So I did that, I then took the projects that were generated by the class- well, first of all I went once a week and I stood next to the students and there were 14 or 15 of them and I would stand next to them during their - the last hour of their class and I would hear how their projects were evolving and I' ; d hear their rationales and I' ; d say, " ; I think that' ; s terrible. I think that' ; s wonderful." ; And sometimes they listen to me and sometimes they wouldn' ; t, so but I really enjoyed the interface with students and they came a lot also to Mott Haven and they would sometimes find me and we' ; d go walk around together and we' ; d take pictures and we look at things. So this happened four times over the course of the year - Amy Starecheski: I actually just noticed this clip' ; s making noise when you tap on it. Carol Zakaluk: OK sure. I did that with four different classes in succession and each time I took their projects and I showed them at a different place. One time it was at Cherry Tree Association' ; s building, which was called Adverse Possession Gallery and we actually made the front page of The New York Times thanks to Lisa that year. I' ; m sure you were there. One time it was at Hostos College up at the Grand Concourse and 149th Street, one time that was at the Mott Haven Public Library and the fourth time it was at Haven Arts. So those were very, very rewarding projects to me. And at that time I was actually working on it something like 20 hours a week a couple of years. I really put in a lot of time on those things. I hope that they' ; re- they had some lasting effect. We did wind up with a connecter to Randall' ; s Island which is a site that Lisa Westberg initially found years - 10 years - more than 10 years ago, and now we have a wonderful ground level connecter to Randall' ; s Island that wasn' ; t there before and probably also within the next year we will have a pier - a park - not a pier, but a park at East 132nd Street with unofficial waterfront access. But they designed it so that one can, when no one is looking, put your canoe or your kayak right in there and scoot over to North Brother Island if you want to, even though you' ; re not technically supposed to walk on North Brother Island because it' ; s a bird sanctuary. There' ; s, of course, the old Roosevelt Hospital ruins there. It' ; s - I' ; ve been there with Friends of Brook Park and it' ; s a wonderful place if you don' ; t step on any bird' ; s eggs and you don' ; t hit poison ivy, it' ; s a fantastic place to visit. You' ; ve been there. Amy Starecheski: Mhm. Crazy poison ivy. Carol Zakaluk: Yes. I thought so. Yeah. You got crazy poison ivy? Amy Starecheski: No no no, but- Carol Zakaluk: Oh. Good. Yes. There was a lot of it. I had a friend who, later, who actually fell through the roof of the hospital and he didn' ; t get badly hurt or anything but he wasn' ; t with us, he - this is just somebody that I met, an independent explorer, and he said, " ; Oh yeah I went there one time and I had my flashlight but I still fell through." ; And so it' ; s not a place to be taken lightly but it is definitely an interesting place to visit. And as an aside about South Brother Island, my Great Uncle Henry was a salesman for Ruppert Brewery and Ruppert is the person who owned South Brother Island for a while before it was a sandpit. Ruppert had a house there and he had very wild Christmas parties and my Uncle - Great Uncle Henry-- used to go on the ferry and participate in these wild Christmas parties until there was an accidental fire and the house burned down and that' ; s when the sand company made South Brother Island into a sand pit which I think it still is. So, that was my life with Cherry Tree Association with Friends of Brook Park, I was more laid back and I became a member of the arts committee, we had an arts committee and I' ; ve been trying very hard over the years to get people to put environmental art, especially welcome environmental art and performance art in the park, and engage with activities with local people and be welcoming of everyone, and encouraging of arts of all kinds but it isn' ; t easy to get people to be willing to put art in a park situation. It' ; s easier if it' ; s dance or theatre or music. Even music is a little complicated because there is a very loud generator that we use to run microphones and amps and that' ; s a little bit daunting. I do intend to retire from Friends of Brook Park as soon as I can. I' ; ve actually told them I' ; d like to retire at the same time as my husband retires from his work in February 2018 but I will not leave until all is well with the books. We have a few back taxes that we have to file for the non-profit and we have to- I just want to make sure everything is in order before I leave. And if you happen to know of anyone who would like to be on the board of Friends of Brook Park, think about it and let me know, because I know you have Sidney' ; s birthday parties in the park and it' ; s a wonderful resource for - for people. One of the things that' ; s so unique about Brook Park is that what I mentioned before, there' ; s a brook running underneath it and Harry and other people, Harry being our former executive director for years and years and years and years and years, and one of the essential founders of both Cherry Tree and Friends of Brook Park, got a big grant from a NOAA, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, to daylight the brook. And after many years of going back and forth with the Parks Department and engineers and looking at safety protocols, it was decided that daylighting the brook was not safe, but creating a wetland area was OK, so we got, kind of, to a little bit of an impasse for a while, because we needed permission from the guy that lived next door to Brook Park, whose sewer was the sewer into which all of the houses on the block fed rainwater off roofs into his sewer, so we needed his permission to get access to his back yard to dig down and divert the rainwater from all those roofs into the garden for use in the wetland. And what happened was we got permission from the homeowner and then-- he sold the building! So for some reason no one could find the new owner to physically get in the same space with him and get- even talk to him about the project. So it was only two weeks ago that I went over and I did not physically meet him but his - one of his workers was there fixing a boiler and I said, " ; By any chance, you know, I' ; m standing in front of this house waiting for this guy to come home supposedly he' ; s moved into the second floor apartment himself, Mr. Jose Martinez, are you waiting for him too?" ; And he said, " ; Yeah, I' ; m his boiler repair guy and he' ; s half an hour late and it' ; s just about time for me to call him again." ; So I' ; m chatting with this guy and we' ; re becoming friends. And finally, Jose Martinez calls him and he says very kindly, " ; There' ; s a lady waiting for you. Could you please talk to her for just a minute?" ; So I talked to him on the phone and he is sort of thinking that maybe he will give permission and yes, he did receive my letters. Anyway, long and the short of it is, it' ; s not a dead project yet. He' ; s- he' ; s thinking about it and we may still be able to go ahead with a project that would give us 93, let' ; s see, it' ; s close to a million dollars, it' ; s 977 thousand dollars, are slotted for use in the park, if we can get his permission and use the existing design. If we can' ; t get his permission, we have to go with a different design, which means we have to go back to square one, find twenty thousand dollars, and make a whole new design for using that money. So- anyway, so that' ; s the story of my volunteer work which has been very, taking a lot of my time. Now let' ; s divert back to what John did, just for posterity. Before he moved to the Bronx, when he was first living in California, he went to UC Berkeley. He dropped out of UC Berkeley because he just didn' ; t think that it was for him. He was not flunking. He was - it was the first time in his life that he was in a room full of people who were as smart as he was. And I think he was quite daunted by that and because he was admitted as an Out-of-State-er with honors, instead of living in a dorm, he could live wherever he wanted, and he chose to live in a building with four other guys, none of them were students, which I don' ; t think was probably very conducive to being a good student himself! Anyway, so he became an auto mechanic for a year and while he was an auto mechanic- I did not tell you this story yet? His main clients were members of the Grateful Dead. Mickey Hart was the drummer of The Grateful Dead and he used to ride over on his horse and ask when his Volkswagen was going to be ready because he really needed it. And so John got kind of " ; in" ; with people in the music industry, and he also was known as being a really good mechanic. So when this musician who was known in Marin County just north of San Francisco needed somebody to go on the road with him, he thought, " ; Well, John not only fixes my car but he can also fix the trucks, possibly, on the road-- if the bus breaks down, we' ; ll have a mechanic with us." ; So John went to be a tour manager and a sound mixer for Norton Buffalo starting in 1976 and he did that for a year. He worked for Silverfish Audio, he worked for a comedian team, Rick and Ruby, ' ; 78-' ; 79. He was Peter Tosh' ; s monitor mixer in 1979 which is really an awesome memory to him because for one thing, Peter Tosh had a really thick accent and it was really daunting to be in the same room with Rastafarians who had accents that were so thick you could cut them with a knife. And one time, you know, Peter Tosh asked for, " ; Bring me a toool, man, bring me a toool." ; And you know they came with their boxes of tools and you know what did he want? Did he want a wrench? Did he want a hammer? He said, " ; No, no, a toool, man, a toool!" ; And it turned out to be a towel. Anyway, so Peter Tosh. David Soul, John was able to go to Japan in ' ; 79. I' ; ll go fast. Carlene Carter who is the stepchild of Johnny Cash in 1979. