Piano Lessons in Marble Hill

 

It would be perfectly fine for the 12-year old girl to ride the trolley across the 225^th Street Bridge. By 1940, she knew the city well and could glare fiercely at anyone who scared her.   

During those years her mother was chronically ill and often disappeared into hospitals and sanitariums. But Rose was around often enough to decide that her only child, Gloria, should have piano lessons, and she went about finding the right teacher.

That turned out to be Mrs. H. Victoria Wilde. Born in England in 1864, Mrs. Wilde immigrated to the U.S. in 1894. There, she taught piano and voice for decades.

Around 1910, Mrs. Wilde and her family moved from Brooklyn to an apartment in Marble Hill, N.Y.

New York, 1911
Mrs. Wilde, unknown woman, Elsie 
& Muriel, seated
(courtesy of the family)

Marble Hill is such an evocative name. One imagines Primrose Hill in London, with its panoramic views. Mrs. Wilde’s Marble Hill was a hilly hodge-podge of narrow streets lined with houses and apartment buildings. Except for the commercial district along 225^th Street, near the subway and trolley stations, the neighborhood stayed pretty quiet. It had its own charm.

There is a strange twist in the history of Marble Hill. Originally, in the time of the Lenape Indians who inhabited Manhattan until the early 1600s, a narrow creek, which the Dutch named “Spuyten Duyvil,” flowed around the northern tip of the island between the Hudson and Harlem Rivers.

In 1886, the city fathers decided to widen and reroute the creek to accommodate a growing number of barges and tugs. Over nine years, as laborers constructed the Harlem Ship Canal, Marble Hill was transformed into an island and subsequently, through the miracle of landfill, became part of The Bronx.

Politically, it remains affiliated with Manhattan. Marble Hill’s residents vote in Manhattan elections.

Amusingly, in 1939 the Bronx Borough President, James T. Lyons, planted a Bronx flag at the highest point of Marble Hill and claimed it for his borough.

Everyone laughed and the Times declared Marble Hill to be The Bronx’s Sudetenland.  

Trolley tracks on the 225th Street Bridge 

Gloria, her parents, and her grandmother lived in Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan. In order to get to Marble Hill, Gloria rode the trolley north on the lower level of the swing bridge that crossed the Harlem Ship Canal. Debarking on the other side, she’d walk a few blocks to Mrs. Wilde’s apartment.

Every spring, Mrs. Wilde hosted a piano recital to show off her students. She printed programs, so I know that Gloria performed pieces by Chopin and Grieg, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Program for Mrs. Wilde's recital, 1942. 
On the left, Elsie Wilde performs a song by Clara Edwards;
 on the right, Gloria Stromberg performs Gershwin.

The recitals were held in Mrs. Wilde’s living room. Perhaps you’re wondering how all of the pupils and their guests squeezed in.

Mrs. Wilde didn’t teach on a grand, not even an upright. Her piano, a spinet, was small with extra-short keys. Spinets became popular during the Depression. Though eminently affordable, they fell short of the rich tone of grand pianos.  

In addition to the spinet, the room held a chest of drawers and a couch. As many chairs as possible were rounded up for the audience. 

45 Marble Hill Avenue

While she managed everything with aplomb, things had been bumpy since Henriette Victoria Hodson Wilde sailed from England to America in 1894 at the age of thirty.

She arrived with her six-year old daughter, Elsie, and the man who would soon become her mercurial common-law husband, William (Willoughby) Wilde. He traveled under “William White.”

Henriette and Willoughby were met by a friend, Francis Wilde. He went by Frank. The two men were not related. 

They had a plan, however, so everyone set out for North Adams, Mass., where Willoughby had been hired to perform as an organist or choirmaster, possibly accompanied by Mrs. Wilde’s voice.

But Mrs. Wilde might have been indisposed because her second daughter, Muriel, was born in North Adams.  

Before long they were off to Oskaloosa, Iowa, where Willoughby had secured a position as the organist and choirmaster at the First Presbyterian Church. He also directed the new philharmonic society in town.

Mrs. Wilde became very popular in Oskaloosa. She gave vocal performances at musicales, women’s clubs, graduations, and churches. The local papers showered her with praise: “artistic,” “delightful,” “sweet and dainty,” “the gem of the evening.”

Meanwhile, Frank worked in bookbinding or real estate. Sometimes he sold clothing and fruit.

In 1895, the family moved to Reading, PA, where Sidney was born. Before long they were off to Lebanon, PA, as the family began its zigzag journey back east, ending in Marble Hill.

