[This short story, written during the "gentrification" of the Upper
West Side of Manhattan, appeared in the December 1985 issue
of the New York City newspaper the New Common Good.]
****************************************************************************
Fiction by HELEN BOREL
GOODBYE COLUMBUS AVENUE
It used to be that a person could traverse the avenue Columbus on a Saturday evening, or yet
night, with whole blocks looming empty in front – an open invitation to walk with leisure. All
right, so it was not spruced like Park Avenue. No fashion costumes. No cockatoo hairdos.
A fruit market was the quiet invasion. Came in the late seventies. Such then multiplied like green
plastic baskets with frozen “fresh” strawberries they sold them to you December. Now, also the
fruit market – they get frozen out of this Avenue Columbus renaissance with plastic buildings that
scrape the once-upon-a-time open sky a Westside person used easily to see above the mostly
three-story, five-story and not often maybe ten-story houses. Character. A character each his
own. Instead those look-the-same high residentials gang up on old locals like you and myself,
blocking every wisp of light God’s sun tries in vain it should squeeze onto the avenue where such
as us used to enjoy to stroll.
Try now, you should see what I mean, to stroll, you should live and be well, from we’ll say
Eighty-third Street Columbus down to Seventy-second Columbus. Right away you can forget
this project. There’s no such thing as to stroll anymore down Columbus Avenue.
First of all, you run into a crowd such as I always got caught lunchtime on Lexington Fifty-ninth
when I worked in a tiny squeezed building in between Alexander’s and the IRT for Horowitz
Linowitz and Tzimitz, a small company country cousins, came from a shtetl line. Their business
was to make point-of-purchase pop-ups for cemetery monument sales. You should excuse the
expression, they weren’t exactly buried with orders. Customers you should know weren’t
breaking down the door. Could be said anything to do with the subject was an underground
business. People don’t like to talk about such things. Not even to think of such. There’s plenty of
time to be dead, they say. What’s to think about now, they say.
Some argumentative type with philosophy lips said some words to Murray Linowitz once about
time is running away with his life. Tempus fugit. So he wouldn’t have to discuss such a cold
matter of fact like the advertisement, the marketing, to promote I shall say the idea of efficiently,
with a flair, a touch – you should pardon the disrespect for the dead – of the Madison Avenue so
he could sell better his marble stones with Hebrew inscribings.
This I don’t want to get anymore into now. You see already the spilkes I had churning the
chicken fat in my stomach from lunch at Bubba’s Kosher Kitchen on the Second Avenue under
the Queens Bridge. For me, death is a thing holy. Is a religion in itself. It shouldn’t allow to be
desecrated by no one. It’s something you can believe in for sure. Sure as you can take serious
when Mr. Tzimitz himself says to me it’s on account of dead bodies laying in hospital beds up to
their noses in air hoses, and tubes, you should excuse, coming out every hole a body ever had
and more put there by doctors wishing should keep beating the heart in spite absent the brain
signals. It is on such accounts that I, Beryl Ringler, after forty-two years a messenger boy for
the Z cousins, I call for short, must be let go. Not enough bodies for the graves. They call it a
word such like statistics. A fancy way of telling when people don’t die I got me no more job.
Now, there’s only myself and my Annala. All the years we hand-in-hand went on Columbus.
Slowly we went by the Star Cleaners on Seventy-sixth Street dropping off my yontif suit before
the High Holidays. We talked in Yiddish the weather with Sam Rothberg, the owner, and
whether it was time yet we should go to live Eretz Yisroel. All such discussions we made slow.
What was to rush? Now you can kiss goodbye Columbus Avenue. Not only is there no one slow
with who to talk. Now there is no Star Cleaners no more. Stands instead a store, all glass, filled up
with such as who could anyway afford so why did they put it on our Columbus Avenue I asked
Annala when it came.
It just happened so when I made this a question she should tell me what she thinks, it was the
minute she dropped in her glass by the bed her uppers. Annala is very stubborn when she
remembers what a beautiful girl I met her as. All black hair, green eyes, high cheeks and pure
as snow skin. She does not let I should see her lip flaps with no controls when her dentures are
not holding her mouth to her words. She never answered me the question of why should such
prices arrive in our neighborhood and swallow up a good orthodox man like Sam Rothberg.
And why more clothing keeps coming in ungepatched trucks. Who’s going to wear it all?
Another question she would not answer – I seem to attract always a conversation with her when
her teeth are on the night table – is with so many new dresses and coats and sweaters and suits,
where will a Westside person go to have cleaned, along with of course a slow conversation?
Instead everyone is rush rush rush. On the sidewalk they push if you do not travel on foot on
Shabbas down Columbus quick like lunch-rushing middle the week down the Eastside.
As you heard, Annala can’t hear good for many Rosh Hashanas. So pulling her across Columbus
with her aluminum walk-helper to escape automobiles honking in angry rushing, she blissfully it
looks ignores, is no picnic for my already, don’t pity, bone-chilling arthritis. You can imagine in
your head the picture. A Columbus Avenue invasion by car drivers and hair styles whizzing by like
arrows fast shot from a fake time and place which it manufactures such a world without how it to
be a being what is human.
We get finally to the other side Columbus and out from nowhere shoots an Asian fella on a
bicycle rushing his brown unkosher package up somewhere across from the Natural History.
But not before he gives an elder gentleman in a thin blue suit with a fine pipe aroma a chance at a
heart attack. This he accomplishes by keeping going even his own light is red and even he wasn’t
legal taking his machine uptown on Columbus. Since the cowardly bicycle attacker did not stop,
I picked up, it turned out, Luftman, a former judge who because of this profession could now
afford many suits. It was a good thing too because this one had now dirt rubbed in from the
ground he was knocked off his feet onto. Judge Ariel Luftman turned into a friend with whom a
person like myself, Beryl the once messenger boy, could complain when it came to comparing
Columbus Avenue, the real one, with the imitation one they recently imported over the Park
from uptown Third Avenue where the fancies live with their high investments and low profiles.
Restaurants. Restaurants. Chatchke shops. Pastries. Ice cream stores with long lines of yet
grownups. Tutti Fruities. Tofutties. Chairs, tables all over the street where a slow person couldn’t
pass to go by. Noise from a banjo something these fakirs in wide clothes call music, drowns out
the silence we used to hear so well. A thought now is a thing of the past. Everything now is no
more inside the head and heart. Everything instead glistens on hangers in glass stores.
Commercial windows some who-cares builder made should hold up penthouse residentials with
no heart for the ethnics, the artists buried under.
To me such a thing is a tragedy to mourn. Each condo house which uprises from the kishkes
of the neighborhood is really a tomb saying, “Goodbye Columbus Avenue.”
© Copyright 1985-2015 Helen Borel. All rights reserved.
For permissions and purchases, please contact
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and in the Subject line, type: GOODBYE COLUMBUS AVENUE
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