Books

Published on April 10th, 2024 | by Frances Badalamenti

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“Eternally Grateful to Grow Up in NYC”: Jennifer Baum Looks Back on the Just City

Jennifer Baum’s book Just City: Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right was both a delightful and insightful read, which blends memoir and social commentary as she looks back at the unique time and community of her upbringing in an Upper West Side, NYC, subsidized cooperative building. Her personal narrative really resonated with me, even though we grew up in much different circumstances. My mother was from the Bronx and my father was from Brooklyn. Her mother was from Brooklyn and her father was from the Bronx. She is Jewish and I am Italian. She grew up in Manhattan and I grew up partly in Queens and partly in the godforsaken Jersey suburbs. But we were both left to be raised by single mothers, mine due to divorce and hers due to her father’s passing. And even though there were certainly challenging circumstances, there was also so much about Baum’s origin story that I envied, most especially how she got to grow up and roam around New York.

We met over Zoom in February, she from a friend’s kitchen in Manhattan and me in my garage studio in Portland, Oregon, to talk about her book. – Frances Badalamenti

Editor’s note: Baum is a longtime MUTHA contributor, and her essays and storytelling on the site became part of Just City. We’ve included photos from her childhood with links to prior work on the magazine, to invite you to dive into our archives—and to order the book to read the full story.

Frances Badalamenti: How did your particular childhood, adolescence and young adulthood in New York City inform who you became as an adult and eventually, a mother yourself?

Jennifer Baum: It’s interesting that we both had parents from Brooklyn and the Bronx. It was my parents’ dream to leave the outer boroughs for the modernity of Manhattan. Once they married, they moved to the Upper West Side as soon as possible. It became their home, and they worked to make life better for my sister and me, and for the building and neighborhood kids, my mother as a public education advocate and my astronomy-loving father by bringing his telescope downstairs to show neighborhood folks the moon and stars.

I very much wanted my son to have the same exposure to a rich Manhattan cultural life growing up that I did, to be steeped in progressivism, to have a sense of place and history, to be schooled in uniquely Upper West Side secular Jewish social justice values, to feel connected to his New York City Jewish immigrant roots, to understand where he came from, to be close to my mother. There is a scene in the book where my mother, five-year-old son, and I visit Coney island just before we moved to Los Angeles. When it was time to go, my mother and son gather some Coney Island sand into a baggie for him to take to California, so that he would have a piece of New York with him on the other side of the country.

96th street, from “Comfort Zone”

FB: In terms of the more architectural and housing related layers to this book, I was fascinated by this idea of affordable housing in Manhattan, something that was never part of my periphery when I still lived on the east coast. Housing in New York City always seemed so inaccessible, so in my young adult years, I was left to find cheaper digs on the Jersey side of the Hudson—that’s how I thought it had to be, go farther out, not closer in.

But I did have a few friends in the ’90s who lived in Stuyvesant Town, a downtown Manhattan housing development, which you talk about later in the book. It always felt like these friends were living in anxiety, steps away from being evicted because of illegal subletting. I remember that there was something about mail that they were always freaked out about, like if someone saw a letter sent to their apt, they would get kicked out of the city.

It felt like there was a time period for affordable housing programs, right before privatization, when tenants wanted to do anything they could to hold onto these apartments, even if they were unable to live there.

JB: There was a time in postwar NYC where subsidized middle-income Mitchell-Lama housing was abundant. There was no need to resort to illegal subletting. This is the time period I’m highlighting in my book. As Mitchell-Lamas stopped being built and some were converted to market-rate housing, subsidized apartments became harder to find. However, this was far from the only factor in leading some people to resort to illegal sublets. Due to many reasons, such as the weakening of rent control and rent stabilization laws, and New York City becoming fiscally sound causing white people to return to the city, housing in New York City became more expensive in general, and affordable units of any kind became increasingly scarce. 

In the 1980s, I was evicted from an illegal sublet in Brooklyn in a private apartment building that was not subsidized. One day, as I pushed open the cast iron lobby door of my Brooklyn building with an armful of groceries, a stout man lurking in the shadows of the unlit foyer menaced me. “I know who you are,” he said, hoisting his belt to hold up his paunch.

“Yeah,” I nodded. I knew who he was too. I didn’t deny living there. I understood I had no rights and didn’t try to fight him. The landlord took me to court, and I was evicted. Affordable subsidized housing gives people housing security, the opposite of what I experienced when I was evicted. This is what the book advocates for.

Jennifer Baum

FB: Are you more of a city person yourself these days or has that shifted? Where are you living now, and do you miss your old neighborhood?

JB: I moved back to NYC, specifically to Brooklyn, about a year and a half ago. I’m happy to be in a walkable city again. I had been living in Phoenix, Arizona, and I’d grown to appreciate aspects of life there like the desert environment, but it was very hard for me to drive so much. I’m glad to be living in New York City, where I’m not dependent on a car, and I can have spontaneous interactions on the street, where there is a street life.

