Acknowledgments
As I mentioned in the preface, this book owes its existence to Barbara Brandes Roth, my sixth grade classmate who invited me to join a chat room of former Rochdale residents she had created. Without Barbara’s deep love of Rochdale, her appreciation of its uniqueness, and her passion for sharing it with others, this book never would have been written. I want to especially thank her for making the e-mails of the Rochdale chat room available. Almost all the Rochdalers I contacted in connection with this book have been gracious and wonderful, and above all, I want to thank, as profoundly as I can, the two-score-plus people who agreed to be interviewed for this volume. The interviews are the heart of this book, and this project would not have been possible without their assistance. I am especially grateful to have captured the stories of several people, crucial to this story, who are now deceased: Harold Ostroff, William Booth, George Korot, and Arthur Greene. In many cases those I interviewed shared not only their memories but documents of their Rochdale years. Much of the essential archives of Rochdale Village was to be found only in their attics and storage closets. I wish I could mention them all here (do peruse the interview list in the bibliography), but I do need to single out my old floormate, Joe Raskin (we of apartment 11A7G, he of 11A7E), who has put at my disposal his unflagging enthusiasm for this project and his encyclopedic knowledge of the unintuitive geography and politics of Queens and of just about everything and everyone connected to Rochdale, to my lasting benefit.
Along the way I have been supported by grants from the New York State Archives Partnership Trust, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and especially the Jane DeLuca Fund for Advanced Historical Research. I have relied on the wisdom of archivists and librarians at the New York Public Library, the New York City Municipal Archives, the New York State Archives, the Long Island Division of the Queens Borough Public Library, the University of Rochester, and the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at the ILR School at Cornell University. The photo and image archivist Barb Morley of the Kheel Center came to my rescue on more than one occasion.
I have presented portions of this manuscript, in earlier forms, at “Researching New York,” the annual conference on New York history; the Columbia University Seminar on the City; the annual conference of the Organization of American Historians; and before my friends at the Rochester United States Historians (RUSH) group. Hilary Ballon, a leader in the new scholarship on Robert Moses, invited me to speak on Robert Moses and Rochdale on several occasions, to participate in the conference “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” and to write on Rochdale and a few other topics for the accompanying book. Clarence Taylor has encouraged my work from its outset, and asked me to write on Rochdale for the journal Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, and I wish to thank him and the editors of the journal for granting me permission to reuse material from that article.
Everyone I have worked with at Cornell University Press has been exemplary in support of this project, among them the series editors, Jonathan Zimmerman of New York University and Brian Balogh of the University of Virginia, and Michael McGandy, Emily Zoss, and Katherine Hue-tsung Liu in the press office. In the years this book has been in preparation, I have been sustained, supported, and nurtured in more ways than I can name, by my friends and family. Rob Snyder has been my constant sounding board, the reader of countless chapter drafts, the other side of myriad phone calls. Marc Korpus, a superlative cartographer and my very good friend, designed the wonderful maps. Dan Soyer, Tami Friedman, Julie Miller, Kai Jackson Issa, Quinton Dixie, and Aaron Braveman have been great friends. Laura-Eve Moss, my good friend and dear colleague from The Encyclopedia of New York State, has been my sharp-eyed, sure-footed, editorial conscience. As in the past, she has guided me past several swamps of potential errata. Other scholars who have encouraged me or shared research include Andrew Hazelton, Timothy Mennel, Marta Gutman, Brian Purnell, Robyn Spencer, Catherine Manning Flamenbaum, Marci Reaven, Tony Michels, and the late Joel Schwartz. I owe a special thanks to Harold Wechsler, who helped me develop this project during conversations held at dozens of Rochester Red Wings baseball games, and who played a crucial role in helping me to find a publisher. In many ways working on this project, at the intersection of my own life story with the broader historical forces that molded it, has been the most deeply rewarding of my career. I am sorry to take my leave of it, and to all those who in some way made it possible, a most heartfelt thank-you.
Figure 14. Class 5-302, PS 30 Queens, 1965. I am sitting directly behind the class sign.
Rochdale Village has three dedicatees. Over the past few years, during the parturition of this book, there have been good times and some not so good times. Without the constant love and companionship of my beautiful wife, Jane DeLuca, I never could have completed this book. Taking nothing away from Lou Gehrig, with you in my arms, Jane, I am the luckiest man on the face of the earth. My mom, Betty, lived with Jane and myself in Rochester in her last months, two ex-Rochdalers reunited. She greatly enriched our lives these past months, when I was also finishing the revisions on this book. I will always remember it as a special, cherished time because of her presence. Finally, this book is also dedicated to the memory of my beloved brother Freddy. Until his tragic and untimely death in December 2007, we had dozens of conversations about this book. Had he lived to see it completed, he would have been its biggest fan. Every day, for the rest of my life, will be another day without him.
Passover 2010