by Mathew R. Warren I have always felt misunderstood when I tell people I grew up on the Upper East Side. Most people make assumptions that my family is rich, that I grew up in a luxury apartment, and that I attended elite private schools. My family isn’t rich, I have never lived in a luxury apartment, and I always attended public schools. People’s perceptions of the Upper East Side are often dominated by the Park to 5th Avenue scene reserved for some of the city's most wealthy. This was not my Upper East Side. I can’t speak for kids today, but for me, the Upper East Side of the 1980s and early 90s was a diverse place, with rich, middle class, and poor families. This was not something I thought about at the time, as economic status did not matter in the playground. Some kids lived in doorman buildings, some in walk-ups, and some in project or low-income housing, but we were all just city kids, doing what city kids do, exploiting our freedom. I loved growing up in this neighborhood. Little League games under the 59th Street Bridge were a right of passage. Running around in the parks, hanging out in the pizza places, causing mischief on the streets, we had fun. 86th Street was our downtown. But the Upper East Side never seemed too sheltered from rest of the city. With East Harlem on one side and Midtown on the other, borders were often blurred. Gangs of kids from Harlem would come down and pick fights with us, so we formed our own gangs, but inevitably we just picked fights with each other. It was all just part of the normal urban culture. Don’t get me wrong, this was still a safe neighborhood to grow up in. Crime was never a major problem here and we felt comfortable out in the streets. What people don’t realize is that the amount of families packed in to this small piece of Manhattan made this a cool place in which to grow up. I didn’t really start leaving the neighborhood until high school, I didn’t need to, all my friends were up here, and the Upper East Side was big enough for us. Wagner Junior High School was where the neighborhood took its shape. All the kids who had gone to their local elementary schools came together. Believe it or not, up until then, you didn’t really know the kids who lived 20 blocks downtown from you, or 10 blocks uptown from you. For me, the kids from the neighborhood were divided into three groups, the kids who lived in our around the Ruppert Towers Complex, the kids who lived close to John Jay Park, and the kids who lived near Saint Catherine’s Park. Each group seemed distinct as did their part of the neighborhood. It’s funny to think that in this city people who lived so close to me could have seemed so distant, but I guess that’s part of growing up. Now of course I see the neighborhood differently, I notice the yuppies and the quiet, but I don’t forget what is was like growing up here, when the Upper East Side was the world and New York was the universe. |
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