Mendel Letters 92–2322 Ryer Avenue in the Bronx
August 26, 2022
Dear Mendel,
I was very unhappy during my freshman year at City College. I was living at home in the Bronx, riding the subway to school, mostly taking required classes that I hated, and felt like I was in 13th grade. That summer my friend Kenny and I went in search of Bigfoot in the Klamath National Forest in North California. After the summer away I knew I did not want to move back in with my parents again and I convinced Kenny to go “halfies” if we could find an apartment.
We checked with some rental brokers in the Bronx, lied about our ages, we were both 18, and one ignored that we had no ID and found us an apartment at 2322 Ryer Avenue near 183rd Street. It was one block from the Grand Concourse and right by a D-train stop, so it was a great location but a really lousy apartment.
It was a 3-room 5th floor walk-up with windows overlooking a middle school schoolyard so it was loud in the morning. The appliances were vintage 1920s, original stove and refrigerator, and the water dripped out of the faucets whether they were opened or shut. You didn’t have to worry about getting scorched because the water was never too hot. But the rent was only $64 a mouth, something we could afford, and we excitedly said yes.
In January during mid-year break I told you that I was going to move out and asked if it was okay to take my bed. You said okay but I don’t think you took me seriously until I drove up in a rented pick-up truck to get the bed and my stuff.
The furniture in the apartment was makeshift from street finds. The first six months we didn’t have a telephone and we never got a television. To make emergency calls we broke open a sealed dumbwaiter and cut into someone else’s line. I made arrangements with one of the offices at school so you could reach me if you had to and I still saw you every other Saturday at the Astoria, Queens luncheonette where we worked together.
Food at Ryer Avenue was very basic. Pre-made hamburger patties, powdered potatoes, macaroni with red sauce, and rice. Because there was only one bedroom, I eventually constructed a wall sub-dividing the living room creating a sleeping alcove with some privacy.
I think the best part of Ryer Avenue was going to the neighborhood Bickford’s Cafeteria at four-in-the-morning after completing a term paper and ordering a stack of pancakes. The other high point was the Great Pizza War of 1970. There were competing pizza places about a block away from each other on the Concourse. When they went to war, one lowered the price of a slice to fifteen cents. The other charged twenty cents but gave you a free soda. We started at the twenty cent slice with a soda pizzeria and then got a second slice at the fifteen cent store.
I ended up staying in the Ryer Avenue apartment for two and a half years, although Kenny moved out at the end of the next summer and our trip to South America. Another high school friend, Ezra, moved in to share the apartment. He ended up staying after I moved out when I started graduate school at Rutgers University. I biked by once years later. The street and building were really dreary.
Your son
Hard copies of these typed letters were discovered in an old camp trunk in the basement storage facility of one of the few buildings that remain standing in this Brooklyn neighborhood. The building is quite decrepit and is scheduled for demolition. The letters were found in November 2048 by a teenager who believes they were written by his great-grandfather. The letters are addressed to Mendel, the letter writer’s father, who appears to have been dead for at least six years when his son, whose name we are unsure of, started to write him. The son appears very agitated in some of the letters. With permission from the family, we are publishing them on the date they were written, only 28 years later.
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