A Writer's Life (18 page)

To Schillinger's right in the photograph, parked under the uplifted paneled doors leading into the stable, was one of his high-roofed padded vans with three of his employees sitting forward on the carriage bench, holding the reins of a pair of chestnut-colored horses paused with their hoofs flat on the sloping sidewalk. In the background stood his ornate warehouse, designed by a Bronx architect named Fred Hammond, and built at a cost of twenty thousand dollars on the south side of Sixty-third, which was then a noisy and trembling street darkened all day by the shadows of the elevated tracks that reverberated up and down Second and Third avenues. Schillinger himself resided in a quieter neighborhood six blocks uptown, in a four-story brownstone at 340 East 69th Street, occupying it with his wife, Eliza, and their four children and some of his wife's relatives. His older children and his in-laws assisted him in performing administrative or secretarial chores in his warehouse, and they accompanied him daily to and from work on foot, doing so along Second Avenue's cobblestone sidewalks and unpaved streets, which were enshrouded with the lattice-patterned shadows formed by the elevated tracks and structure of the overhead railway. Although electric traction cars had replaced steam engines a few years before, in 1902, the fabric awnings of some of the avenue's shops still displayed burn holes formed by blazing bits of coal that had come flying down from the older trains, and nearly all the buildings in the neighborhood were darkened by varying shades of soot.

When the Schillinger warehouse opened for business in 1907, it was the newest addition to a block that had long catered to the household and personal needs of those wealthier New Yorkers who dwelled westward, closer to Fifth Avenue and Central Park. Here, on this service street between Second and Third avenues on Sixty-third, Mr. Schillinger's neighbors included a beer-bottling plant, a wholesale baking factory, a lumberyard, a carriage manufacturer, the workshop and family apartment of a blacksmith (the current site of Bravo Gianni restaurant at 230 East 63rd), and a massive dark-bricked four-story public school building—P.S. 74, its enrollment primarily made up of Irish and German immigrant children who had been pressured by truant officers into regular attendance partly as a result of the rising antipathy within the city toward child labor.

Across the street from the warehouse was a vacant lot that would presently become the site of the rumpside annex of the Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital, which fronted on Sixty-fourth Street. Frederick Schillinger's most friendly and accommodating neighbors on his side of the street, next to the school, were the proprietors of a piano factory, who accorded him exclusive delivery rights to the department stores and other
retail outlets that sold their products, and also to their special customers (such as concert performers) who received pianos directly at reduced prices, or even gratis if they were very famous.

If anyone had cornered the piano-moving market in New York City in the early twentieth century, it was probably Frederick J. Schillinger. He had earlier received introductions to pianists and to shop owners and manufacturers from his wife Eliza's parents and other relatives who owned and operated a small factory that manufactured keyboard parts near Times Square, then called Longacre Square. The factory was well known to members of New York's musical community, and Eliza herself, throughout her courtship and the early years of her marriage to Frederick J. Schillinger (himself an able violinist), made certain that all of her family's clients and friends with pianos to be moved were aware of his capabilities.

Eliza and Frederick's three daughters and one son, Fred junior, were excellent piano players, although the girls became more accomplished as light classical singers on New York's radio station WEAF (one of them also sang in the Metropolitan Opera's chorus), while young Fred's musical talents were most conspiciously noticed at his father's warehouse after he had begun working there in 1920, having just graduated without honors from high school and with no ambition to go to college. He did not like working in the warehouse, either, but he did enjoy serenading his fellow employees at the keyboard while they were pushing pianos in and out of moving vans.

Since no other family member would agree to take over the warehouse following the elder Schillinger's death in 1927 of bronchopneumonia, Fred junior became his father's successor by default, and while he would gradually replace the horses with trucks, he did little else during the next twenty-five years to keep pace with his rivals in the small but very competitive furniture-moving and storage business in New York.

“He slowly ran his father's business into the ground,” I was later told by Fred junior's wife and widow, Charlotte Schillinger, who added that in 1952 he was grateful to dispense with the entire five-story building for the low price of $64,200.