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, 1980. Sammy Hagar in Europe, 1980, " ; I Can' ; t Drive 55," ; that' ; s his famous song. Bonnie Raitt, his favorite employer of all time who is very fair and very inclusive and wanted to know everyone' ; s opinion and was just a wonderful person to work for in 1981. Huey Lewis and the News, famous blue-eyed charmer, 1979 to 1982. Quarterflash, Tommy Tutone, who had a big hit, " ; Jenny Nine- [867-5309]," ; 1980, 1983. And those were all the bands that he worked with when he lived in California and then he moved to New York and broke up with his wife, he was married for 10 years. So he got divorced, moved to New York, was living in Tribeca with his good friend Victor and he started working for Mink DeVille, 1984, and he was working for Mink DeVille when I met him. Ok. Then he went to work for Laura Branigan, 1984, was tour manager, sound mixer for The Del Fuegos, my favorite band he' ; s ever worked with, 1984-85. I love The Del Fuegos so much! If you' ; re listening, Del Fuegos, kiss! He was the tour manager of The Call, 1986-87. They were a religious band, but you would hardly know it, but their fanbase was often Christian and they were a really wonderful rock band. And you might know that The Call was Michael Been, was the leader of the call, and his son, Robbie Been, now has a popular band called Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and they are excellent. They' ; re - he surpasses his father in every way, musical prowess, chops. Then a tour manager and sound mixer of Deee-lite, a disco band with a big hit, " ; Groove Is In The Heart," ; and that was 1990, 1991 and we were actually on the road. I was on the road with him quite a bit, and it was just John, me, a monitor mixer, a roadie, and that was it, in a large van, and the monitor mixer and the roadie were in a truck so there were two vehicles on the road. They had never been on the road before. They had never been out of New York City or Washington D.C. in their lives. They knew nothing about touring, they were very young. Dimitri was a Ukrainian immigrant and Lady Miss Kier wore cat suits. All the time. So we would drive around the country and we would pull into little places in Iowa and she' ; d get out and go into a diner in a catsuit with platform shoes. It was amazing! And at the time they had a number one hit which was just breaking while we were on the road. They went to number one. So every, every place that we went, every venue was three times as many people as could fit in the venue would be outside. I got to be- to wear so many hats on that tour. One of them was security guard after the show, or escort for certain members of the band to get through the crowds to get back to their hotel room. It was so wild that we did not- we slept maybe six hours a night. And every single waking minute we were working. If John took a shower I was at the phone taking five or six phone calls. It was so exciting I can' ; t tell you! And that' ; s what being on the road is -can be, can be so, so exciting. And I have other stories about all these things that I can divert to. And now we get to the last few jobs of John: Violent Femmes 1989 to 1992 and then intermittently, on and off for the Femmes through 2013. We did a lot with the Femmes also and became good friends with them, and friends with their friends, Midnight Oil, from Australia, so that I got to take musicians' ; children to the Bronx Zoo and recommend places for them to go like Coney Island. I would take - take them around the city, hang out with them in their hotel room on - in The Roger Smith downtown. It was really fun. Go to their houses for dinner. And then John kind of stopped going on the road and started working at a nightclub called Sounds of Brazil, 1988 through 98. Ten years. And Sounds of Brazil is a world beat nightclub at Varick and Houston. Seventh Avenue becomes Varick as it goes south. Amy Starecheski: Yeah. Carol Zakaluk: Have you ever been there? Amy Starecheski: Not SOB? Carol Zakaluk: Yeah. SOB. Amy Starecheski: Oh I' ; ve been there. Carol Zakaluk: It' ; s a nice place. Amy Starecheski: I didn' ; t know it stood for Sounds of Brazil. Carol Zakaluk: Oh yes. Everybody calls it SOB' ; s. And it' ; s Sounds of Brazil, and every Saturday they would - this is back then, I' ; m not sure they still do this but it used to be, when he was there, one of the weekend nights would be a Latin night and, and the next night would be an African night. And then other things would fill in during the week. There was a Haitian band in heavy rotation during the week. There was an Irish band that would come a couple of times a year. And it was a very popular place for UN diplomats to go and let their hair down. So you could always pick them out. They had the best suits. And John was in the turret above it all. So I would go up. I was allowed to go for free twice a month. So I have been to SOB' ; s over 500 times. And it was so much fun and everyone at SOB' ; s would dance! You could not, you could not not dance if you were there. If you were in the room and you were not in the turret, you were on the ground floor, you would be dancing the entire time that you were there. And that was heaven to me, because John doesn' ; t really dance much, and he did not mind if I danced with other people. So I learned how to do salsa dancing really pretty well, and also lambada while I was there, and it was just such a pleasure. I would always leave happy, and the best days to be there were New Year' ; s Eve parties, which for the average Joe were 250 bucks, but for me, standing next to John in the turret, I was working, throwing confetti out on people and balloons and it was really, really fun to be there, and especially also during Brazilian dancing nights because you had great displays of people on stage, really talented people from all over the world. So that was SOB' ; s. Then he worked at The Village Vanguard from ' ; 93 to ' ; 99, being sound engineer and that' ; s a very little room so he would basically set up the show once and the show would go - run the whole week. So the- Tuesday nights was his big work night to set up and then the rest kind of almost ran itself. There would always be a lot of very interesting patrons there from - also from all over the world because it' ; s a world class jazz club. Then he started at Carroll Music, Carroll Musical Instrument Rentals and studio rehearsal spaces, on West 55th street from 1999 to now and he' ; s retiring next month-- he cannot wait. And he started out being the sound engineer that they hired out like they hired out their many thousands of pieces of equipment. Often, a band would need a sound engineer, so he would not only design the system for them for their needs, for their particular venue, but he would also sometimes go out and make a lot of nice extra money and then, oh, probably five years ago he decided that his hearing was failing enough so that he did not trust himself to mix sound quite so often. So he let somebody else do that. So he works at night now. He' ; s the night manager, and he sets up rehearsals and he still decides what - what are the right things to sell to people that they need to rent and that' ; s the story of John' ; s work life. So I' ; m very proud of him. He' ; s looking forward to retiring and now I will also--because I' ; m doing work life--I will just tell you a little bit about what Ann has done in her life and then go back to other things. So, my daughter went through all of those lovely gifted programs, Stuyvesant High School and then went to - got a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration and Creative Writing at Rochester Institute of Technology, which is a school she picked out of many schools she got into. That' ; s the one that she picked. Then she worked at - while she was in college she worked part time at H& ; M, because there was one nearby and she wanted to buy a car and we weren' ; t going to buy her a car. So she decided, " ; I' ; ll work part-time at H& ; M," ; and when she got out of school she decided, " ; Well am I really going to bat around going to place to place trying to sell my illustrations?" ; And she decided that was too difficult and too competitive for her and it was easier to just get a job at H& ; M because it wasn' ; t so bad to her, she could be a visual merchandiser and kind of use her art degree that way, and that' ; s what she did. She worked at H& ; M for quite a while. She worked as a color team assistant at Eileen Fisher and then, and - I guess we' ; ve got all the way to 2006. She started in 2006 with Levi' ; s, also as a visual merchandiser, and she' ; s been with Levi' ; s from November 2006 to now. And at the moment she' ; s a manager - brand presentation manager at Levi Strauss and she works both in the corporate level and in the field, which means, lucky for me, that she can come east and work in New York City probably twice a year with regularity and she gets to go to Chicago, this past year she went to Edmonton and Calgary, in Canada. She goes frequently to Los Angeles and she' ; s been to the Disney World Orlando zone. She went to Texas this year. She loves to travel and she turned down an opportunity to go overseas and be an expert in a store set ups because she felt she wanted to have a boyfriend and pets. She said if I have to be away from more than six months of the year, I don' ; t want that job. But she does love to travel and she' ; s really glad that she gets to do it domestically. So at the moment she lives in San Francisco, five blocks from where she was born, and I' ; m looking forward to going to visit her in January. Yippee. She' ; s going to be, I can tell you, tape recorder-- I' ; m not supposed to tell anyone else, but it will be announced next week that she is the spokesmodel, more or less, for the San Francisco Film Noir festival that' ; s coming up starting in January. It runs for 10 days and she' ; s the poster girl. They will be- they will be revealing the two posters starting on the 20th of December and that' ; s why we' ; re going in January, to go to the first three nights and attend the gala opening at Castro Street Theater on Castro Street, San Francisco and I' ; m really looking forward to it. I have to get my vintage attire in order in order to not embarrass her while I' ; m there. Amy Starecheski: You guys both really like to stay close to where you are born, huh? Carol Zakaluk: Well I was born here. Amy Starecheski: I know and she was born there and you both live- Carol Zakaluk: Yes, yes. Amy Starecheski: Right? It' ; s kind of unusual. Carol Zakaluk: It just occurred to me yesterday, and I know this is a digression, but I' ; m going to ask her if she would like to pool resources with John and I, because she feels she can' ; t, she doesn' ; t have enough money to buy a house by herself in San Francisco. But if we were to do it as a team of three people, I think we could find a duplex, that is if she didn' ; t live next door to her mother, which she probably does mind, but nonetheless I' ; m going to throw it out there to her when I visit her. She did live next door here for, I don' ; t know, five or six or seven years and she knows that I grew up, I lived next door to my mother, my mother lived next door to her -her mother. So why not continue it if it means that we all get to live in the city we love and we couldn' ; t do it otherwise? So it' ; s just something to discuss. And I just thought about that just a couple of days ago. So anyway, I will now go back and talk about what it was like growing up in Mott Haven and what it was like out in the world. And for that I have these pages just to remind me what was going on. When I was growing up it was 1955 I was born, so late 50s and 60s is when I really had consciousness of what it was like around here. I had four or five friends from school who all lived in the neighborhood. And they are Naomi Diaz, who lived next door, Yvonne Matos and Nydia Rosario who lived on 139th Street, Marilyn Pearl who lived across the street, and Peggy White who lived down the block and we were all either jump rope buddies or friends from