by Andrea Scrima
A few years ago, when I learned that a large trove of photographs taken, for tax purposes, between 1939 and 1941 of every building in each of New York City’s five boroughs had been digitized and published online, I set out to look for my parents’ birthplaces. Sitting at my desk in Berlin, I suddenly found myself on East 148th Street between Brook and St. Ann’s Avenues, searching for the building my mother’s grandparents purchased with the earnings of the family business after arriving in New York in the late nineteenth century. I remembered that I’d seen it in the background of an old family photograph, and so I fetched the ladder and hauled down the heavy tin box and found the picture in an old manila envelope marked “Bronx.”
My mother had been dead for several years, but here, in this sepia-toned, scalloped-edged photograph, she was a little girl of three or four, her sister eight or nine. It was summertime, she and Frieda were wearing sleeveless white dresses, and they each had a white ribbon in their hair. My mother’s right hand was resting in her sister’s lap; they were sitting on a low stone wall, scowling. Heavy shadows hung over their features, and it was difficult to tell if they were angry or merely squinting in the bright sunlight. And then I saw that what I’d long taken to be a metal grate or fence of some kind in the background was actually a stretch of arched windows reflected in a large fountain or pool.
My discovery that it was not, as I’d long believed, the steps of my great-grandparents’ building that the two were sitting on was due to the fact that I’d finally found it, found 516 East 148th Street in the online archive of the New York City Department of Records and Information Services. It was a respectable-looking five-story brick structure with flower boxes on the windowsills; it had long since burned in the Bronx fires of the 1970s and been torn down. I wondered what floor they’d lived on. My mother and her sister had grown up there, attended P.S. 27 around the corner and played in St. Mary’s Park across the street from the school.
Holding their photograph in my hands and staring at the screen before me—at this building I’d gone searching for once, many years ago, only to discover that the lots had long since been redrawn and that the house number, which would have been one last trace of the vanished building, no longer existed—I felt caught in time between the two images, and all at once I understood that this picture of my mother and her sister scowling in the sun was, at the very moment a city employee photographed the building nine or ten years later, resting in a box somewhere behind that brick façade; that it was, in some form, physically present in the image, and that a twelve- or thirteen-year-old version of my mother was somewhere nearby, absent from this photograph of 516 East 148th Street, but alive and breathing; a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Frieda, alive and breathing, just outside the camera’s frame, perhaps, or indoors, doing schoolwork. Read more »
