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Murray Hill When I Was Young
The Murray Hill Neighbors'
Martha Hodes, Professor of History at New York University and a Murray Hill resident, wrote this story.
I grew up in Murray Hill a long time ago, moved away, then moved back many decades later. In the early 1950s my parents met as young members of the Martha Graham Dance Company; in 1957 they moved into (in my mother’s words) “a rundown six-room apartment on the fifth floor of a seedy building on Lexington Avenue.” As my mother recalled, they were so glad to have three tiny bedrooms that they ignored “the ancient bathroom, rickety floors, bad wiring, and roaches.” Their phone number began with “L-E,” for Lexington; neighbors’ phone numbers began with “M-U,” for Murray Hill. My father lived in that rent-controlled apartment on the corner of 31st Street for the next 66 years (advances in extermination eventually beat the vermin), until he died at the age of 98.
Growing up in Murray Hill in the 1960s and 70s was not without challenges. Sex-workers solicited from our stoop. Drunken men slept off their stupors in our building’s outer vestibule. In high school, walking home from the Third Avenue bus stop after dark meant moving with swift, if feigned, assurance past the shadowy Red Ball Garage. At sixteen, I was mugged at knifepoint in my elevator by a drug addict in search of cash.
I went to college in Maine, then moved to Oregon. I came back east for graduate school, then headed to California for my first job as a professional historian. So many beautiful places to live!—and then a position in the History Department at New York University gave me my ticket home.
After fourteen years in faculty housing in Greenwich Village, I felt the old neighborhood beckoning. My L.A.-born spouse and I began with a studio apartment in a building one block west and three blocks north of where I grew up. Eight years later, we moved to a one-bedroom a few more blocks north. I liked walking the familiar streets and avenues with Bruce, charting the decades of stasis and change. “We used to play handball against that wall” (corner of 30th and Lex); “Mr. Henry’s butcher shop was here” (west side of Third Avenue, between 30th and 31st); “Mr. Stern’s pharmacy was there” (the old Rutledge Hotel). My childhood bedroom had looked over 31st Street; the B. F. Goodrich Tire Company building, along with the dark corner bar and the row of tenements were long gone, replaced by a high-rise with a circular driveway. Serious misgivings about gentrification mixed with relief that my father could grow old on safer streets.
I’ve been back in Murray Hill almost twenty years now. Today, my writing desk looks over the backs of townhouses, and ideas come to me while walking the neighborhood’s pretty side-streets or sipping coffee at Cinico on Madison Avenue or Felix’s on Park Avenue South. While writing a book about Lincoln’s assassination, I was thrilled to learn that Lincoln’s granddaughter had lived in Murray Hill for many years; the owners of that private home welcomed me inside and showed me a preserved shred of the flag that had covered the slain president’s coffin in 1865. Murray Hill plays a part in my most recent book, too; in My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering, I write about returning home, at twelve years old, after being held hostage for a week inside a hijacked airplane. Upon my return on September 14, 1970, I’d written in my diary, “I’m so glad to be home!”
As a grown-up resident of Murray Hill, I’m glad to be home, too.
CELEBRATING 65+ YEARS OF
The Murray Hill Neighborhood Association
Better Together
The Preservation & Design Committee’s Murray Hill Neighbors’ Stories is a place
to share your memories, anecdotes, surprising encounters, or human interest
stories that charm, surprise, and build our community.
We want to hear from you!
MURRAY HILL NEIGHBORS’ STORIES –
What drew you to our neighborhood?
How long have you lived here?
Why do you love living here?
We look forward to getting to know you better.
Send Your Stories to The Preservation and Design Murray Hill Neighbors’ Stories Committee.
Chair: Barbara Gieseler
Pauline Brooks, Susan Demmet, Deborah Landey, and Michaela Walsh
MurrayHillStories@murrayhillnyc.org We will acknowledge your email and contact you if your
submission has been accepted.
Please Note – The Murray Hill Neighbors’ Stories Committee does not edit or comment on
stories submitted and accepted, except for spelling and punctuation which are then reviewed
with the story provider.
