Preface to Olga Sikorski
Escape from a place of misery and poverty continues to be a prime
motivator, driving both men and women to tear up roots and begin a
journey that is usually transforming. Olga Sikorski’s parents emigrated
to the United States in search of opportunity. In the new land of hope,
they found conditions equally dire to what they had left behind. Olga
Sikorsky’s legacy from her parents was a thirst for a better life and a
powerful will to survive. She is one of millions of first generation
Americans who carried on the quest begun by their immigrant parents.
At ninety-one years of age, Olga loves
and enjoys life, and she possesses a fierce will to live, so much so
that her energy seems greater than many women decades younger. Her
recollections of the ghetto in New York City where she grew up are
vivid, the details etched in her brain by the acid strength of her
desire to get away. Being a woman, and coming of age during the Great
Depression that enveloped the United States in the 1930s, complicated
her hopes and possibilities. Had she been a boy, she might have left
sooner and tried to make a better future for herself in some other city
perhaps. But “this was the old days,” Olga told me. “My father wouldn’t
let me leave home. I wasn’t married, and I didn’t get away until he
died.”
OLGA SIKORSKI
The Old Block
I grew
up in New York City in one of the ghettos for immigrants. I’ll tell you
about my block. It had a stable, where the horses and the cows lived.
The stable smelled of manure and animal sweat, but you didn’t notice it
when you were out on the street. The horses loved to stick their heads
out of the stable windows. I’d be walking along and right in front of
my nose there would be a horse, and he’s looking out and enjoying the
view. When the horses died, they were dragged out and left in the
street. Then, and this was the awful thing, the Health Department would
come and punch the horse’s stomach. Everybody ran to shut their windows
because we all knew what was coming, the most awful smell, out of that
dead horse. After a few days had passed, some men would come with a
cart and the horse would be carried away.
The stable had a blacksmith. Mr. Kelly.
He had a big family, ten children, and they all looked alike. Mr. Kelly
and his wife had gorgeous fights. Everybody waited for them to fight,
and when they started, all the windows on the block went up. I used to
go to the stable to watch Mr. Kelly work. What attracted me was the
clanging of the anvil, and I loved to watch him shoe the horses. He
would take a horse’s hoof in his hand and hold it, and put on a shoe
that was red hot. Red hot, and I could smell the flesh burning, and he
would hammer nails into the horse’s hoof, but the horse didn’t move an
inch. I was amazed.
When I was a girl, we had more horses in
the city than automobiles. An automobile was a phenomenon. One man who
owned a wire factory underneath the elevated train had an open car that
he kept parked on the street outside his factory. As kids, we would
always climb into his car. He’d come running out and say, “Would you
like a nice drive around the corner?” He tried to keep us from playing
with his car by giving us a ride. There were no traffic lights. Drivers
just took turns at intersections. There were no buses. We had trolleys,
and the fare was a nickel. Five cents.
Every day the streets were cleaned. The
sanitation department removed the manure. At a certain time every day,
men dressed in white came with push wagons. They scooped up the manure
and carried it away. Men came down the streets pushing brooms, and the
hydrants were opened and the streets were washed with water. In the
summer, after they’d cleaned out the street, I used to wade in the
puddles.
Next to the tenement where I lived was a
twelve-story building, a big steam laundry where a lot of people from
the block worked. When World War I started, the owner got a contract
from the government to make uniforms. There was a big chute in the
building, and we used to watch these army uniforms coming down the
chute, ready made.
On every corner was a saloon. I used to
visit all of them. As a kid, I could walk right under the folding
doors. This was amazing to me: how nice it was inside the saloon. It
was much nicer than any of the rooms we lived in. There was a whole
table covered with all kinds of cold cuts and bread, and if you wanted,
you could make your own sandwich, and it was free to the customers.
Above the saloon on my corner was a big room where people held
weddings. I visited every time there was a wedding. The Greeks would
treat us kids to a drink or candy when we came in. They had wonderful
candies, almonds covered with icing. As kids we scrambled for them.
My elementary school, P.S.114, had been
built before the Civil War. The toilets were outdoors, one for girls,
one for boys. Inside the toilet was one long plank with holes cut in
it. Water came through in a stream about every five minutes. Another
thing about elementary school was that every girl made her own
graduation dress. We learned sewing in a class, and one of our projects
was to sew our own graduation dress.
About a block away was a dock. There
isn’t one dock left in the city today that’s like it. It was a wharf
where tug boats parked. As kids, we made friends with the captain and
he let us come on the tug boat. Once we got a ride on this magnificent
boat. It was a thrill to ride on a small boat so powerful it could push
a big ocean liner.
Politicians held dock parties on our
wharf. Everyone from the neighborhood went. The mayor would hire a band
to play music, and he would treat everyone to watermelon and ice cream.
Peope ate or drank what they wanted, and nobody paid for anything.