school who rode back and forth from school together on the bus, or some of them also came over- actually four of them came over and played in the house with me. And I got to go to their house. So I got to see what some of the other people lived like who were growing up in the same neighborhood. And for the most part I was really surprised that they did not have things. In my house we had a remarkable number of toys because me being the youngest child and my brother and sister being very good with their toys and nondestructive, I had every single toy that my brother and sister had, about a thousand comic books, lots and lots and lots of children' ; s books, and we also had kittens, and this was - the story of the kittens is that a cat wandered in from the backyard pregnant before I was born, named Blacky and Blacky deposited several kittens and then did not die. She was kept by the family. They kept one of her kittens and Blacky. And then eventually I came along. So I grew up with Blacky and TARFU. TARFU so-named Things Are Really Fouled Up, because she was calico, and she had lots of different colors. So Tar, Tarfu and Blacky more my childhood cats. And then my mother felt that neutering was wrong. Spaying and neutering was - was not right for her, because for one thing she felt that she was so social and knew so many people and she was so friendly that she could easily find good homes for kittens whenever we had them. And then later, when she went back to being a teacher, it was even easier because she could just bring a box of kittens to the school and go and bring the kittens to several different classrooms and somebody would bring a note in and say, " ; I give permission. My parents will come pick up the cat." ; We always had a cat, you know, bring it back guarantee, if you don' ; t like the cat, if something doesn' ; t work out you can bring it back any- at any point in its life. And sometimes we got cats back. Mostly we didn' ; t. So every year we had about 13 kittens because eventually Tarfu had a kitten that we kept also. FUBAR, Fouled Up Beyond All Repair, also a calico, so we had Tarfu and Fubar. I think we kept Fubar after Blacky had died so we only had two cats ever, but we did wind up with 13 kittens so that' ; s the other thing that I did at home. I played with kittens, which was the most fun that you can have as a human being--I think, is to have 13 kittens run to greet you and have your job being: make them presentable to humans. Teach them to be kind and gentle with humans. Teach them to come when called. Teach them to use a litter box. That was my job and it was a wonderful job. I read books, I played with kittens, I listened nonstop to children' ; s records and memorized them and played them so many times that I could sing every note of every song and every lyric, and I - I sang a lot with my mom and we - we did a lot of things with her Girl Scout troop, we did projects. So we did a lot in the house that was very fulfilling, that was beyond going out and socializing with anybody. But I did have friends, they did come over, I did go to their houses and they had very little furniture, my friends, and often very small places to live. Marilyn Pearl across the street, her mother was the landlady of the whole building, and they lived in the dark basement. And I think they had two rooms. And every time I went there they had no lights on and we - you know she' ; d take me to the backyard and we would look at the backyard or sit in the backyard and then we would come back out and jump rope. So the only thing I ever did with Marilyn Pearl was jump rope out front but when she came over, you know, we certainly played in my house. And she was a wonderful and lovely person and I just found her on Facebook and sent her a message and I hope she messages me back. Peggy White was interesting to me because she didn' ; t have a father. And I thought that was pretty unusual, and her mother and she had two different last names. So I remember asking my parents how that worked, and what that meant, and having my mother hesitate explaining exactly how that worked and what happened, but she obviously had a really great relationship with her mom. They did a lot of cooking and I was amazed that a mother could cook because mine couldn' ; t [laughs] . My grandmothers did all of the major cooking on holidays, my mom was really great at opening cans. My mom made a fantastic pot roast but she did not make really elaborate or well-thought-out meals. And you know, we got slapdash things and then moved on to the next activity, whatever it was, singing songs or learning the latest square dance or whatever. She did not spend a lot of time worrying about feeding us which was OK because she made up for it and many, many other ways. Yvonne Matos and Nydia Rosario lived in an apartment where I had to walk up three or four different, you know, flights of steps in a five-story walkup which I had not really experienced being in, except for my Grandmother' ; s five-story walkup, and their apartment was similar to my Grandmother' ; s. They had nice furniture in every room, not a lot of toys, but a lot of love, and that their mother, Yvonne' ; s mother, really was super nice - really loved her. I remember that her sister, her older sister, had a giant scar on her neck because she had been in the bath tub and a radio had fallen into the bathtub and she had been lucky that she hadn' ; t had worse things happen to her, but she was a very, very beautiful girl who had a giant red mark on her neck that she would have for the rest of her life. So that certainly stood out in my visits to- to them. Later, when I went to the IGC program on The Concourse, I suddenly met other kids who were white kids and I had one best friend, two best friends who were white kids that lived in my neighborhood and one was Puerto Rican, and there was Janet Murray who was from a big Irish family of six kids, and we went back and forth quite a bit, there, because there were six kids and the parents didn' ; t have a lot of money. They had a lot of bunk beds and they went to the library a lot. And they went to church a lot. They went to afterschool church activities. And I would go to the afterschool church Catholic activities, which was very different for me because I wasn' ; t raised Catholic in any way. So to be in a Catholic church in release time after school every Wednesday the bus would come and kids who were Catholic got out early on Wednesdays so that they could attend religious instruction. And I was allowed to go with Janet Murray one time, and sat in the Catholic Church and there was a censor and a guy speaking Latin. And it was very different. But their family, absolutely really close to one another, and really close to their parents. They lived near the Immaculate Conception Church up at The Hub, that big church just west of- north and west of The Hub, and they really didn' ; t have a lot of stuff either but I' ; m very glad to have known Janet Murray. Astrid Ramos, wonderful person I wish I could find her again. Just the sweetest, nicest person. And Astrid Ramos, me, and a girl named Marilyn Marshak whose name is now Amita Kleifgen, we were a triumverate, and we went everywhere together and we just had the best time! And we were very silly and very jovial and always sat together on the bus. And Marilyn Marshak was my friend, really close friend for about seven years, and she was my entrée into what it was like to be Jewish, what it meant to be a Jewish person. She lived on 154th Street, just west of The Concourse, and I think of all the people I' ; ve mentioned, she and I spent the most time in each other' ; s houses. I spent an equal amount of time in her apartment with her parents and her older brother and sister and her dog, as she spent at our house and she had books and just being with somebody that had a dog was interesting, to watch the training of a new puppy and go on walks and learn about that. I was allowed to go to her Schule, religious instruction, but one time with her father, to a prayer session that was mostly just men, and she and I sat quietly in the back, we got special permission from the rabbi to be there and that was something I had never done then or since, I think - I think I attended two Bar Mitzvahs. So that' ; s as close as I' ; ve ever been to being present during Jewish ceremonies. She was also very, very introspective. The whole family was very much into reading and discussion and intellectual life. And I was very pleased that there was somebody else out there who cared about whether a girl was educated and how well they did in school, because a lot of the other kids that I knew, that wasn' ; t considered - school was not important. But in the Marshak house, it obviously was, and they very much a, you know, took the elder brother and sister to task about what they were doing. Her elder brother went to Columbia University and then decided it wasn' ; t for him and switched to the Columbia School of Broadcasting and became a DJ who was on WPIX and now you can see him, he' ; s the voice of the Thanksgiving Day parade. He' ; s still working. I think he' ; s going to retire probably next year, but really a neat, interesting family and they' ; re like my other family in some ways. And now I' ; m in touch with her, Marilyn Marshak, after many years because we became friends on Facebook, I think -was it Facebook? For some reason I got a call from her about a year and a half ago and she just said, " ; Let' ; s- let' ; s start up again, you know, here I am-- my husband has recently died, and I have more time now, and my children are all living elsewhere, and I' ; m taking care of a couple of kids at home in my spare time and that' ; s my income." ; So now we' ; re - we' ; re phone friends and e-mail friends and we send photographs once in a while and it' ; s really great to be back in touch with her. She lives in Pittsburgh and I' ; m hoping to visit her next September for some balloon festival or arts festival downtown and catch up with her in person. So that' ; s what my friends were like when I was a kid. I was a Girl Scout. Mrs. Adkins was my, not only my Girl Scout leader but ultimately also later my dental assistant, because my mom was Mrs. Atkins' ; s best friend and vice versa. Mrs. Adkins lived where Ranaqua Park is now, in a five-story walkup, and I used to go to - you know--about where the swing set is, I used to bake pies every year with Mrs. Adkins, and attend a couple of Girl Scout meetings, and the Girl Scout meetings were often in schools or in local churches and we did some campfire things in Pelham Bay Park and we did some outings to places like Rye Playland and sometimes museums. We' ; d work on merit badges but mostly the girls in the Girl Scout troop were kind of poor so we didn' ; t often wear uniforms and we sometimes didn' ; t do things that other Girl Scout troops do because kids couldn' ; t afford to pay dues. So I was a Girl Scout for a couple of years, a Junior Girl Scout with Mrs. Adkins and most of the Girl Scout things I did, I did with my sister' ; s Senior troop because they met at our house and it was unavoidable. They were right