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On the surface, actor Al Pacino, comedian Carl Reiner, television personality Regis Philbin, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and politician Colin Powell do not have much in common.
But author Arlene Alda pushed through their professional guises and, with a little help from the Walk of Fame on the Grand Concourse, made a major connection between them: They were all born and raised in the Bronx—Ms. Alda included.
That fact alone, when considered, is actually a remarkable phenomenon—that a seemingly endless stream of talent, a fraction of whom Ms. Alda interviewed for her newest book, “Just Kids From the Bronx,” all hail from the same place, the same cluster of neighborhoods, and even the same buildings.
“There was always a tremendous pride that we had in the Bronx and kids still have in the Bronx,” Ms. Alda said last week during a telephone interview from her home in Water Mill. “Why this number of successful people from the Bronx? Perhaps because of the street culture—like with oysters, where the sand makes the pearls.
“All I know is everyone looked out for everyone else and people cared for one another,” she continued. “That contributed to the feeling of competence, that you could go out and conquer the world.”
A number of summers ago, Ms. Alda found herself at a dinner party in Bridgehampton with her husband, actor Alan Alda, when she overheard the words “growing up” and “the Bronx” in the same sentence. Her ears perked up and she whipped her head around—only to see Mickey Drexler, the CEO of J. Crew, chatting with a small group.
The two perfect strangers immediately began comparing notes. It wasn’t before long they realized they had grown up in the same building, the Mayflower, and had never met. A few months later, they paid the six-story, tan-and-brown brick building a visit. For Ms. Alda, it was the first time in 30 years.
“It was very touching to me that this very established, self-confident man had grown up in very modest circumstances,” Ms. Alda said. “I knew that a lot of other people from the Bronx did, too. That began the interviewing process.”
The year was 2011. Ms. Alda knew many of her subjects personally, but others required an intermediary to connect them, she said. And, remarkably, each interviewee opened up almost immediately, she said, whether they had a history together or not.
Ms. Alda approached each interview with zero prepared questions. She didn’t interject. She had no preconceived notions. That strategy yielded down-to-earth, forthright, honest, candid and sometimes unexpected conversations, she said, though it helped they had common ground to start.
“I could understand where they were coming from,” she said. “At least 80 percent, if not more, of those stories were surprising. There were adventures with growing pot in the Bronx Park, or having a date with a girl and having a surprise—I won’t tip my hand with the surprise. And then there were wonderful, happy surprises, and very dark surprises.”
Mr. Pacino brought Ms. Alda back to the Bronx of the 1940s. “And at night—at night, there was this cacophony of voices, especially in the late spring to late summer,” he said, as written in Ms. Alda’s book. “You would hear the different accents. We had them all. There were Italians, Jews, Irish, Polish, German. It was like a Eugene O’Neill play.”
She talked with actor Chazz Palminteri, who wrote the one-man show “A Bronx Tale,” about witnessing a murder at age 9 while standing on his stoop. Mr. deGrasse Tyson and Joyce Hansen described their experiences with racism. Luis Ubiñas, former president of the Ford Foundation, discussed growing up in poverty in “poetic detail,” she said, which she had never experienced as a child.
“At one point, the industries that were part of the Bronx left. Times just changed,” she said. “There was a time when the city was nearly bankrupt and the drug culture came in, and parts of the Bronx became terribly poor and dangerous. That no longer is true. The borough is certainly looking up. But in terms of economics, it’s still one of the poorest.”
Ms. Alda stopped, arbitrarily, at interview 64 with her youngest subject, 23-year-old Erik Zeidler, who still lives in the Bronx today. “He talked about how beautiful the Bronx River is, how crystal clear, how he discovered a colony of snapping turtles in the river,” she said. “That was a total surprise to me, because, when I was a kid, the water was filthy. It was not until the Bronx River Alliance came in and cleaned it up that Eric and his generation could be the beneficiaries.”
She paused and added, “In a sense, all of us are.”
Arlene Alda will visit the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton on Friday, August 14, at 5 p.m., as part of the Fridays at Five author series. A Q&A and book signing will follow. Tickets are $20. All author proceeds from “Just Kids From the Bronx” benefit several children’s organizations located in the borough. For more information, call (631) 537-0015, or visit hamptonlibrary.org.
on Aug 11, 2015