by Alice Rosenthal
I am standing on rising ground overlooking a large expanse of green that blankets this corner of the northwest Bronx. I’ve come back to revisit this distinct patch of time and place from almost a lifetime away and a distance of 3,000 miles. I’ve come to honor it — and to grieve for it — as an American and a Jew. Something I couldn’t have dreamt of doing in those years I lived in it. I look back with love to this time, though my actual memories are the vivid sensory ones of a young child; but with all the advantages and revelations of hindsight I see here, in 1946, in this comfortable, unglamorous, urban community, the blossoming of a vigorous and hopeful democracy. Its emblem and its heart are our park.
Van Cortlandt Park embraces the neighborhood, reaching north to the very edge of New York City, and before it can become a memory, it is caught up by more parkland in Yonkers — the passing of the green, like a torch that is never dropped, from one group of civic custodians to another.
A few centuries ago, this area was a large tract acquired by the Van Cortlandts from the original Dutch settlers. They knew what they were about, those shrewd Van Cortlandt’s, and they lived on this capacious estate during the Revolution and through most of the 19th century. One of the sons built a family home up here, still preserved as a museum in the park. Van Cortlandt Mansion is actually quite modest compared to the ostentatious houses of the Gilded Age that came later. It does not scream to be envied or admired, nor does it invite close inspection. The pristine rooms are roped off and only the polished and buffed surfaces of existence can be seen. Except for a basement kitchen, we see nothing of workshops, fields, or any evidence of the underbelly of backbreaking labor necessary to run the place. Quarters for servants, bonded or otherwise, are not preserved for our view, yet it is the descendants of slaves and bonded servants, and their first cousins, the waves of working class immigrants and their children, who will later become denizens of this stretch of green. [click to continue…]
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