Millionaires and the Melting Pot

I’ve been meaning to post something for a long time, but somehow it hasn’t happened. However, today I got inspired. What is written below wasn’t written by me, I’ve just typed it up from the book I happen to be reading. The book is Letter from New York by Helene Hanff. It is a collection of beautifully written short essays that she wrote monthly, years ago, for the BBC Radio program “Woman’s Hour.” This one, from March 1981, seems particularly apropos today.

March 1981

I wish to enlist your sympathy for the poor millionaires who live on Fifth Avenue, in New York’s most expensive town houses and co-op apartments. With the coming of the warm months, they’re braced for a long succession of parades up Fifth Avenue, Sunday after Sunday.

These parades are ethnic. Take the Pulaski Day and von Steuben Day parades, in honour of European generals who fought in our War of Independence. Pulaski was a Pole, von Steuben was German, so the Pulaski Day parade is organized by Polish New Yorkers, the von Steuben Day parade by German New Yorkers. There are parades on Greek Independence Day, Puerto Rico Day, Salute to Israel Day, Philippine Independence Day, and so forth, including Captive Nations Day for Armenian, Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, Lithuanian and Romanian New Yorkers.

All these parades go straight up Fifth Avenue, which means that at 8 a.m. of a spring Sunday the occupants of a town house are wakened by the boom-boom of the drum and the raucous blare of a trumpet, as the first marching band tunes up under their windows. It will be followed by twenty more marching bands and the millionaires will get no peace for the rest of the day.

The millionaires formed Community Action Groups and demanded that the city issue parades permits only for weekdays. But this was fought by Fifth Avenue merchants, since parade crowds impede shoppers and are bad for business. So the millionaires demanded that the city move its Sunday parades to some other Avenue. This, the city could not do. You can’t give one ethnic group the right to march up Fifth Avenue and tell all other groups to march somewhere else.

When a century ago the first ethnic groups held a parade, it had its right to use Fifth Avenue written into the City Charter. That group still holds the city’s biggest and most popular parade, popular even with the millionaires since it’s never on a Sunday. The parade is held on March 17^th, and when that falls on a Sunday it’s held on the 18^th because the parade is in honour of St Patrick’s Day, with a reviewing stand in front of St Patrick’s Cathedral.

St Patrick’s Day is unique in New York; for some reasons known to nobody, on March 17^th the entire city becomes Irish. But I have to tell you about the one never-to-be-forgotten St Patrick’s Day, back in the Sixties.

New York has always had a large Irish Catholic population and a small Irish Protestant population. But one year in the Sixties the Mayor of Dublin, Robert Briscoe, was to be guest of honour at the St Patrick’s Day parade and the newspapers announced that Robert Briscoe was not an Irish Catholic, nor yet an Irish Protestant, but – Heaven bless us – an Irish Jew. I mean to tell you, the Jewish population of New York went completely out of its mind.

Cohen’s clothing store and Goldberg’s Meat Market painted green O-aposrophes on their signs and became O’Cohen’s and O’Goldberg’s for the day. Delicatessens sold green bagels, kosher restaurants served green matzoh-balls and green noodles in their soup. Whole Hebrew schools turned out for that parade as the annual sea of green floats, marching bands, and schoolgirls in green shorts rolled past the Cathedral, before the three dignitaries on the reviewing stand: Jewish Mayor Briscoe of Dublin and Protestant Mayor Lindsay of New York, with the Catholic Cardinal between them.

Well, this year’s St Patrick’s Day parade has just come and gone and the long Sunday parade season looms ahead. Which brings us back to the millionaires. Why do they put up with it? Why don’t they move?

They’ll keep fighting to have the parades moved to some other day or some other Avenue. But they know that those ethnic parades, which would be unimaginable in any other great city in the world, are the essence of this one, the visible signs of that melting pot out of which New York was created. They know it, because millionaires, too, are descended from poor immigrants, beckoned here by the Statue in the harbour, holding out hope of a better life. So the millionaires and the marchers are all kin – all New Yorkers – like the rest of us.