Big Earl
interview excerpt
BE: Let me tell you those were some amazing times. You know we was real poor. But we really didn’t even know we was poor. We were so rich in the heart. The way we was living. We always made something out of nothing. That’s just how we were brought up. At my house, you know I lived with my grandparents, I was an only child. So, were kind of on a fixed income, you know? So, we learned to stretch the dollar out. To be conservative. To be happy with whatever we had, you know. But, at the same time, my grandparents taught me how to make something out of nothing. So, at that time, in the neighborhood the landlords were actually burning down all the buildings.
JCN: Wow, intentionally?
BE: Yeah. Yeah they were burning down the buildings to collect insurance money.
JCN: Okay.
BE: You know they felt like majority of the people in those neighborhoods were Puerto Rican or African American. They just felt like the Bronx at one time, used to be pretty much, I’m going to say a lot of Irish people. There were Italian people. And then slowly and surely as Hispanics started making their way to the Bronx, as they were coming from Puerto Rico. One of the reasons the Puerto Rican people were actually moving to the Bronx and Brooklyn too was because there were so many warehouses out there. They used to hire the Spanish people whether they spoke English or Spanish. They were just more like okay, they’re doing the jobs. They’re becoming the seamstresses, the janitors, and the maintenance people. You know, but only the Bronx was actually hiring everybody, so that’s how we ended up there at that time. But back to the landlords burning down the buildings down, you know, we used to actually build social clubs and play hiding go seek in these abandoned buildings. We probably had some of like the best times as if we were playing in an amusement park and we were just playing in an abandoned building. That’s just to go back and tell you how we were rich at heart, because we didn’t see, like wow. We didn’t pick up on like, what’s going on? Who is burning these buildings down and why are they being burned down? We used to get excited to see a fire truck come and park in the neighborhood. You’d see all the kids, you know, climbing on the truck like it was a circus or something you know? That kind of helped us build something different and try to find an outlet.