there with me. I went to riding lessons because I was a horse fanatic. My parents paid, which was a lot of money at the time for me to go up to Van Cortland Park Riding Academy about once a week for maybe a couple of years. And they also sent me for two years to camp Wishe, short for Wischenski, riding- riding camp in uh - let' ; s see, Goshen? Near Goshen, New York. And that was wonderful. I really thank them to this day that they spent that large amount of money to send me to riding classes and also to riding camp because it was a great pleasure. And I got to be pretty good at it. I did not jump. I got to the point where you were just starting to learn to jump and then camp was over. And I aged out of it, kind of-- I became more interested in boys at age 14. So I stopped going to riding camp which is-- I' ; m very sorry. And sometimes I miss it. Particularly whenever I see a horse, I really remember, I have a visceral memory of what it felt like to ride and I certainly enjoy being around and taking care of horses and animals in general, but, horses in particular. I also had guitar lessons. I went to a funny little studio close to The Hub, just south of The Hub. I' ; m gonna say it was 148th or 147th and Willis on the East side. It was a triangular building and you' ; d go up to the second floor and you would have a guitar lesson in the point of the building with I don' ; t remember his name [but he had played violin in the Philharmonic and he was a kindly Italian man who used to say to me, [Italian accent] " ; You no-a-practice, you no-a-practice," ; on the days that I did not practice, and he could tell when I had practiced and when I hadn' ; t. But, those were the only formal music lessons that I ever had and it was really good because I got a lot of pleasure out of playing the guitar and singing throughout my life at different points. And so it' ; s just one of the things I did when I was a kid. We went to Astoria Pool in Astoria, Queens, which is a huge pool with an Olympic size diving facility that was built for an Olympics event. So it' ; s huge. That' ; s where our family went to get away from the summer heat. My father had a car because we won a car. Did I tell you the story of winning the car? OK. The story of winning the car. We used to go every year for two weeks to Southampton, Long Island because Uncle Charlie, my mother' ; s uncle, had a house there, and after my mom started working again and being a teacher, they had enough money so that they could rent a whole place of their own for a whole month, sometimes two months, out in Southampton, near Uncle Charlie' ; s. But without fail we would go to Uncle Charlie' ; s for two weeks. And Uncle Charlie, being a retired guy, drove the hearse for the Catholic Church who was very, very devout. He worked in the liquor store and he also ran the roulette wheel during the annual Catholic Church Bazaar. And so Uncle Charlie said, " ; You guys got to come out during the church bazaar. It' ; s always a really good time. And plus, you can help me with the roulette wheel, you can help me set it up and take it down. And, you know, just check out the odds--if you buy tickets to buy this year' ; s prize, which happens to be this Ford, brown Ford station wagon, Ranch Wagon, then you' ; ve got really good odds because there' ; s only a couple hundred people that come to this bazaar." ; So my mother, who loved taking chances on things, she loved buying chances. Raffle? Bring ' ; em on. You know, " ; Selling chances for something? I' ; ll take 10." ; My mother bought 10, one for each of the- two for each of the family members. So- so they call the winner and it' ; s - it turns out to be my brother' ; s number, and my- my brother is 15. So my mother, standing next to my brother, says, " ; Switch tickets, switch tickets with me! They might not let you take it because you' ; re a minor." ; So my brother switches the ticket with my mother and my mother says, " ; I won!" ; So we won a Ford station wagon, which was wonderful, and we named it Buttercup. And, like, for years my brother would say, " ; It' ; s really mine. It' ; s my car. You know I' ; m letting you drive it, but only because I' ; m not old enough yet." ; But we loved having the car. And so it was very easy to go to Astoria Pool in the station wagon and come back. It was like 10 minutes to get there and back. I spent a lot of time as a kid either with Grandma Boekhoff in this house where we are now or with Grandma Zakaluk and Grandpa Zakaluk across the street, the corner building, and that' ; s what life was like inside for me. At some point, my mom made me join a church choir downtown also. That was the last extracurricular thing that I wanted to throw in. It was at St. Bartholomew' ; s, which is a kind of world-class singing organization that they have because it' ; s a lot of adult singers who were opera wannabes who didn' ; t make it. So they take the lesser, part-time jobs at a number of churches. They get paid something and they' ; re really, really good. So they had a children' ; s choir that got to sing with them periodically on big holidays. And you would sometimes get to be on TV. They had an amazing Christmas pageant where everybody got roles and you got costumes and there was really expensive lighting and every seat would be filled. Think St. Patrick' ; s but littler, a little bit littler, very big church, very theatrical. Amy Starecheski: It' ; s on Park Avenue? Carol Zakaluk: Yes. Amy Starecheski: Yeah. Carol Zakaluk: It' ; s on Park and 51st, between 50 and 51st. Amy Starecheski: Mhm. Beautiful church. Carol Zakaluk: It' ; s Romanesque, it' ; s really nice inside. I didn' ; t believe any of the religion but it was a very good musical education. And so I' ; m - in a way I' ; m glad that I did that anyway. So back to Mott Haven. And now I get to tell you how difficult it was to grow up in Mott Haven as it was, in the 60s and in the 70s in particular. Just in general, it was a lawless atmosphere. There were a lot of fires and bombed-out-looking buildings that looked like they were rotten teeth, standing as you drove by on the highway, you would look out and see all these buildings look like they were ready to be taken down. Like when you were in the London Blitz or something, and it certainly was heroin infested. And I remember in the 60s there were people passed out on the street sometimes, and I would walk to the subway to go to junior high school downtown. Did I tell you that I went to junior high school downtown? Amy Starecheski: Mhm. Yeah. Carol Zakaluk: Ok I went to Rhodes. There would be people passed out on the street, there would be a lot of empty lots in which you would see people who were on the nod from being heroin users. I witnessed people making - not making but throwing Molotov cocktails, which is a bomb made out of a wine bottle. You know, you light the end of it and you throw it in? I saw kind of a wino, derelict guy down the block here, throwing that into a building that then became Ranaqua Park now. There were buildings there, but they' ; re - they' ; re not there now because they were red-lined, of course, somebody at City Hall decided to draw a red line around a section of the map, because the five-story walk-ups in certain sections of Mott Haven were deemed not - not cost effective to renovate. So the only recourse that the owners of those buildings had to recoup anything was insurance money. So I believe the case that I witnessed, some owner paid that guy to throw and start a fire, throw a semi, little bomb inside the buildings and start a fire. I saw people--dozens of people were always sitting on their stoops, because unemployment here was so much worse than it is now even, there would be young men, mostly men, but a lot of people sitting on stoops and they seemed to me to be there all day. And I had a sense that - I was a very private kid. And as a teenager in particular I certainly did not want to be singled out or stared at or looked at, you know, when I didn' ; t want to be. And every single time, I went anywhere, outside the door, there would be, you know, a sea of eyes watching. If you, for example, put out as trash, something that contains some metals, within, like two minutes somebody would come from one of those stoops and take it apart to sell the metal as scrap. That' ; s how desperate people were for money of- of any kind. There used to be people that rang the bell once in a while asking for food. There was one kid named George in particular who came almost every day. And he - he hardly said anything. And you knew he was hungry because he was from a big family across the street and his mother couldn' ; t afford to feed all the kids. So George, who was a little bit simple-minded, came to the door, and my- my family would either give him a piece of bread or a banana, almost every day, for years, and now I believe he still lives in the neighborhood. And every once in a while he says, " ; Hi," ; but I never recognize him. I feel kind of guilty about that because, you should. But he looked significantly different now that he' ; s grown up. And that was really hard to watch. My family taught us three kids, their general sentiment was that people could not help it, that they came from really poor backgrounds, either in Puerto Rico or from wherever they came from, they didn' ; t have resources, the same resources that we had. They weren' ; t lucky enough to have an education. They didn' ; t have two parents at home. They didn' ; t - they weren' ; t privileged. So we should be understanding but at the same time it was really difficult to, to kind of navigate and survive in Mott Haven. It was hard to get goods and services sometimes. Spanish was the predominant language for a very, very long time and bilingual education, while it looked to be a good thing, didn' ; t seem to be working. After the five or six initial years that it was going, it seemed like it to me and to my parents also because they were both public school teachers at one point, that it was kind of a crutch for a lot of people. What else can I tell you? I had a lot of trouble with machismo. I think it was a Hispanic culture thing that young men should be interested in girls as soon as they were 13 or 14 or 15. That that was kind of a ripe age at which to start pursuing the female sex. So when I was 13 and 14, when I left the building to go to school, there would be a little group of men, sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes three, who would walk along with me and either in English or Spanish, more often Spanish, talk to me, and they would try to get a date or they would just try to chat me up, so to speak, and I could not understand Spanish at that point. But it was the motivator for me to select Spanish as my second language at school and they wanted to track us into French and I had to go speak to the - the dean and explain why I wanted to study Spanish and my two rationales were that I wanted to be able to understand the people that were in my immediate neighborhood and that I felt that it was an easier language to learn and that it was hard enough to master any language. So if I had any hope of being able to