The man who bought the building, and continued to operate it for the next twenty years as a storage and moving business, was an Italian-American named Frank Catalano, a short, balding, and compactly built individual in his late forties who had successfully owned and managed other warehouses in New York and who wasted no time in revitalizing the trade at 206 East 63rd Street after he had removed all the advertising signs bearing the name Schillinger. The building was now the site of Dard's Express and Van Co.

The new owner named it Dard in memory of his grandfather, Dardinello Catalano, who had been born and reared in the hills of Calabria, not far from my own family's ancestral village. A son of Dardinello Catalano who was named Salvatore left Italy at twenty-three to work as a coal miner near Pittsburgh. But within ten years, Salvatore Catalano's ailing lungs made it impossible for him to continue with his job in the mines, and so he left the Pittsburgh area for New York, where he found work as a laborer with a construction company. A disabling injury a few years later forced Salvatore to quit and begin earning his living as the proprietor of a fruit and vegetable store near the East River on Forty-ninth Street. In the neighborhood, he met and would soon marry an Italian-American woman with whom, during the next decade and a half, he would have nine children. The second of these, a son born in 1914, would prove to be the most energetic and resourceful, Frank Catalano.

As a child, when Frank was not helping his father in the store, he was on the sidewalks shining shoes in front of the Grand Central Post Office. As a young teenager, Frank rose daily at dawn to drive a horse and wagon downtown to fetch the produce for his father's store before going on to class at Public School 135 on Fifty-first Street and First Avenue. During the 1930s, after persuading his father that the high cost of purchasing a truck was a prudent investment because of its time-saving value, Frank put the produce truck to use during his off-hours from the store by moonlighting as a furniture mover. Within a few years, while taking night courses to complete his high school education, Frank Catalano was buying trucks on his own, and employing his younger brothers and sisters to help with his moving and storage business, which was initially centered within a warehouse on East Forty-ninth Street. In 1952, needing more space and knowing about the mismanaged warehouse belonging to Fred Schillinger, Jr., Frank Catalano paid him a visit and found him more than eager to sell.

After I had moved into the neighborhood, I would sometimes see Frank Catalano helping his men as they loaded or unloaded trucks behind the opened paneled doors, and once I ventured in to introduce myself and tell him about my interest in his building. He was reluctant to talk to me, and I did not press him. But I continued to see him and to acknowledge him with a few friendly words or a wave while walking to my then girlfriend Nan's apartment, which was located on Sixty-third Street east of Second Avenue; and in 1959, after we had gotten married and began exploring the city together in my aggressively stylish, sleek white TR-3—an English sports car I bought secondhand but have maintained and continue to drive today—I parked it directly across the street from Frank
Catalano's warehouse in an underground garage where the monthly rates were low but where my low-slung vehicle was often nicked or dented by one of the wiry, wine-drinking attendants as they backed into my fenders and headlights while maneuvering larger cars with higher bumpers. It was impossible to accuse anyone, since I could never identify who was at fault, although I did complain constantly and futilely to the management about the abuse being rendered upon my beloved TR-3, whose every dent was like a hole in my heart.

One warm autumn afternoon in 1963, after I had arrived at the garage and had lowered and snapped my car's canvas top down, I noticed that one of the red plastic taillight covers mounted to the back fender had been smashed, and it was the third time this had happened in recent weeks. I always stored extra taillights and covers in the trunk in anticipation of their breakage, but for some reason on this occasion—though the fender itself was not damaged—I succumbed to rage. Unable to direct my frustration at the garage attendants, since none was in view, I turned toward a metal trash can that stood in front of a concrete post and kicked the can halfway across the floor of the garage, hurting my foot.

Limping into my car and turning on the ignition, I began to gun the motor and discharge noxious puffs of dark smoke from the exhaust pipe. Then I shoved the wooden knob of my stick shift into first gear and roared up the ramp with my horn honking, alerting any and all pedestrians above that I was to be reckoned with. Arriving on the sidewalk, I saw to my left a fast-approaching garbage truck that would have blown me away had I kept going, and so I slammed my ailing foot down on the brake pedal and skidded to a stop at the curb. Close behind the garbage truck were other vehicles that were soon blurring past my windshield—taxis, limos, buses, private sedans, and vans, many of them coming from the Sixty-third Street exit of the FDR Drive along the East River and all of them now churning forward almost bumper-to-bumper on this wide westbound one-way street toward Third Avenue.