I miss the Upper West Side of my childhood, but not the Upper West Side of today. It’s become gentrified and generic, banks and cell phone stores have replaced funky, unique boutiques. It’s very expensive. It still retains some of the qualities I enjoyed growing up like a progressive spirit and integration, thanks to its mix of public housing and market-rate buildings, but it’s not the same.

Most of all, I miss the building I grew up in. RNA House remains my home, at least emotionally and spiritually, if not in physical form. We moved into the building in 1967 when I was four years old and lost our apartment upon our mother’s death in 2013. I miss my 14th floor three bedroom apartment with a terrace and a view of the Manhattan skyline seen through large windows in each room. I miss hanging out in the backyard and in the lobby, chatting with people I’ve known for years, those who I grew up with and those who watched me grow up.

RNA House is like a small village in an anonymous city. I miss the diversity. The building is integrated and socio-economically mixed. It’s socialist. You can’t live there if you make too much money, and the size of your apartment depends on how large your family is, on need, not on how much money can buy. I miss the ethos.

96th street, from “Comfort Zone”

FB: I am curious to hear how the trajectory of losing your dad played a role in your childhood and adolescence in terms of living on the Upper West Side. I guess that I ask this because growing up in the suburbs was so miserable for me, that if I had a big loss like this as a kid, I would at least want to have the distractions of being able to traipse around Manhattan like you did. Art and culture is such a salve and I felt happy that you had that as a kid who lost her dad so young.

JB: In the book, I write a lot about how the culture of the Upper West Side and Manhattan shaped me. It was a rich life, and I am eternally grateful I grew up in the city. I don’t know how I would’ve responded to my father’s death outside New York. Art, literature, music, and dance defined my life. After my father died, when I was alone, my sister with her boyfriend and my mother with hers, I often escaped to the Thalia, an art house, revival cinema two blocks from my apartment on 95th Street. I’d spend hours in the dark immersed in a Bunuel double feature, in a completely different surreal reality. That saved me. That I wouldn’t have had in the suburbs.

FB: I could relate so much to the socioeconomics that you experienced growing up—how when you eventually attended school with much wealthier kids, that your socioeconomic status became a point of shame at times.  I’d love to hear how you look back at this now and if you would have opted to have a different situation.

JB: Interacting with much wealthier kids was eye-opening. There are such extremes of rich and poor in New York City. At first I felt ashamed to be living in subsidized housing. I wanted to live in a glorious, prewar Central Park apartment with a doorman and have Matisses and Picassos hanging from my living room walls like my private school friends had. As I became passionate about socialism, I began to learn how RNA House fit into the bigger picture of social justice and I became proud of living there.

In retrospect, I feel extremely privileged and grateful to have received such an outstanding education. So no, I wouldn’t have opted for a different situation. I was lucky in a lot of ways, though I didn’t know it at the time, mostly because I was consumed with grief over my father’s death.

Jennifer as a teen, from “Shoplifting at Bloomingdales”

FB: The most curious part of your personal narrative for me was when after your dad passed away, it seemed as if your mom kind of checked out. I related so much to this, although our situations were so different, my mom really checked out as well. She was depressed, whereby your mom was either working or with her boyfriend.

JB: Practically all my friends growing up, like me, had parents who left them to their own devices. This was the 1970s laissez-faire style of almost every Upper West Side parent I knew. We kids suffered a lot from neglect. Likewise, everyone I know from childhood has turned out to be much more attentive to their kids than our parents were to us. We did this to compensate, to make sure our kids got the attention that we as kids so craved. Subsequently, it seems that practically all of our kids are better adjusted as young adults than we were.

From “She Liked to Save Things”

FB: One last thought I have, is this: what do you see as a current solution to housing in NYC for those who are not wealthy? I know this is a big ask but I am just curious because there are such income disparities nowadays in NYC. Literally the only person I know that lives in Manhattan or Brooklyn these days is a young, wealthy in-law who works in finance and did not grow up on the east coast, so he has no roots. Over the holidays, I asked him what he pays for a one-bedroom in Chelsea and I was astounded by the rent.

JB: It’s true that in NYC (meaning all the boroughs) rents are very high, though there are parts of the city, in various Brooklyn, Queens, and especially Bronx neighborhoods where rent is much cheaper than in Manhattan. Rents are also very high in most major North American cities.

Democrats in the NY State senate want to bring back Mitchell-Lama housing, dubbing it Mitchell-Lama 2.0. This is very exciting and long overdue.

PS – you can catch Jennifer Baum in conversation with MUTHA’s editor in chief, Meg Lemke, on May 8th at 7:30pm is at Taylor & Co. bookstore in Brooklyn.

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About the Author

Frances Badalamenti is the author of the novels I Don’t Blame YouSalad Days and her most recent, Many Seasons. She teaches writing workshops and works individually as a mentor for writers. Frances lives in Portland, Oregon. Find more at francesbadalamenti.com
Author photo credit: Jennifer Brommer



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