keep what I learned in school throughout my life I had - I had better start with something that was an easier language. I had a chance to learn more of it. And so they let me take Spanish, and once I took Spanish, I began eventually to learn what people were saying to me on the street. And later, as I got older, and after I came back from San Francisco, it was a tremendous boon to be able to speak some Spanish. And I formed really great relationships with some people because I was able to speak some Spanish. For example, the people in Pioneer grocery store, there are lots of them that don' ; t speak English at all. And I, at one point, had a little group of people and every time I went in, they would come over to me and we would have a conversation in Spanish and they would think up things to ask me and I would go home and I would find the answers and go back in Spanish and we would have these dialogues which was tremendously fun. Sometimes it wasn' ; t easy to go grocery shopping because it took so much time to do that. And then the other time it was extremely useful was when I was working on cats in the backyard. That' ; s the other volunteer thing that I do that I left out. Cherry Tree Association and Friends of Brook Park, I' ; m on the board of directors of BronxArtSpace, a space which is an art gallery on 140th Street, which is very rewarding, and I' ; m also a member of Neighborhood Cats, which is, in some ways, reversing the work of my mother, populating the Bronx with cats for decades. Now I have a certificate. I' ; ve been through a very long class, enabling me to pick up stray feral cats, take them to the ASPCA, get them spayed or neutered for free, and then I bring them back, and as long as there are feeders in a community, I can release them. and those feeders will continue to feed them. So at the moment I have a feral cat colony in my backyard called The Rat Pack with 16 to 20 cats, and most of those cats, actually 12 of those cats, were from a fellow who lives catty corner to me, and his name is Manolo and his wife is Cindy. She' ; s Puerto Rican and he' ; s Cuban and they have so many children living with them and grandchildren that they have got their hands full. They have no extra money. They never heard of spaying and neutering and when I showed up at their doorstep and said, " ; Hey, you need help? There' ; s 20 cats coming from your yard into mine every day and-- really hungry, and you know, we don' ; t do something there' ; s going to be a hundred." ; And I said all of that in Spanish because he doesn' ; t speak any English at all. He' ; s been here for, I don' ; t know how many years, but it' ; s rather amazing to me that he doesn' ; t speak English at all, but he doesn' ; t. So that - that was rewarding and he was very thankful and it' ; s also kind of important because now he seems to have even more cats, and come March, I' ; m going to have to do a new round of neutering and spaying. Anyway, so Spanish has been very useful in the early days, I guess in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s, not a lot of English education was out there for people I guess and most people spoke Spanish. Now, it' ; s completely different because there' ; s a generation who has grown up here who speak English so it' ; s a very different experience being in Mott Haven now. But back then it was - Spanish was the language number one. There were a lot of methadone clinics. There was one that I - two - in the neighborhood that I walked past all the time. One that I walked past all the time on my way to P.S. 31. So there would be people lined up outside the big building on 138th Street and the Grand Concourse, not sure it' ; s still a methadone clinic. Amy Starecheski: I think it is, yeah. Yeah. Carol Zakaluk: I think it is too. Back then it was kind of scary, and it was unmarked and there were all these people hanging out outside who kind of look like ne' ; er do wells, look kind of scruffy, and nothing ever happened to me, but that' ; s what I passed on the way to school. There were a lot of quality of life issues that were - that made the day-to-day-ness of living here really hard. There were - it was common for people to back their cars up on a one-way street if they saw someone who was their friend. They would say, " ; Oh, my friend is back, backwards." ; They would drive backwards down the street and they would also just stop if we happened to be in our station wagon going somewhere. It was very frequent that somebody would be just stopped in the middle of the street in front of us because they saw their friend on the sidewalk and their friend had to come over and have a conversation with them. So this was like a daily occurrence, getting - normal rules did not apply here. There were people that would steal power by running an orange cord across 136th Street so that they could power lights in the - in the burned down, you know, lot, across the street where cars ran, from the light pole on the other side of the street. That' ; s ballsy! But this happened! There would be open hydrants every summer. As soon as the thermometer hit, say, 90 they would open both hydrants, sometimes. And back then, for some reason the sewer system was such that whenever that happened, you could not get water above your main floor. So all of the people who were on the front-- in the five-story walk ups had to come down with buckets, to get buckets from the hydrants to carry water back upstairs. And I had to buy a garden shower, a children' ; s toy. That was the size of John, you know six feet tall, garden shower thing, that you were supposed to use in the backyard so that we could have water in the basement here. You' ; re laughing, but luckily my grandfather had installed a drain in the floor of the basement - so to make it easy to wash the basement floor. And so I would set that up in the basement. And when the hydrants were open we could still take, sort of, showers in the basement. I felt very lucky that I didn' ; t have to carry the water upstairs and my parents would come over and use my basement shower and I was very proud of myself that I had created this work-around during the summers. But I realize- I didn' ; t really realize it at the time or it didn' ; t faze me so much at the time--but this was kind of unusual for life in the United States! It was unusual to have to shower in the basement. It was unusual for there to be people driving backwards down your street. It was unusual for there to be heroin addicts passed out in the street and for people to be stealing power. There was squeegee men. Later during the 80s a lot of corners around here, and they were very annoying. Every intersection you came up to in Mott Haven would have people begging for money and you know that squeegie would be on your windshield, they' ; d be trying to wash your windshield because they wanted a handout because they were hungry. At one point, Mayor Giuliani came along and a lot of people didn' ; t like Mayor Giuliani. But I have a very fond spot for two things that he did while he was mayor. One was he - the squeegee men went somewhere, they went away. He made - I don' ; t know what he did with them, but he kind of forced people into homeless shelters, I think, more, which may be good, maybe wasn' ; t, but for my quality of life here, it was a good thing. And the other thing that he did was, there was a lot of police corruption in the 80s. For example, right next door to 422, where we are now, in 424, there was a drug den for years, at least two years if not three. There were guys who didn' ; t live there, but they were there every day from like 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. or 7:00 or 8:00 or whatever it was, they had work hours, and they would sit on the stoop on folding chairs and they' ; d be inside when it was colder. And they- every 15 minutes, somebody came and made a purchase on the stoop or inside the house and the police knew that it was going on and nothing happened. And there was a lot of that throughout the whole neighborhood. At one point I took Ann to a - we went to the post office for something on 139th Street, and after that I took her to the playground that later became- I guess it' ; s called People' ; s Park, used to be a big empty lot next to an apartment building and lots and lots of broken glass by the swings. But I thought, " ; We' ; re just going to be here for a few minutes," ; I' ; m swinging her on the swing, and I see a line of people going up to the main floor window of the apartment building and a little old lady opens the window and hands drugs out like 10 feet away from the swings of a playground. And so this went on a lot on many, many corners, many places in this neighborhood. This was very, very visible. There were a lot of gunshots. The other thing Giuliani did, was he sent a separate task force to deal with drugs. And they even had a trailer unit thing, like a temporary house that they set up outside the 40th precinct for those separate guys. And during the period that they were there, there were very- there were - there was less drug dealing, and at some point, while I was taking Ann to P.S. 83 and Morris Park, we stepped outside at 8:00 a.m., I turned around to lock the door, and at that very moment, with me and Ann on the stoop, a SWAT team arrived with a battering ram and guns drawn and they broke into 424 and they arrested and took a bunch of guys out. But I' ; m sure that they weren' ; t intending - they didn' ; t know we were going to step out right then, I' ; m sure they wouldn' ; t have timed it that way. It was our luck to be present during the takedown of 424' ; s drug dealers. Gunshots. There was a lot of gunfire at night. You were inside your house and you felt, " ; I' ; m not going to worry about it. Mostly they shoot at other people they want to shoot at." ; You- you heard stories about people getting hit with stray bullets but you just kind of, if you lived here and it was your decision to live here, then you didn' ; t think about it. You just kept your head down and most people that I know on this block have their main living spaces in the back. That' ; s partly also for noise because now I get to the worst quality of life assault of all to me. Me, who grew up memorizing records and listening to every note of things, sound, is to me the worst thing about living in Mott Haven, and in fact, probably, I know it' ; s the biggest complaint of anyone living in New York City is the assault of unwanted sound from outside. But part of that other culture, that you know, the other people that were moving into my neighborhood, had in their cultural background the sense of sharing music as a friendly thing. So people, all these people, that are sitting on stoops outside are also playing radios and they' ; re playing them very loud, very - top, top volume and you know beat boxes came around in the 80s also and you could easily have giant beat boxes producing a lot of sound and I would sometimes have that experience in the front and in the back because people would be hanging out in their backyards doing that. We also had roosters. It was common for people to have chickens and roosters