The Old Buildings Man

By Raanan Geberer
(Formerly Published in "Wings")

He had lived in the neighborhood, on Cruger Avenue near Burke in
the Bronx, since anyone could remember. No one knew exactly how old
he was. Some said 60, some said 70. He told people he had once been
a jazz musician, and had played with Xavier Cugat's and Woody
Herman's bands, although there was no way of really knowing. The
only people who were seen entering or leaving his house were two or
three odd-looking individuals whom he called his music students.
But he did have a hobby. He was a connoisseur of the old 1920s and
1930s apartment buildings in the neighborhood. Most of the
inhabitants of this area had walked these streets for years without
ever realizing the patterns in the bricks, the stone decorations,
the lintels above the windows, the elaborately tiled floors in the
lobbies. But the Old Buildings Man knew each one by heart. Strange,
most people couldn't wait to save enough money to move out of these
buildings to the suburbs or to more prestigious neighborhoods, and
here was the Old Buildings Man, cherishing them as though they were
the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
He would often sit on the steps outside his basement apartment--which
was not in one of these glorious buildings, but in a plain-looking
three-family house built in the mid-'60s--and talk to children
passing by. New parents who moved in the neighborhood were a little
wary of him, but those who had lived here for awhile had long learned
that the Old Buildings Man was harmless.
"Look at those crazy gargoyles on the top floor!" he would tell a
group of youngsters who would pause near him on their way from
school. "Some builder must have put them there as, like, a secret
message to make sure cool people would move in! And you see that in
the back, you see that alley over there, that old faded sign for
Jacob Goldberg's Hat Store? Like, that was when all the men wore
those old felt, wide brimmed hats! Like Bogart, Cagney! What a
crazy style, Jack!"
Sometimes he talked about the names above the buildings' doorways,
names that had been initially used to attract tenants way back
when, but had soon been forgotten. "Hudson Gables! Boy, what does
that conjure up? Some far-out sailing ship, like the Vikings,
cruising up that river; oh, just a few miles west of here! And
those dudes, they're climbing up the masthead, blowin' those horns!
That's something else!"
Yes, those old buildings were his pride and joy. "You see that six-
story orange brick building over there? See those rusty old
fixtures on the roof? Well, before you had washing machines and
dryers in the basement, that's where they'd bring the clothes to
dry. Can you imagine one of those oldtime women in some kind of
funky house dress, maybe wearing curlers, going up to the roof just
like Alice in the HONEYMOONERS, and wheelin' the clothesline in,
reading some kind of movie magazine about Clark Gable or James
Cagney? Those old buildings have so much soul!" And even though the
kids had no idea what he was talking about, his enthusiasm,
something about his tone of voice, attracted them.
Years passed. The neighborhood became a little more neglected. The
man's beloved old apartment houses became rundown--front doors
jammed open, graffiti on the ground floor, mailboxes that had been
broken into, elevators that didn't work half the time. The music
students stopped coming. The children stopped talking to him. There
had been just too many incidents in the neighborhood, and their
parents told them not to talk to any older person they didn't know.
One day, a short circuit in the Old Buildings Man's ancient
electric heater caused a fire in his apartment. Almost everything
he had was destroyed. "My sheet music! My records!" he wailed. The
owner upstairs offered his sympathy, but he was secretly glad--now
he could evict the Old Buildings Man and find a new tenant who
would pay twice the rent. For the time being, the Old Buildings Man
had to move to a shelter.

When the social service agency came and went through the apartment,
they were able to salvage one thing--a yellowed photo of the Old
Buildings Man, much younger, holding a trombone and standing with
the other members of what looked like a Latin jazz band.
"Mr. Talarico, you must have some relatives somewhere?" the social
worker persisted.
"All I know is one sister out in Rockaway, and I haven't spoken to
her for 20 years! She's a pain in the ass!" the old man complained
angrily!
"Do you belong to a church?"
"Are you kidding? If I started to confess, even the priest would
throw me out!"
The social worker sighed. She had a lot of work to do. Finally, it
turned out that the old man's doctor had a cousin in Sheepshead
Bay, Brooklyn, who owned a two-family house. The previous tenant
had gotten married, and the cousin said she would be delighted to
have the Old Buildings Man as a tenant.
"Sheepshead Bay? I haven't been out there since I played a wedding
at the Manhattan Beach Jewish Center back in '63. Um...do they have
old buildings there?"
"Definitely! They have lots of old buildings there! And many senior
citizens, too!"
A few month later, on a bench outside a row of two-family houses in
Sheepshead Bay, an old man in his mid-80s was talking to two
similarly elderly Russian immigrants about a corner apartment
house:
"Dig, these details really mean something! You see that design of
a fish, right over the doorway? That's to symbolize the fact that
the building's right on the bay! Man, when these white-brick
apartment buildings were built in the '30s with those elevators and
those big lobbies and those steps going down into the living rooms,
that was the living end! I tell you..."