These dock parties were part of the summer festivals, and it was the
way politicians kept their vote. It was understood that people who came
and enjoyed themselves were expected to vote for the politician who
threw the party.
In those days, people didn’t shop at
supermarkets. Peddlers came to the block with pushcarts. Each one had
his own special call. One man sold rabbits, one man sold partridges.
The man who sold lemons, three for a nickel, had a big, big white bag,
and he would pull your lemons out of it. My mother would buy potatoes
and apples by the bag.
Every store in the neighborhood
specialized in one thing. The butcher had only meat. The dairy store
had only eggs, butter, cheese, milk. When I was sent to get milk, I had
to carry my mother’s pail and say, “Please give me a quart of milk.”
Italian bread cost a quarter for a long loaf. The butcher stored his
meat in a beautiful oak icebox. My mother would give me four dollars,
and I had to say to him: “Now you’ll give me a round roast, a ham, and
a chicken.” I always had to ask for chicken feet and the chicken head,
so mother could make soup. When I got back home, I would have to clean
them. That’s a job I don’t miss. I hated it. And I always had to ask
for a piece of liver for the cat. We didn’t have a cat, but liver was
free.
One Chinaman lived around the corner. As
kids, we called him ChingChingChing and we used to tease him and pull
his pigtail. He would get so angry that he would chase us with his
flatiron. But he did a good job on those stiff collars that my father
used to wear. I used to think those collars must be torture.
One of the good things my father did for
me was that every Sunday when I was a little girl, he used to take me
for walks with him, and we would visit different neighborhoods in New
York. We would take the elevated train to some part of Manhattan and
stroll around. The streets of the lower east side were so crowded.
Rivington Street, Delancy, Canal Street, those streets had so many
immigrants, there was almost no room to walk. I was fascinated by all
the different languages I heard people yelling. We walked uptown (it’s
called midtown now) to where the United Nations is now. But we went to
see the albatoir’s boats when they docked. We used to stand and watch
as the sheep were led up the ramp from the boats to the United Beef
Company, a slaughterhouse. We walked all around Park and Madison and
Lexington Avenues, and we saw the homes of the very rich. Beautiful,
beautiful mansions. On those walks I learned early that there were
people who lived differently than we did on our block. My father told
me that the only way I would escape the block was to get a college
education. After I watched what happened to other kids on my block, I
figured out that he was right. None of the other kids on the block that
I went to school with went to college. They graduated high school and
got a job or got married, or dropped out and went to work. I didn’t
want to die on the block.
I graduated from Hunter College in 1931.
I was lucky because I didn’t have to pay tuition. You could get a
college education for free, so long as you kept up your grades. I got
my B.A., I was all prepared to take the exam and become a teacher.
Well, what do you think happened? Mayor LaGuardia, may he rest in
peace, stopped the examinations for teachers and put a freeze on
hiring. To teach, you had to pass the teacher’s examination, and for
six years nobody could take the exam and get licensed.
1931, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37. Those years
I couldn’t get a job. I shopped and shopped for a job, but I couldn’t
find anything. Nothing. I was stuck. Finally, I was able to get a job
with the WPA that paid thirty-six dollars a week. So I always say God
bless Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He started the WPA. A lot of people
looked down their noses at the WPA, but how else were poor people going
to find a job and live? You tell me! Nobody else had a better answer,
I’ll tell you that!
FDR got legislation passed that allowed
anybody who qualified to take post graduate degrees, if they also
worked. In 1939 I went back to college. The federal government
underwrote my tuition, and I worked in a university library until I
graduated with a masters degree in music. It was really while I was
getting my masters degree that my eyes were opened and I came to
understand how much better some people lived, that there were beautiful
things in this world, and that life could be beautiful.
Finally the teachers’ examination was
given again. I took it, and I got my license, and I was able to get a
job in the school system. I still have that license someplace. It was
my ticket out of that block.
After I finally escaped my old
neighborhood, I didn’t go back for twenty-five years. When I did, I saw
that all the tenements and factories, the stable and the saloons had
been torn down and replaced with beautiful, expensive apartment
buildings. On the avenue there were new stores and new restaurants and
they were all very elegant. I was astounded.
There’s still a hustle and bustle on the
old block, but it’s a different sort of energy from what I knew as a
girl. All kinds of people lived on my block. There were Irish,
Italians, Jews, Greeks, Polish, and Germans. Bundles of immigrants who
were looking, searching for something. Do you understand? People, so
many people, immigrants, we were all crowded together. They all wanted
something and they came looking for it in America. The way we lived in
the tenements, with families crammed together, and no money. . . . We
tolerated the worst depths of poverty. If I go back to my old
neighborhood today, I can hardly believe my eyes. It reminds me of the
morning when for the first time I opened my eyes in a luxury hotel room
after living thirty-eight years in a cold water flat. It’s as if a
miracle happened. But then I remember all the people who I lived with
on that block, and how much misery we knew, and I get angry.