even though they, I think, were illegal. You know people would look the other way. So there would be roosters crowing, there would be salsa or hip-hop music blaring, cars would go by with giant beat boxes, you know, built into them, sound systems built into them and they would just park and they would be--. The idea was, " ; I' ; m sharing my wonderful music with the street." ; But there would- I never have been able to understand that. I have always been, " ; Keep your music to yourself, keep your music in a headphone." ; I' ; m totally down with that, and it has been really horrible at times to try to keep my sanity with all of the sounds coming in. Amy Starecheski: What do you do? Carol Zakaluk: Well, back then I think probably the worst period for me was when, after the drug dealers, we had a really nice couple for a little while, couple with a child. They were great. They lived there maybe five years. Then in 424 we had 10 people, only one of them had a job, and she worked as a building manager on 138th Street so she had a very short commute. So all 10 of them were there all day, pretty much, and, because there were 10, and they didn' ; t - they needed extra space, they would occupy their stoop and their backyard from maybe 6:00 a.m. till 1:00 a.m. they were in the front and in the back. They played music and they talked. They talked to each other and they hung out and they talked with neighbors and they were very loud. And I thought I was going nuts during those 10 years so what I did there, my- my survival technique, was, when they were particularly loud, I mean, not only did I speak to a normal human being. After five years I let them- I thought that they would move. I really did. I couldn' ; t believe that they were still there after a few years. So one day I went out and I spoke to them and I said, " ; You have cousins who live in 418, and so every day, both families come out, you' ; re on the stoops of 418 and 424 and you allow your children to run back and forth between 418 and 424. Well, we' ; re in the middle, and it' ; s really hard to be in our living room or our kitchen without hearing you guys." ; And I- it just wasn' ; t going over well. And from that day on I think they hated us and we didn' ; t want to have anything to do with them. They said to me, " ; You should be glad we don' ; t break your windows." ; She said to me, " ; You should be glad we' ; re a nice family that don' ; t - you know that we' ; re not breaking windows." ; And so from then on I - I tried calling their landlord and asking him to try to ask them to keep it down. I asked the landlord to remove their back deck because it was illegal. It was right up against my fence line so that they could literally stand about six inches away from my kitchen sink, that he gladly took down and gave them a smaller staircase. Anyway, what I did was I taped them, and I created a project for an art gallery which was a stoop, and the idea was you would enter the art gallery and you would sit on the stoop and you would hear the tapes of people making noise and you would then answer a questionnaire: " ; Do you think this is loud? What do you think of what you' ; re hearing? Do you think this is interesting conversation? If you lived, you know, within ten feet of this every day what would you do?" ; And the point of it was that people coming into the gallery would hopefully think about and learn and, you know, develop some consciousness of a sense of keeping it down. That other people were living nearby, that they were sharing space with other people that they weren' ; t necessarily thinking about. Anyway. And that was the way that I coped with that. Also earplugs and for the most part, trying to go to other places in the house where that sound wasn' ; t. So I tried to be loose about it. Sometimes I would just leave. Also I would go downtown to do something else for a few hours and then come back and then I had a break from being there. But yeah that' ; s - that' ; s was my - my feeling about it. Taxis wouldn' ; t take us here. That' ; s another thing, is you' ; d get in a taxi downtown and say, " ; East 136th Street." ; And they' ; d say, " ; I' ; m sorry, I' ; m going off duty. Can' ; t take you there" ; . And that happened. Betsy Bilsky was a friend of my sister' ; s who was coming for a visit, she was a Californian and went to Bryn Mawr -Bryn Mawr with my sister. She got out of the subway and somebody spit on her right near St. Jerome' ; s Church because she was a white girl with blonde hair, and she arrived in tears. You know things like that happened. Shall I go on now to crimes? Actual crimes. Would you like to hear about crimes? I have a page full of crimes that I either witnessed or was privy to. And then I think I' ; ll be pretty much done with this. You can ask me questions. Let' ; s see, in the 70s, Grandma Boekhoff, Harriet Boekhoff, who lived here, had a roomer, who lived upstairs in the second floor front room. A Polish man named Louis Bulla, and he lived here for about ten years. She needed - she needed extra income and he provided a little bit. He came down to make one evening meal every day and he would sit and play cards with her and other ladies from the church, and once in a while she would get a man from the church to come so Louis wouldn' ; t be lonely. And I learned to play canasta with them. I mean I had a lot of great experiences with geriatric people as part of my growing up, but anyway Mr. Bulla was a - had many little odd jobs in Manhattan and one of them, he was a doorman. So he came home in the winter one night with his big, long doorman coat and his little doorman hat. And somebody stabbed him on the stoop and took his wallet-- under the armpit. But because he was wearing a very large, heavy coat, he did not die. And I came home from wherever I was, and I came into this room and saw Louis sitting here and the doctor had come to the house, because we had a doctor, Dr. Herman. Theodora Herman, the nice little German woman, had an office and an apartment on, like, near the post office. And anyway, she had come over. She had bandaged him up, and the police were here and taking his deposition. And he was going to be OK, and he was going to go and see a hospital - go to a hospital the next day. But that happened. And it was probably the most violent thing that ever happened to anybody associated with, with our family. So that happened in the 70s. There was a break-in at 422, this house. A youth came in the second-floor window. He just broke in. Now we have scissor gates up there, but we didn' ; t back then. So somehow he got from the Diaz family house, came across, came in and stole a few small things. We also had a con man caper at this house, where two guys came to the door dressed as Con Edison men in coveralls and they said, " ; Emergency! We got to get in, there' ; s a gas leak down the block. Ev - We' ; ve got to get in. We' ; re turning out all of- turning off all of the gas to all the houses so that there isn' ; t an explosion." ; And Mr. Bulla and Harriet were, I guess, on this floor eating a meal or something, and they said, " ; Great. You know it' ; s in the basement. Go ahead." ; And so they went and they did something or other, and then they came back and they managed to steal a watch and some coins and some money, some cash. They distracted, you know, the elderly people enough, so that they got a few things and they got out. There was also a - an illegal entry. There were two illegal entries, one at 420, and that was when the Diaz family, remember Naomi Diaz was one of my friends who used to play with me. Her house didn' ; t have much of anything in it except furniture, no toys, no nothing, that struck me. So she mostly came to my house. Plus, she had uncles living with her, which is very unusual, I thought. You know, I was familiar with a nuclear family living in a house and she had these extra people in there. On the day or the week that they moved back to Puerto Rico after 10 years, the uncles climbed over the fence, came in, broke in through the back of 420 and stole all the things that Naomi must have told them about over her visits. You know, I' ; m sure that very innocently, and I didn' ; t tell you this story already? No? OK. Naomi would come over and we would project home movies. So she saw we had a projector and that night I' ; m sure she went home and said, " ; Oh, how wonderful. They had a family projector. And I saw the most wonderful movies." ; So the uncles knew where that was. " ; Oh they had a wonderful coin collection. And I saw Carol' ; s coin collection in this drawer right here. And, you know, a lovely bracelet that her brother had gotten her when he was in Paris." ; Anyway, they seemed to know where a lot of really cool things were. They came in through the basement. They took my coin collection, some of my jewelry, some of my mother' ; s jewelry, the projector and the wonderful film of my brother at age 4 running around a tree in St. Mary' ; s Park chasing a sparrow, who for the course of the film very wonderfully ran around the same tree four times! It was this awesome family film and they got that in the same box as the projector. So maybe they were making money so they could fly home with the family to Puerto Rico. For whatever reason they broke in, and it was a very sad experience for us to have lost things. To open the drawer and see my coins not there was a very sobering moment that made me really sad. Amy Starecheski: How old were you about then? Carol Zakaluk: I was about 13 or 14 at that point. The other illegal entry was more dramatic and I was younger. I was maybe eight or nine and it was around winter also. And the family was watching something like " ; Gunsmoke" ; or " ; Paladin," ; or one of those late night 10:00 ish TV shows in the living room, main floor front room in 420. And my father, who had been a Captain, in- in the military and who then came home and was still an enthusiast about guns, he admired them as machines. He never shot anything in his life alive, just targets. He had a couple of pistols at home and anyway, so we' ; re watching TV, and my father goes down during a commercial to get a snack and he comes back up and he says, " ; You guys just stay here. Just- just do me a favor. Just you know, you' ; re happy here. Just stay here for a minute." ; And we thought, " ; What' ; s going on?" ; He went upstairs and he came down with his pistol and he went back to the basement and there was a guy when he went down for the snack, there was a guy sitting at our kitchen table, just sitting. A guy my dad didn' ; t recognize. And he had come in through the back - back door. Had broken in through the back door, was sitting at the table. So my father holds the pistol with one hand and with the other hand, he dials the phone and he calls the police and the police come over and the guy only spoke Spanish but he explained that he was in his apartment on 135th Street and someone was trying to break in. And he was afraid. So he went out the fire escape, saw a light, crossed over the back fences and came in to our kitchen and only intended to just sit. And at one point during the night I thought, " ; My