Mumford Gutkind Bookchin:
The Emergence of Eco-decentralism
by
Janet Biehl http://www.biehlonbookchin.com/books/
http://www.biehlonbookchin.com |
In
the 1950s the aging Rose Bookchin still lived in the old apartment in East
Tremont, the Bronx neighborhood where she and her family had lived since 1920
and where her son Murray had grown up. Rose had been a diabetic for two decades
and was nearly blind. She was incapable of giving herself daily insulin
injections, so every day Murray took the Third Avenue El to East Tremont to
administer them.
He
would step onto the platform, and if he looked to the south, he could see over
the tops of the buildings the trees of Crotona Park. Then down the stairs and
onto the sidewalk, and he stroke briskly past his old street-side haunts: the
kosher butcher, the deli with pickles and whitefish and knishes, the old candy
store, the dairy with its slabs of butter — the old familiar shops were still
there. Most of the kids he’d known in YCL had moved away too, but their parents
still lived here — the buildings were rent controlled, after all, and it suited
them fine. The vacancy rate in East Tremont was less than one percent. Snatches
of Yiddish in the streets came to his ears, as in the old days, a comforting
sound as always. One difference: the farmers from New Jersey who’d brought
their produce over the bridge into the Bronx — they didn’t come here anymore.
Their farmlands were paved over. No one was farming there or in Yonkers now.