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Couple Recalls Life on Lower West Side Barbara and Martin Rizek, the authors of “The Financial District’s Lost Neighborhood: 1900-1970,” grew up in a Lower West Side immigrant neighborhood that has since vanished. The community was loosely bound by Battery Place, West Street, Liberty, and Broadway. It was partially demolished by the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in the 1940s. The construction of the World Trade Center all but finished it off in the late 1960s. Barbara, 65, and Marty, 74, now work to preserve three remaining buildings on Washington Street, the neighborhood they left in 1969. They recently shared some memories with the Trib. Barbara: My great-grandmother came from the Ukraine with her husband in the early 1900s. And Marty: My mother was born at 110 Greenwich, but the family was from Slovakia. My father came here from Slovakia at 14, and worked in the mines in Pennsylvania, where he got tuberculosis. Then he lied about his age and joined the army in World War I. Later he worked as a porter. Barbara: The neighborhood was Polish, Slovak, Irish, Syrian, Lebanese, Greek. And everyone knew each other. Living in an area like this, you came here and you were kind of in awe. You were in a canyon of all these office buildings, and here we are in these little tenement houses. We felt we better stick together. Marty: We had a stickball game every Sunday on Albany Street. We used to go to all the yards in the morning and get the brooms, the ones that weren’t any good. We sawed the handles off, and that was the stick. And then there’s the Spalding. You’d throw that one bounce and then hit it like regular baseball. Barbara: And all the girls would watch.
Barbara: But he would get picked on for playing the violin. He’d carry it in a saxophone case. Marty: So people wouldn’t know it was a violin, because that was sissy. Barbara: Material things, we did not have. But camaraderie and simple fun, we had. We went on the roofs for picnics. That was our yard. We’d sunbathe up there and Marty’s father’s band would play up there. And everyone went on the roof to take pictures, especially in your Sunday best. Marty: No one really had anything of value. No one was rich here. Barbara: When I was very young, we had no bathtub. We had a big round tub with handles. And we had a coal stove, because there was no steam heat. I remember my mother would boil the water and put it into this tub. I had a younger sister, and I took my bath first. As we got older, we’d have big arguments about it! I know it’s hard to believe. I mean I’m not 90, I’m in my 60s. But this is what it was like here at that time.
Barbara: And all the ladies would meet in Battery Park. My grandmother cleaned offices at 40 Wall Street. She would meet the other cleaning ladies—they all had two or three jobs—in Battery Park at two o’clock in the morning before going on to their next job. I think they just liked those few minutes to rehash, to remember this or that. Can you imagine? This was the type of neighborhood we had. Young people have no idea of the little simple things that brought us joy. Marty: When we got married, my house was full of people, so I went to my usher’s mother’s house. I said, “Mrs. Chobar, you have to leave.” She was in the kitchen, and that’s where the bathtub was. She says, “Why, Martin?” I said, “Cause I gotta take a bath.” She says, “That’s okay.” It was a real community! Barbara: Our children have beautiful homes with four bathrooms, where we had one bathroom in the hallway that we shared. But they’re missing that uniqueness, that neighborliness. It was really marvelous.
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