father is in trouble. He' ; s got a gun." ; We kind of inched down the staircase to see what was going on and we saw this guy just sitting there, you know kind of like this, with his hands up in the air. And my father, you know, then dialed and he said, " ; It' ; s OK. You know, you guys go back upstairs," ; and his story was- I think my father did not press charges. You know our family didn' ; t press charges but that was also disconcerting. And it was one of the times when I was glad my dad had a pistol. Probably the only time, really, that I was glad my dad [laughs]- it was the only time I ever saw him use it, you know take it out in any kind of protective or threatening way. And that' ; s it. Oh, oh yes. There was one other, one other thing. John and I were coming home in the late- later 80s from a late night of being at a nightclub, and I had on a miniskirt and tights, and we got to where we were approximately next to St. Jerome' ; s, coming out of the number 6 train subway at Third Avenue and 138th Street. So we were within eyesight of the precinct and a gang of girls came, started shouting from behind us, " ; You don' ; t belong here! Go back to from where you came from. You know, we' ; re going to stick you." ; And so I thought- John was, you know, just felt like continuing on home. But I thought, " ; This' ; s pretty threatening. There' ; s a lot of them. I would rather stop and confront them when the precinct is within view." ; So I turned around and I said, my- " ; I went to that school right there, P.S. 154, my mother taught at P.S. 30, they probably taught your- your older brothers and sisters, both of my parents. Father Grange, in this church right here, buried my grandmother and was her - like her best friend, every Sunday he used to come into that apartment building and Mitchel Houses by and from here. You do not need to bother us, you know. Just, you know, stop bothering us. We are from here! We' ; re not from outside. We' ; re not outsiders." ; So one of - not the leader of the gang but her second, or whatever, who was standing right next to her said, " ; Come on ____," ; - whatever the name of the girl was -, " ; come on, let' ; s leave them alone. You know? Let' ; s go, let' ; s go." ; And they kind of backed up, but it was an interesting situation. And that' ; s one of the only times that I' ; ve ever been confronted with anything like a gang kind of threat. And I remember thinking I was really surprised it was girls. But there were a lot of them and that head girl was really mean and she was coming up right in my face. But I did not want to go closer to the projects, I didn' ; t want to go farther away from the precinct, and John said he was proud of me. They also pushed him. Like, she came right up to John who' ; s six-foot two and pushed him in the stomach so that he moved back about, you know, half a foot. But he- he was very calm and non-confrontational, and I don' ; t think he said two words in the whole thing. But I took a stand. So that' ; s it for - oh no there' ; s more in my - my notes. In my life, there were three dead bodies on the block. In my experience. There was one, there was an incident at the corner bar. It' ; s now a - an apartment building with nothing in the corner store, I think, what is there? Can' ; t remember what' ; s there--. There used to be a bar on the Northeast corner of 136th and Willis, and a guy was stabbed. There were two police involved. I don' ; t know who did the stabbing exactly but the body fell outside the bar on 136th Street, and there was a big white outline around where the body fell for a very long time. So that was pretty interesting to walk across a body mark for months, you know, on my way to school and on my daily route to things, that there is this wonderful white outline where this guy had fallen. Another person was found shot in his car in front of 418 and that was some sort of a drug deal pay-off. The family living at 418 at the time were frightened enough so they moved away because of that incident. The woman said, " ; I have two, you know, pre-teen boys and I can' ; t raise them here. This is not a safe environment for them," ; and she packed up and moved right away. And the third dead body was dumped in a man- under a manhole on the block down kind of near where Ranaqua Park is. And my mom, ever the good citizen, on her way to P.S. 30 to go to work, noticed that the manhole cover was ajar. So on the way to work, all she could think of was, " ; All the poor cars that might damage their tires or it might cause an accident." ; So with all her strength, she pushed the manhole cover all the way closed so that it was, you know, in the correct place. Then she went to work and when she came back from work, same day, there was a hearse on the block and there were, you know firemen and policemen and everything, and evidently she had, you know, closed off the manhole. It had been left ajar because a body had been dumped down there. So, I never saw that body but it' ; s kind of a funny story. Not many people, I think, know that there were three dead bodies caused by strife on their block and I don' ; t know maybe - maybe there are in New York City, maybe it' ; s a more common occurrence than I know. Amy Starecheski: Did your parents think about leaving? Carol Zakaluk: Yes. It was a frequent conversation, and the conclusion that they came to usually hinged on the fact that each one of my parents was the eldest child in their family. So they felt responsible for their parents, and their parents already lived here One lived next door, and the other one lived across the street. So it was very easy for them to take care of their parents throughout their usual week. And they also both worked at P.S. 30, so they could both walk to work. So they would give up - they would have had to move three families, and they would have given up their beautiful, close commute. And I was the only child that they had left living here. And they asked me, " ; Would you - know how bad is it for you? It' ; s pretty bad. You know we notice it' ; s pretty bad and it' ; s bad for us too, it' ; s bad for all of us. What do you - how do you feel about it?" ; And I said I could stick it out, because I knew that really they did not - I could tell that they did not want to move. They were good about many, many, many wonderful things, but they were not good about getting up and moving. They were hoarders in some ways. They definitely had a lot of stuff, and the idea of them moving was just too unfathomable, I think, for them, or they would have done it. Grandma Zakaluk was invited many times to go live with her other son on Long Island in Seaford. And she said, " ; No, no, I insist, I have to have my own place. I don' ; t want to be a burden to anybody. I need to have my own apartment, my own door to lock at night, and you should only have to visit me once or twice a week at, you know, tops. And, you know, no, I wouldn' ; t think of it." ; Even though they- they had a very nice set up for her. She didn' ; t want to go, and Grandma Boekhoff loved this house and didn' ; t really want to go anywhere either, so. Amy Starecheski: Did your parents talk to you about how to handle yourself around here? Carol Zakaluk: Yes. I think the family policy was to be nice to everyone and to try to simplify our conversation so that people who didn' ; t speak English as a first language could understand what we were asking or what we were saying which was very useful and smart. And as we look at the hardware store and the grocery store and the butcher shop, any place we went, we kept it really simple. We tried to keep a very low, low profile. We dressed down, a little bit. My sister, during the years that she was in graduate school at Fordham University, she was studying math to get a graduate degree, and for her extracurriculars, she worked in the Fordham Theater. She was a lighting person and the stage manager and that often meant really, really late traveling back and forth to Fordham on the bus because that was the commute going up Willis all the way to Fordham. So she got a hat that looked like an afro and she was 5' ; 11." ; She- she added to her height by wearing really tall heels. And she wore a big, imposing cape, you know, which was fashionable in the 60s to wear, you know, kind of outlandish fashions. She really was also trying to look a little outlandish so that nobody would bother her on the bus and nobody did in those years when she was going back and forth on the bus, a really hairy decade of traveling around in the Bronx late at night. Nothing ever happened to her. She wanted them to think she was a semi-crazy person or ,if they saw her from the back, to wonder, to not know that she was white. So that' ; s how we got by. And my mom also had an interesting thing that she did. She kind of made friends with known drug dealers. If they were selling fenced goods, that obviously had dropped off a truck or something, she would buy something and she would come home with really awful t-shirts or, you know something that nobody would want. But my mom had contributed. She had given them two to ten dollars for whatever it was and had helped them, so that she had sort of befriended them. And the other thing that we had working for us as a family was that my parents were schoolteachers here, so that if anybody was really bothering me on the street generally somebody else would come up to them and they would say, " ; Leave- leave her alone, man. Her mom was my little sister' ; s teacher," ; or " ; She was my teacher, you know, best teacher I ever had at P.S. 30. Leave her alone. She' ; s OK. You know, she lives here." ; And that was frequent. That happened a lot. Amy Starecheski: How would you respond if people would bother you on the street? Carol Zakaluk: I would tell them that I was not looking for a boyfriend and because I was told to be polite to these people I would say, " ; Thanks for the compliments but I' ; m really not interested," ; you know, or, " ; Just on my way to school, you know, not looking for any engagement," ; or whatever it was my 13 year-old mind thought to say, particularly to people that didn' ; t speak English. I communicated successfully to them that I did not want- I never let anybody carry my bookbag. For one thing, because I was afraid they might steal it though there was nothing in it they wanted, other than maybe my bus pass on my train pass. That' ; s what I did. And mostly I was really appalled by it. It really made me kind of shrink inside. I did not want that attention. I just couldn' ; t wait to age out of it because I knew that once I got a little older they would stop bothering me. Amy Starecheski: How long did it take? Carol Zakaluk: A long time. I think it wasn' ; t until I came back to New York with a child in a stroller. And then suddenly I went from- from eligible slut or whatever, you know, sex object to Madonna. Where- " ; Can I help you carry your stroller up and down the steps? Can I help you cross the street?" ; It was a completely different kind of attention. Yeah, I would say 24, 25 is when it stopped. Has it stopped for you? [Laughs]. Amy Starecheski: No. And feel