I waited impatiently at the curb, gunning my motor but unable to advance. Looking directly across the street, I saw Frank Catalano's tan brick warehouse with its doors closed and no one in sight. This was one of the few old buildings still here since the era of the elder Schillinger, and it appeared to be very small and anachronistic and fuzzy as it stood in the midafternoon duskiness of this street now being polluted by passing motorists and dominated by soaring rows of white brick modern high-rise apartment houses that cast deeper and darker shadows than had been the case when elevated trains had hovered over Second and Third avenues. Thousands of people now resided on this block, paying high fees to live in
terraced apartments as high as possible, and as remotely as possible, from the horn-honking traffic and grime below. There were no cafés, no dress boutiques, no fine shops of any kind on either side of the street, and therefore no incentives for window-shoppers nor diversions for strollers. The only person I saw on the sidewalk as I sat drumming my fingers on the steering wheel while inhaling the foul air that matched my mood was a uniformed doorman who stood some yards away, close to the curb, smoking a cigarette beyond the range of the security cameras posted in the lobby of his large apartment building at 205 East 63rd Street, near the corner of Third Avenue.

Then I heard a voice calling out to me, coming from somewhere behind my car. Turning, I saw a short, round-faced man standing near the rear fender, the one with the smashed taillight cover. He was wearing a yellow peaked cap and a dark windbreaker, and in his left hand he was carrying a fishing rod. It was Frank Catalano.

“You gotta take it
easy,”
he said, slowly shaking his head, but he spoke in a manner that was more avuncular than admonishing. Embarrassed by the thought that he had seen me at my worst, foolishly enraged because someone had cracked an inexpensive and replaceable piece of plastic, I sat and said nothing.

“You're young yet,” he went on. “Whatever it is, you shouldn't let it get to you.…”

Carefully laying down his fishing rod near the edge of the sidewalk, Frank Catalano walked in front of my car and assumed the posture of a crossing guard, raising his arms high and gesturing with his hands for the traffic to halt. After it did, he nodded in my direction.

“Okay,” he said, keeping both arms raised, “it's your turn.”

As I pulled out into the street, spun to the right, and passed him, I heard him say, “I like your car.”

“Thanks, Frank,” I replied, calling him by name for the first time.

In 1973, as Frank Catalano anticipated turning sixty, although it would not happen until the following year, he decided to quit the moving business. He and his wife, who had served as his bookkeeper, had more than enough money to live comfortably in Florida for the rest of their lives, and their two college-educated children were now both self-supporting, married, and residing far from New York City. Their daughter, Luanne, was a homemaker in Michigan, and their son, Frank Catalano, Jr., was an attorney in Oklahoma. What the elder Catalano now wanted to do was not retire from work but, rather, embark upon a new career that would allow him to do full-time what he liked to do best—go fishing. He would operate a charter-boat business in Key West, Florida, and spend his
days as a seafaring captain and fishing guide. For many years he had regularly taken time off from the warehouse to drift in the currents of the East Coast and the Caribbean, and one day while angling in the Point Judith fishing grounds near Galilee, Rhode Island, he struggled with his catch for nearly two hours before hauling in a 746-pound, ten-foot-long tuna. A photograph of him posing next to the hanging fish appeared in
Movers News
, a publication sponsored by the New York City Movers Association, which had elected Frank Catalano to serve three terms as its president.

Although he terminated his business on Sixty-third Street in 1973, it was never his intention to sell the building outright; he would retain it as a rental property, and eventually it would be inherited by his daughter and son. Meanwhile, he turned over the empty warehouse to a real estate firm, which in turn leased it to a lanky, blond, wealthy twenty-seven-year-old land developer from Sarasota, Florida, J. Z. Morris, son of multimillionaire Robert Morris, who had financed the construction of many shopping centers and condominiums in western Florida after making a fortune in the grain business in his native Indiana.