Willoughby S. Wilde surrounded by members of
his chorus for an operetta, "The Ballet of the Seasons,"
performed in Reading, PA, 1903.

Of course, Mrs. Wilde’s students did not know that the British lady in her mid-70s had inhabited far more American cities and towns than they could imagine.

The teacher possessed her own odd story and so did my mother, who took piano lessons for at least ten years and insisted that my brother and I do the same. But we never heard her play a note. 

Mrs. H. Victoria Wilde and Gloria held their years close.

They have gone away but the mysteries remain.

 

*Deepest gratitude to Tom and Liz, who opened up their memories and files.

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2025/11/piano-lessons-in-marble-hill.html?m=1

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

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2025/05/the-girl-in-pictures.html?m=1

Camp Bonheur

Endpapers of Parlez-vous Francais? A First Book in French

There’s a book that my mother has kept since the summer of 1940 when she received it as a gift.

Parlez-vous Francais? A First Book in French is heavy and thick at 500 pages, and surely was a textbook.  It’s inscribed in the formal manner of parents born around the turn of the century: “With love to Gloria from Mother.”  My hunch is that it was packed in my mother’s suitcase when she went off to Camp Bonheur in Northville, N.Y., a town at the northern tip of the Great Sacandaga Lake in the Adirondack Mountains.

Sacandaga Lake, 1920s

Camp Bonheur had existed since the early 1920s.  Its director, Miss Rich, and all of the counselors were New York City high school teachers. The camp was for Jewish girls and had special classes in French and music.  One of Miss Rich’s assistants, Mrs. Drukker, performed as a soprano on various radio programs of the day.

1940 proved to be the happiest summer of my mother’s childhood.  That autumn her mother, Rose, became sick with tuberculosis and more or less disappeared into hospitals and sanitariums.  The cycle persisted until after World War II when antibiotics became widely available.

Tuberculosis was an epidemic and Rose’s story was not unusual.  But my mother never went to camp again.

Before she became sick Rose doted on her only child.  On Saturdays, they would take the trolley across the University Heights Bridge, from 207^th Street in Inwood, the northernmost Manhattan neighborhood where they lived, to Fordham Road in The Bronx. 

University Heights Bridge with trolley tracks, 1938
(Municipal Archives, City of New York)

There they shopped at Alexander’s department store and saw movies at Loew’s Paradise, a palace-like theater typical of its time, and had a bite at Krum’s, which was a soda parlor, chocolatier, and candy store all rolled into one.

Tucked in along Fordham Road was a grocery store owned by Louis and Ethel Berenson. He had been a music teacher until the Depression when he was forced to switch his profession. The Berensons lived on Sedgwick Avenue, which ran north and south along the Harlem River near the Bronx campus of New York University.

Fordham Road stores, 1940

They told Rose about Camp Bonheur, where their daughter Cora went every summer.  

And so, in June the girls took a bus to Albany and then another bus to Northville, a picturesque town not far from the camp which could be reached by walking over a bridge. 

By 1940, going away to summer camp had long been part of the American experience.  Christian youth ministries and the YMCA founded camps in New England as early as the 1880s.  It was not until after World War I, however, that camps for Jewish children were established, largely in the Northeast.  Among the first was Camp Cejwin in Port Jervis, N.Y., founded in 1919 by the educators Albert and Bertha Schoolman, who were Zionists.

Indeed, Zionism was woven into the fabric of many Jewish camps where both the American flag and a Hebrew flag were raised and lowered each day.* 

The Workmen’s Circle, a Jewish aid society established in 1900, started Camp Kinderland, which emphasized Yiddish culture and taught socialist ideals, in 1923.

But most Jewish camps focused on the Americanization of the children of Eastern European immigrants while affirming their religious identity in the face of anti-Semitism. 

Postcard of Northville Bridge, 1940

Through camp activities like hiking and swimming, the children might also overcome the stereotype of Jews as weaklings with no stamina or tolerance for pain.   

That idea was promulgated by a well-respected University of Wisconsin sociologist, Edward A. Ross, whose book, The Old World in the New (1914), popularized the idea that Jews were the unfortunate opposite of the tough pioneers who led the Western Expansion in the United States.

Incidentally, Ross coined the term “race suicide,” which referred to the declining birthrate among white Americans, an issue of grave concern to anti-immigrants and eugenicists.    

My mother, who is 92 years old, did not grow up in a especially religious family.

