Bread Man Dead in Apartment 13

September 17, 2009 – 5:06 pm

His name was Angelo. Angelo used to climb the stairs backwards on his buttocks to get to his apartment after work, because he was in pain and there’s no elevator in this building. He worked for the bakery downstairs. Angelo was born in this building. His mother had been an immigrant from Italy.

If you walked past Angelo’s door any time of the day or night, you’d hear him crying out in pain. A neighbor told me that Angelo could have gone for medical treatments, but he was distrustful of anyone trying to help him.

One day, after the bakery had been closed for a couple of years, I saw Angelo laying on an ambulance stretcher in the hallway. I did not say anything to the policewoman and emergency workers, and they did not say anything to me. If I had known Angelo at all, I think I would have asked, “Where are you taking him?” I would have asked because, as far as I know, Angelo had no family in New York.

The police department stuck a bright green notice across the door of his apartment this summer, when Angelo died. The green paper sealed the door more tightly than any steel latch or lock.  A neighbor confirmed that Angelo was dead.

Months later another neighbor told me he doubted that there had been any memorial service for Angelo.

Today as I was going downstairs, I noticed a bucket of soapy water and a long-handled mop outside of Angelo’s apartment. The mop handle was lodged diagonally in the doorway, barring all intruders. Some workmen had emptied the contents of the apartment into big black garbage bags. About a dozen of these were stacked on the first floor for pickup by the sanitation department.

In addition, two work orders were taped to the glass door near the entrance to the building. They said that the Greenwich Village Historic District had authorized construction work on the third floor of the building. The landlord was getting ready to renovate apartment 13.

The apartments are all pleasantly rectangular in that line. I mention this because in our building the apartments can be oddly shaped. This row of buildings was built to house the influx of workingmen arriving from Italy in the early 1900s. A neighborhood historian told me that this building will celebrate its ninety-eighth birthday this year, and that means it was built in 1911. The original architect’s floor plans were lost long ago.

When the crew is finished renovating apartment 13,  it will have new blond wood flooring. It will have a tiled bathroom, whereas each of these apartments originally came equipped only with a john and no place to bathe. A john is a small room with one toilet, but no sink for washing the hands and no tub for taking a bath. Maybe there were bathhouses in the neighborhood then. I don’t know.

The renovated apartment will have in addition a beautiful kitchen area with a sink, stove, refrigerator, counter space, and wooden cabinetry. The cracked plaster walls will be removed and new sheet rock walls will be painted bright white.

They’ll probably make it into a one-bedroom apartment with a separate living room and even some built-in closets. These rooms originally had no closets, just shelves above the kitchen sink. The renovated apartment will have air conditioning outlets in both the bedroom and the living room, and plenty of other outlets in the kitchen for appliances. When Angelo’s mother first moved in, this building was not electrified.

When I moved here in 1971, the majority of the apartments were occupied by elderly Italian women wearing black dresses. They were widows, born in the old country, who were afraid of the landlord and called him “The Boss.” I was just a young woman then, 22 years of age and a recent college graduate. I would pass them in the hallways on my way upstairs, and never once did those women in black turn to welcome me or talk with me. The Italian immigrants thought women who lived alone were up to no good. In their view, I should be married, I guess, not working.

This whole area, so trendy and upscale now in terms of high-priced real estate, was in those days a poor section of Little Italy, and the community here was clannish in nature. They clung together and excluded all others.

They seem to have excluded Angelo as well, even though he was Italian. I heard from a neighbor that even when he was a little boy, everybody liked to pick on Angelo. He was yelled at by his irascible mother, who was said to be the spitting image of the tough character Mammy Yokum in the old L’il Abner cartoon series. Angelo was bullied at school and they never gave him any peace where he worked, either. He never married.

In the meantime, the whole world changed and this neighborhood was no exception. The Village is now one of the most desirable sections of the city in which to live. Most of the young people living in this building are paying very high rents.  The tenants usually do not speak with me in the hallways when I see them, even if I say hello to them in passing.  They walk down the stairs with wires plugged into their ears from their cell phones and other electronic devices, and they don’t plan to stay in New York City for more than one or two years. In other words, my neighbors are transients, and they probably see me as a throwback to a bygone era, just as toothless Angelo always was to me.

Divisions between people come in so many different varieties, and I’m sure I cannot list them all.

I want to say that I don’t know the dead man any better than you know him. I shouldn’t even be writing this, because I am not in possession of all the salient facts. Since the Village is an historic district, however, I thought I would tell you a little history, all that I know about Angelo, who lived in this neighborhood his whole life.

I used to see Angelo every day pushing a cart filled with bread down the street for Zito’s Bakery. Zito’s Bakery has been closed for many years now. I never once said hello to Angelo, and he never once turned his head to look at me, even though Angelo and I lived in the same building for 38 years.

As soon as Angelo’s apartment is renovated, it will most likely go on the market for over $3,000 per month rent. I do not exactly wish to put it this way, but as I’m sure you know from reading the above, the dead man himself was worth nothing at the time of his death.

Angelo is survived only by his apartment, located in the heart of quaint, old Greenwich Village.

You may be wondering why I started talking about Angelo and ended up talking about Angelo’s apartment. It is a peculiarity of human nature that apartments are often seen as more interesting and valuable than the people who live in them. Maybe this is because we cannot change human beings, but an apartment can be renovated in a few weeks, given a work crew and enough money.

By the way, it bothered me for a long time that Angelo was suffering so much and nobody could help him. Maybe he did not know how to ask for assistance nor say what was wrong.

Questions for Discussion:

1. Not all cultures are clannish, excluding outsiders. Individuals can be clannish or cliquish, too. A clique is a smaller faction that forms within a larger group. Have you ever experienced this?
2. Have you ever had the experience of being rejected for social reasons; that is, reasons that had nothing to do with you as an individual and your personal qualities?
3. Where you live, do you feel like an outsider? Or do you feel at home there?
4. If you are unhappy where you live, do you ever think of moving to a place you might like better?

© 2009 Barbara A. English      Revised in 2010.      All rights reserved.