By Margie Smith Holt
When Steven Schrader first came to live on the Upper West Side, he was not a fan. Then again, he was only 14 when his Jewish-Polish immigrant parents moved “downtown” to the UWS from Washington Heights, where he was born and spent his early years.
“Well, I left all my friends!” Schrader told the Rag as he recalled his teenaged first impressions. “I somehow got more friendly with the hoodlum types…I didn’t feel good, and so I read a lot privately. I think that’s what got me into writing.”
Safe to say that on the subject of the UWS, he’s come around. The author has now made his home in the neighborhood for more than 75 years, and he isn’t planning on leaving. In fact, he thinks his Bloomingdale neighborhood might just be the best place anywhere to grow old.
“It’s my salvation! This is like assisted living up here,” he said during a recent interview from his 12th floor apartment near the Ellington on Broadway.
“Here, you can walk a few blocks and you’ve got everything, pretty much, other than medical services,” he said. “I really feel lucky that I can get in a cab to go to a doctor’s appointment…I’m independent. No one has to go anywhere with me. I can take care of myself.”
“Assisted Living” is the title of one of the chapters in Schrader’s new book, “The Other Steve Schrader,” published in December, just after the author’s 90th birthday. Here’s a sample:
In the past few years, I’ve noticed it’s harder to get to places than it used to be, he writes. Like walking to The Health Nuts seven blocks away at 98th Street, then carrying two heavy shopping bags home. I have to stop every block or so and rest the bags on the low metal fences around the trees on Broadway. I’ve come to know where the trees are at each cross street. 103rd doesn’t have any, so I have to make it to 104th without stopping.
Schrader’s memoir-in-vignettes describes a vanishing (maybe vanished) New York. His father Abe Schrader, for example, “ran away from the Polish army,” arriving in New York illegally in 1921. “The next day he was pushing a rack of dresses up Seventh Avenue,” Schrader said. “He was very ambitious.” Eventually, this Polish immigrant became a prominent figure in the garment district, at a time when the industry employed tens of thousands of workers.
When Schrader arrived on the UWS in 1949, his family lived a privileged life at the Kenilworth at West 75th Street and Central Park West. But affluence wasn’t what defined the neighborhood, he said.
“The Upper West Side was in a much more accessible place,” Schrader said. “Even Central Park West. There were, you know, half a dozen buildings that were very expensive, but there were a lot of teachers and city workers. You could be a waiter. If you made a decent living, you could live here…with a four-room apartment!”
Schrader’s memoir is full of UWS memories, from watching his brother box with the son of gangster Meyer Lansky at George Brown’s Gym on West 57th Street to spending Saturday afternoons at the movies – the RKO at West 81st Street and Broadway, or Loew’s at Broadway and West 83rd. His stories range from humorous:
Sometimes on weekend nights we went to the Bretton Hall Hotel Bar on 86th Street and ordered a round of rye and ginger ales, even though we were only fifteen years old.
… to melancholic:
I live on the 12th floor in a light-filled apartment with open views of the city. In the late afternoon I enjoy watching the sky change colors and light sparkle off the water towers and windows of the surrounding buildings. I’ve come to accept that I’ve got only so many sunsets left, something I never used to think about. My building is over 110 years old, so there were at least several tenants before me in this apartment.
Schrader held many jobs over the years – public school teacher, garment salesman, and director of the non-profit Teachers & Writers Collaborative that connects creative writers with students and teachers in city schools. Along the way, he has moved from UWS place to UWS place: West 87th Street and Amsterdam (“around the corner from Barney Greengrass”); West 114th Street and Riverside; and now West 105th and West End Avenue, where he’s lived with his wife, documentary filmmaker Lucy Kostelanetz, since the 1980s.
“It was a rougher neighborhood then. When we moved here, this block was a little run-down,” he told the Rag. “People…walked on the other side of Broadway. They didn’t go through Straus Park, where there were a lot of drugs.”
Of course, not everything has changed.
“Mondel Chocolates on 114th Street and Broadway has been around forever. I have been going there for close to 60 years,” Schrader said. “You feel like you are in a magical place there, like in a fairy tale, surrounded by displays of chocolates. University Housewares is a block below Mondel…I have been going there for about 50 years.”
“Newer” favorites include Silver Moon Bakery, Valley Drugs, and West Side Rag. Schrader enjoys guessing how many comments each Rag story will solicit.
“I’m pretty close most of the time!” he said, adding that he hopes commenters on this story will be kind.
Schrader says he hadn’t planned to write a memoir at 90, but an editor at Hanging Loose Press, which had published three of his five previous books, encouraged him. He thinks he may have enough in common with other Upper West Siders that they’ll appreciate similarities between their own stories and his.
“I feel lucky I’ve lived this long,” Schrader said. “It’s good to be alive. It’s good to be 90.”
“The Other Steve Schrader: New and Selected Writing,” is published by Hanging Loose Press and is available at Book Culture on West 112th Street. Schrader’s website is HERE.
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