The Girl in the Pictures

 

Inwood neighborhood, northern Manhattan, 1930s. 

https://myinwood.net/map-oval/ 

On the day before my mother died, she lay fully dressed and propped against pillows atop her neatly made bed. As always, she wore a silk scarf around her neck.

By the time I arrived in the early afternoon, she felt very sick. In a few weeks she would be 96 years old and something was catching up with her. 

Though pleased to have a visitor, she spoke little and spent much of our time together looking at a wall by the bed where hung two portraits of herself at a very young age.

Once, breaking the silence, she gestured toward the pictures and said that she liked looking at them.

They had hung on that wall since she moved into the apartment seven years earlier. I’m now certain that they were there by some grand design:  for the moments she still inhabited and those that followed the next morning until she was gone. 

My mother shared very few memories of growing up as an only child in a one-bedroom apartment in New York City with her grandmother and parents.  

Yet it happens that she shared the stories of the portraits.

One weekend in September 1929, perhaps a month before the stock market crashed, my 1-1/2 year old mother toddled happily along Dyckman Street, a busy shopping street in her northern Manhattan neighborhood, Inwood.  

Her delight was captured in a photo snapped by her father (most likely), but it was her mother who decided to have it enlarged and colorized. She must have hung it on the living room wall.

The second picture came to be in 1932, the worst year of the Depression. My mother’s parents operated a luncheonette on East 20^th Street in what is now called the Flatiron District. 

In the luncheonette, my grandmother worked the cash register and my grandfather cooked. Their four-year old daughter, my mother, accompanied them downtown when no one could watch her at home. 

One day a penniless artist came by. He offered to draw my mother in return for a meal. Afterward, my grandmother folded the drawing and stuck it in a drawer, surely under some handkerchiefs. She had many. It was retrieved and framed after her death in 1968. 

The two pictures are my closest point of reference for understanding my mother. Gazing at them evoked something inside her—not so much a jolly childhood as the city where she was born in 1928, which she adored throughout her life.

“I was in love with New York,” wrote Joan Didion.

 

I do not mean love in any “colloquial” way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who touches you, and you never love anyone quite that way again. 

My mother told me that she never asked her parents and grandmother about their escape from Ukraine during the first decade of the twentieth century. The bleakness and horror that once filled their eyes and ears became deep wounds that one would not share with a child, even if she were to inquire.   

For the little girl, however, there was New York City. It stretched as far as she could see in every direction, hers to discover:  first, with the three adults; then on her own.

Her neighborhood at the top of the island, its old-growth forest crowned with schist and marble formations, ran down to meet the Hudson River.

The George Washington Bridge rose 40-odd blocks south.

The “A” train’s last stop was 207^th Street, whose steps she flounced down or ran up thousands of times.

It’s an old story. The daughter of immigrants who have the great fortune to come to America, she finds herself at home in the city. The two pictures were the beginning.  

George Washington Bridge, 1931

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Tangled Trees

 

Introducing Mr. Primrose Avenue

George Primrose, promotional card, 1880s

 

In my hometown of Mount Vernon, New York, Primrose Avenue ran less than a mile between two main streets. Yet to a child, it seemed to go on forever, uphill and down dale. 

Since we walked and biked everywhere until we got our drivers licenses, the streetscape etched itself into our youth.  

Passing by, day after day, trudging or whizzing along, one couldn’t help noticing the graffiti on a traffic box, the unruly shrubs that overran a particular corner, and the tree roots pushing up sidewalk slates. 

I don’t remember seeing primroses but surely they had bloomed 90 years earlier . . . small vibrant flowers scattered beneath the trees that shaded Mount Vernon’s undeveloped tracts.

Of course that’s why the street was called Primrose Avenue. And the grassy triangle where the terrain dipped was Primrose Park.   

But the time has come to make a correction. The name has nothing to do with flowers. 

George H. Primrose, an entertainer who made his fortune as a Blackface minstrel, arrived in Mount Vernon around 1885. Before long, he built a “showplace mansion” for himself, his wife Emma, his brother Albert, and a terrier named Baby.

 

Primrose Avenue, circa 1900

In 1959, an old-timer watched from across the street as the big house was razed to make room for a parking lot.

He recalled Primrose as an “end man,” the comic who stands at the end of a row of performers at a Blackface minstrel show. The end man banters with the master of ceremonies, whose serious manner contrasts with the insulting racial stereotypes that the audience finds uproarious.      

Primrose, his role central to the show, continually refined his act. He was alert to “modern trends in minstrelsy,” according to a newspaper report.

Despite the demolition of his mansion, Primrose left an imprint on Mount Vernon. While he toured widely, he found time to buy land on the north side of the city where he built speculative homes with turrets, broad lawns, and wraparound porches. They still stand.

Scientific American published
special editions on architecture and building.
(1893)

By now no one recalls Primrose’s many appearances at the local Proctor’s Theater, which opened in 1914. How delightful to stroll along the promenades and enjoy climate control that was “cool and comfortable as an ocean breeze.”

  

Black minstrelsy became an American fixture during the 1830s, launched by Thomas D. Rice, who conceived the character of "Jim Crow,” a plantation slave.  

Before each show, white actors darkened their skin with shoe polish or burnt cork and dressed in outlandish costumes. They performed as duos or in troupes that drew crowds through the Antebellum Era, the Civil War, and into the 1920s.   

White audiences howled with laughter at skits, songs, and monologues that ridiculed Black life and culture. When vaudeville became popular in the late nineteenth century, Blackface performers also appeared on the bill. These variety shows catered to working-class whites, but racist entertainment also showed up in high and mighty places.

Poster for Primrose & Dockstader,
1880s

During the Theodore Roosevelt administration (1901-1909), the White House welcomed Mary L. Leech, a singer of “coon songs” including “You’se Just a Little Nigger, Still You’se Mine All Mine.”  

George H. Primrose, a Canadian born in 1852, came on the scene in Buffalo as a circus performer. In 1871, he turned to Blackface.

For much of his career, Primrose toured with William H. West. Their troupe, Primrose & West, celebrated its 25^th anniversary at Madison Square Garden in 1896. Mount Vernon residents must have been excited that one section of prime seats was set aside for them. 

 

During the show, Primrose & West pleased the old-timers with a clog dance from their early days and plenty of Blackface acts.

Just a few months later, the U.S. Supreme Court would establish the “separate but equal” doctrine in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

Racism was continuing at a nice clip.

As an up-and-coming city, Mount Vernon naturally would want to be in the vanguard, so it’s not surprising that a Blackface minstrel got to be the namesake of an avenue and park. 

George H. Primrose
(1852-1919)

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