like, pregnant pushing a stroller, nothing has really actually stopped it, but-. Carol Zakaluk: No? Really? Amy Starecheski: And I was just about to ask you - oh so when you were, like, a little kid was this neighborhood already predominantly Latino and people of color? Or was it, it --was it was it,it-- was it mixed? Like, were there -- like, what was the, what was the demographic makeup of the neighborhood like when you, your earliest memories? Who all was living here? Carol Zakaluk: OK. Well it would be, let' ; s first go through my early school years. I went to first grade at P.S. 43, where there were two white kids in my class and one half white kid, and everybody else was Latino and black. Amy Starecheski: This is like 1961, about? Carol Zakaluk: Yeah. 1961. When I was 6. That' ; s the year that the projects were built. When the projects were built, P.S. 154 was built, and I started going to that one. And even though it was a much better school experience, there were two white kids in my second and third grade class: Roberta - I can' ; t remember last name, was the other girl, and I used to go to her house and it wasn' ; t- the visits weren' ; t that successful. But I liked many of the kids and got along better with that group of kids that were in my second and third grade classes because of the teachers and because they were smarter kids. I was in the so-called top classes instead of in a not-so-great class when I first went to school. I think there were very few white people. There were few white kids that lived on the block. And my mom, I remember her telling me not to be like Hetty and Sally, because they used to hang out on the corner, and there was another girl whose name I don' ; t remember who also used to hang out a lot who was pregnant at age 13 and used to go up and down the block becoming more and - showing more, and it was pretty scandalous back then to be having a teen pregnancy and Hetty and Sally both married corner Latino boys at age 14 and 15, you know and also pregnant, not married, probably, in New York State, but they had mates and they had children really early. And I remember seeing that happen and thinking that' ; s why my mom- my mom used to - and dad, both used to say, " ; We expect you to go to college. We expect you to have a full, young life without the burden of a family. Don' ; t- you know, if you would, if we were to have you do what everybody else around here seems to do which is to hang out and socialize on the street corner, you may very well find yourself married young and have-- not complete your education and not have a full spectrum of opportunities." ; So I understood what they meant. Amy Starecheski: And were Hetty and Sally white? Carol Zakaluk: Yeah. They were white. And they lived down there in the same building as Mrs. Adkins. Amy Starecheski: I know we' ; re probably - we should probably pause for the evening. Oh, let me just - I had one more question, but don' ; t want to lose it. What was it? Oh, just the kind of lawlessness that you described. Was that consistent over the period that you can remember or was it - like was it already like that in the early 60s when you can- when you start remembering being sort of out in the neighborhood? Carol Zakaluk: I would say it was not in the early years of heroin epidemic, but pretty shortly after the heroin epidemic started. And that sort of conjoined with the burning of the Bronx and the dilapidation of the buildings and the stealing of copper pipes out of the buildings and anything metal anyone could find. And it got worse - the crack period was pretty bad also. During the crack period I had had the opportunity of being away at college and then coming back. So I was kind of relieved of some of it by not being here. Once I came home from Christmas from SUNY Binghamton and my dad had, in his classroom, a miniature Christmas tree, he had gotten special permission from the principal to decorate it with crack vials, because there were, like, so many of them on the street, and you know crack vials had a bright colored tip, a different colored plastic tip, and his message was, " ; Take something negative and make it positive." ; I know [laughs] it' ; s amazing he got away with that! But ever the recycler! You know my father found another use for those crack vials. You know? [laughs] Amy Starecheski: I know, they' ; re really cute and colorful. [laughs] Carol Zakaluk: I know it' ; s really appalling. If I was a parent, I' ; d definitely have spoken up about that, but- Amy Starecheski: That is really outrageous. I know I see what he meant, but [laughs]. Carol Zakaluk: He meant - he meant well, my dad- my dad was very - very, very well-meaning and - and really into recycling and was really teaching them about taking bad things and making them good. Amy Starecheski: Yeah. Carol Zakaluk: So I' ; m sorry to say so many negative things. There is actually one really cool thing about growing up in the Bronx. A lot of people had pigeon coops. There were- you see a few of them now. But back then there were ten times as many. Everybody had a pigeon coop on their roof and it was fun to see them flying every day. You know whoever had the coop would go fly their pigeons and I thought that that was a wonderful pastime for - for people. I' ; m sorry we have fewer coops these days. Amy Starecheski: Danny' ; s friends with the guy who has a coop on 141st near the garden. I' ; m trying to get him to let me get Sidney up there to see it because I really want to - They' ; re so beautiful. Carol Zakaluk: Yeah. I am friends with the pigeon guy around the corner. Amy Starecheski: Oh, Yeah? Carol Zakaluk: I gave him a pigeon once that my cats in the back had cornered and they looked like they were keeping it almost like in a refrigerator for later. You know, " ; We' ; re just going to surround it and keep our eye on it. We' ; re not going to do anything to it. We' ; re just keeping it for later." ; And he was there for over an hour. And so I went out with a box and put him in the box and gave him to Jalito. Jalito? No. Joselito. Joselito, the pigeon coop guy. And his are in a store-bought coop that he ordered and had shipped. It' ; s beautiful. It' ; s - all his birds are from the South, they all have vaccinations. They' ; re beautiful, kind of cream-colored and white pigeons. And he loves them all, loves them all. So I don' ; t know if- if you are around when Joselito is around if you want Sidney to meet him. Amy Starecheski: It' ; s seems really special. Carol Zakaluk: Yeah. Amy Starecheski: Is there anything more that you want to add for today? I think we should -if it' ; s okay with you we should probably do one more but for now, is there anything else that you want to say? Carol Zakaluk: Oh, yeah. No I am, I think I' ; m talked out at the moment I can' ; t think of anything else. But thanks for listening! Amy Starecheski: I have lots of qust- I have lots of questions still but I' ; ll save them. Carol Zakaluk: Oh, oh I have one last thing to say. It' ; s about- on the crime tip. Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels. I used to ride the Subway, and I hated graffiti. I hated - I didn' ; t loathe hip hop quite so much. I loved breakdancing, I admired breakdancing, I admired hip hop, but didn' ; t like listening to it all that much, didn' ; t hate it. But I did really, really dislike graffiti and it was part of that sound assault. I didn' ; t like visual assault. I felt people were graffiti-ing everything and that was stuff that they weren' ; t supposed to graffiti. If somebody asks you to graffiti something and they pay you and they want it, it' ; s different. That' ; s aerosol art, but graffiti was something that- tagging was, in places where it wasn' ; t allowed and I hated it. Anyway, associated with riding the Subway, Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels, which founded in 1979, was a vigilante-type group, unarmed crime prevention, and they had an office in the Brook Avenue 138th Street, 6 train station. And to this day, if you go down where the Dunkin Donuts- the new Dunkin Donuts is, you' ; ll see a roll up gate, and behind that roll up gate was a room, and Curtis Sliwa and his Guardian Angels had a pool table and, like, six or seven chairs and they didn' ; t have a bar but they had, you know, a clubhouse there. And you may not have known that but I used to love seeing them in the subway and it - made me feel safer riding back and forth on the subway during the 80s. Amy Starecheski: They had the berets, right? Carol Zakaluk: They had red berets. Red jackets. Amy Starecheski: Yeah. That' ; s amazing. I didn' ; t know. In the Brook Avenue Subway? Carol Zakaluk: Yeah. On the Brook Avenue Subway. Amy Starecheski: I didn' ; t know there was a Dunkin Donuts there now either. Carol Zakaluk: Yeah, yeah. Amy Starecheski: All right, well thank you so much, Carol. Carol Zakaluk: You' ; re very welcome. Thank you for being such a good listener, Amy. Amy Starecheski: It' ; s my pleasure. audio 0 motthavenhistory.org/ohms/render.php?cachefile=Zakaluk_Carol_20171214_session2.xml Zakaluk_Carol_20171214_session2.xml
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Carol Zakaluk Oral History Interview | Session 2
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2017-12-14
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audio
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A third-generation Bronxite born in 1955, Carol Zakaluk has lived most of her life in Mott Haven. In 1921, her German/Dutch maternal grandparents bought a row house in the now-landmarked Bertine Block Historic District. Eventually, all four of Carol’s grandparents settled near one another in the neighborhood. The building has stayed in the family for 97 years, has been home to Carol and her husband for more than three decades, and is where Carol raised her daughter. Carol remembers the rise of the Mitchell Housing Projects vividly, as well as the difficult ‘70s and early ‘80s—and also many grassroots efforts to revive the neighborhood. Her mom, dad, and sister worked locally, teaching public school—and Carol, too, had several jobs in the neighborhood. She was an ESL teaching aide, then a grant and shop assistant for a sculptor, a co-director for the Haven Arts Gallery, and currently is a building manager for two small brownstones.
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This is the first of a 3-part interview. Carol Zakaluk, 62 years old at the time of the interview, is a third-generation native New Yorker whose connection to the Mott Haven neighborhood is tied to the properties she inherited from her grandparents and her own childhood. Zakaluk discusses her maternal and paternal grandparents’ immigration stories and the lives of her extended family members. She attended a mix of private and public schools as a child before going to a SUNY school for her college education. After college, she moved temporarily to California, where she worked a number of jobs that helped her to establish her professional career and gave birth to her daughter, before moving back to New York City to raise her daughter as a single parent before eventually getting married.