Bob Marrow shares the story of his childhood play area, and a friend he met in the process.
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I was ten years old in 1951 when our family, two parents and four sons, moved from the Bronx to a house at 16 Atherstone Road in the “north end” of New Rochelle, a short bike ride from Heathcote, the five corners. It was a new development — the streets had not yet been paved and there was mud everywhere. But soon lawns were planted and the streets were paved. We rode our bikes and played stick ball in those traffic-free streets with other formerly Bronx kids whose parents made it to Westchester.
But football needed grass and more room than we had in our yards. We had no parks near this new community which had been carved out of ancient woods. We were at least five miles from the schools I attended, first the Roosevelt Elementary School on North Avenue, now a cooperative apartment house, and then Albert Leonard Junior High School which is now New Rochelle’s City Hall also on North Avenue.
However, we had something almost as good — the Bloomingdale Farm. It stretched for miles along Wilmot Road, bordering our new development and beyond. On this farm were fields with horses and cows. There were barns and apple orchards, hay fields and a huge mansion at the end of a long driveway that ran through lawns and trees for a quarter mile from the entrance on Wilmot Road. This was the home of the original Bloomingdale family. One of them had founded Bloomingdale’s Department Store which was then in a single large building on Main Street in New Rochelle.
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During the fall, we played football in the hay field on the northern border of the farm near our newly constructed homes. One day while we were running, blocking, passing, catching and tackling in the hay field, a very old lady, or so she seemed to us, came out of the mansion and walked slowly across her lawn and toward us. We watched her approach, standing still, transfixed in the field. She was wearing a long black dress with her gray hair pinned on top of her head and pearls around her neck; an aristocrat such as we had seen only in movies.
When she finally got to us she said in a quiet voice, “Boys, you are playing in our hay field. We need this hay for the animals in winter. You are trampling it and we will not be able to harvest it this fall. Would you mind very much coming up and playing on our front lawn?”
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For the rest of my years in that rural section of New Rochelle, that’s where we played — not just football but baseball as well. In those years of the early 1950s there was little knowledge of soccer or the parents who helicoptered over athletic fields. We were on our own, except perhaps for the watchful eyes of Mrs. Bloomingdale peering out of the windows of her mansion.
Years later I thought about the difference between Mrs. Bloomingdale and our neighbors in the new development. When we were playing catch in the backyard and an errant throw flew over a fence, our neighbors protected their precious lawns with shouts and threats if we dared to retrieve the ball. They worshipped the grass that grew from seed planted in the muddy earth. For Mrs. Bloomingdale there was no better purpose for her lawn than a place for little boys to play.
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Photo credit: Chris Burke / flickr
After Mrs. Bloomingdale (or her descendants) sold the estate to a developer in the 1970s, my parents were one of the first people to put their deposit down for a new house in what was to become Bloomingdale Estates. I was a few months shy of my 5th birthday when we moved in, in February 1980. I was reflecting on that this weekend as I stayed in their house, and looked through old albums to see the photos of the new development taking shape. Their earliest photos show how this was farm land. I have always been curious about the… Read more »
Many years after the above story, I was the Paper Boy for The Bloomingdale Estates. By this time, the “Estate” was only a main house, chicken coups, and a few horses. One day, when I was delivering papers, the skies opened up, and it started to pour. Mrs. Bloomingdale invited myself and a friend into her home to wait out the rain. She was so gracious. She offered us some Coca-Cola, and asked us what we would like to watch on television. It just happened to be the time for my favorite show, “The Adventures Of Superman”, with George Reeves… Read more »