No doubt, however, that Camp Bonheur was part of the scaffolding of her life as a young, first-generation American.

Gloria Stromberg, late 1930s

*A precursor of the Israeli flag was used between 1920 and 1948 during the British Mandate for Palestine.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2020/05/camp-bonheur_29.html?m=1

Back in Time: Inwood 1940

My mother (left) poses with a friend on
Sherman Avenue, Inwood, Manhattan, mid-1930s.

My mother is living in a corner of her childhood.

She doesn’t suffer from dementia, although her memory has worsened.  Her intellect persists, fed by the New York Times and the New Yorker.  She is not grieving; she is not pained.  She just keeps cycling through 1940 where she lives in an apartment on West 211^th Street and attends junior high school at P. S. 52.

Her story is set in a particular place called Inwood, located at the northern tip of the island of Manhattan.  While my mother was growing up there in the 1930s, the neighborhood was home to mostly Irish and some Jewish families who lived harmoniously in Art Deco-style apartment buildings built between the wars.   

Contemporary photo of Inwood Hill Park with
the Hudson River visible through the trees

As a little girl, living on Sherman Avenue, she liked to ride her tricycle along the sidewalk in front of her building. One day, she looked across the street to watch a police car pull up in front of a candy store.  The cops leapt out and busted through the door, dragging out pinball machines and smashing them in the street. Mayor LaGuardia believed that pinball encouraged gambling and corrupted youth.

The family moved to a four-room apartment on 211^th Street.  An only child, she drew adoration from her grandmother, mother, and father. Her parents owned luncheonettes and worked long days so she ate dinner with just her grandmother. The two were very close; they shared a bedroom. Sarah Olcott cooked, shopped, sewed, and – the story may be apocryphal – brewed something alcoholic which she sold to the local policemen.

The radio, a 20” Philco made of dark wood, sat on a table near a chair and ottoman. On Sunday mornings her father sat on the ottoman with his head close to the fabric screen that covered the speaker, listening to Father Coughlin.

When Father Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest out of Michigan, started his radio program in the early thirties, he was a New Dealer. Then he became obsessed with Jewish bankers and, as the decade progressed, enthusiastically embraced Hitler and Mussolini.

My mother asked her father why he listened to such a horrible man. Her father replied that he liked to hear the other point of view.  

Scholars have thoroughly examined the importance of radio to all Americans during the war years. My mother remembers Edward R. Murrow’s “This is London” and commentary by William Shirer. Those reports must have been thrilling and chilling.

Her grandmother Sarah had emigrated from Kiev around 1900, at the age of 30. She arrived with two young children and her younger sister, Rebecca. The eldest sister, Zelda, stayed behind. Everyone assumed that Zelda had perished at Babi Yar, but a few years ago we learned that she came to the U. S. during the late 1930s. The secret puzzled my mother, who concluded that Sarah and Zelda had argued about something serious and never reconciled. 

Corn Exchange Bank, West 207th Street, Inwood, 1920s.
My mother's mother kept an account at this branch.

  

Rebecca’s husband turned out to be crazy and slashed her throat with a kitchen knife.  Her two sons, by then grown up and both lawyers, “took care of him,” according to my mother. There may have been restraining order or perhaps the guy was institutionalized.

Rebecca’s daughter, Rhoda, married a man who went into the Venetian blind business after the war.  He did very well for himself, as they say.

Rebecca’s other daughter, Faye, was blonde and blue-eyed.  Since Faye didn’t “look Jewish,” she snagged a top job at a bank.  While on a ship headed to Paris for a bank conference, Faye met a British oil engineer who worked for BP in Iraq. They married and lived in Iraq through the 1950s.

Sadness intruded.  My mother’s uncle, Ben, had been gassed in the Meuse-Argonne during World War I.  He returned to the U. S. and spent the rest of his life in V. A. hospitals.

Her mother had TB and spent years in hospitals and sanitariums. 

I wonder about this attachment to childhood. Surely not every 89-year old feels like crawling back into the past, even if it is comforting.   

Recently I realized that my mother’s point of reference has always been those years on West 211^th Street.  When we were growing up, she excessively invoked her childhood.  I wonder if she is now trying to figure out something or someone, but the fact is that reflection has never been her forte.    

And so she simply replays the past.  At least she knows how it will turn out. 

Summer Afternoon by Ernest Lawson
My mother remembers the ancient tulip tree depicted
in this 1908 painting of Inwood Hill Park.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/10/this-day-winding-down-now.html?m=1