By Bonnie Eissner
“When you build things in our city so many times other things are destroyed,” said five-time Emmy Award-winning documentarian Stanley Nelson in a recent interview with West Side Rag. “We can all list things that probably shouldn’t have been destroyed,” he added.
Nelson was talking about San Juan Hill, the mostly Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood, home to thousands of families, that was razed in the late 1950s in the name of urban renewal, to be replaced by Lincoln Center and Fordham University’s midtown campus.
At the time, urban planning czar Robert Moses called San Juan Hill, which stretched from West 59th Street to West 65th, “the worst slum in New York.” But, in fact, it bustled with businesses and churches, and its theaters and clubs produced such creative geniuses as James P. Johnson, creator of the Charleston, Josephine Baker, and Thelonious Monk.
The rise and fall of San Juan Hill, is the subject of Nelson’s latest documentary, “San Juan Hill: Manhattan’s Lost Neighborhood,” debuting on October 9 at Alice Tully Hall, as part of the 62nd New York Film Festival. Tickets are choose-what-you-pay and available starting September 10 at noon.
Nelson grew up on the Upper West Side — first at West 148th Street and later at West 82nd Street and West End Avenue — but said he knew little about San Juan Hill before Lincoln Center commissioned him in 2022 to create this latest film. He spoke to West Side Rag about what he learned. Following are lightly edited excerpts from that conversation.
What responsibilities did you feel making this film?
Nelson: I felt the responsibility to tell an honest story, but also one that would engage audiences. Even though the late ’50s [when the neighborhood was demolished] is kind of a long time ago, I felt that we could find people who were still around and could talk about it — first-person witnesses, not just historians — and that we could find good footage and pictures. And we were able to do all those things.
What was the overall feeling among the former residents you spoke to about the neighborhood and the loss of the neighborhood?
Nelson: There was a genuine feeling of love across the board for the neighborhood and for the life that they had. We tend to romanticize our childhood and where we grew up. but it definitely wasn’t a “Tobacco Road.” As people say in the film, there was a lot of love and mutual understanding. I don’t think we talked to anybody that said it was horrible and it was great that it was destroyed.
What to you is the most moving part of the film?
Nelson: I think there are two or three things. One is when the people from the neighborhood talk about how, all of a sudden, they heard explosions and saw dust. One gentleman talks about the fact that he was a kid and that people started to be missing from his classroom because they were forced to move out. And people talk about the community that was lost; it’s gone, and it’ll never be replaced. And what’s startling is the amount of artistic vibrancy that was contained in that neighborhood that was destroyed.
Do you have a sense of why it was such a rich place for music and the arts?
Nelson: One of the things that we show is that there was a real mix of people, and it was a changing demographic. At different times it was a Black neighborhood; it was a Puerto Rican neighborhood; it was a white neighborhood. And some of those people stayed. So there was a mix of people that was really interesting.
The neighborhood wasn’t always harmonious. There was gang violence. There was hardship and overcrowding. How does the film address those aspects of life in San Juan Hill?
Nelson: We try to address them honestly. It wasn’t utopia; as the residents say, there were problems, and it was a poor neighborhood. But as somebody says, it wasn’t a slum. To us, it was home. And that’s really important. Part of what happened in urban renewal was there was a general sense that “poor neighborhood equals slum,” and they should all be done away with. There were problems, but there are problems everywhere; and there’s true value many times when people mix. It’s not always totally harmonious, but there’s also other values.
The destruction of San Juan Hill paved the way for Lincoln Center and today’s Upper West Side. Was it worth it?
Nelson: That’s an unanswerable question. But I think there was probably a different way to do it. They could have certainly kept some more of the neighborhood intact. And they could have made Lincoln Center more accessible to the neighborhood and included the neighborhood in Lincoln Center. But that was not the thinking at that time. It was a very different time.
What do you hope viewers take away from the film?
Nelson: I hope that people learn and think about San Juan Hill — and that when you build things in our city so many times other things are destroyed. We have to modernize. That’s part of life. But we can all list the things that probably shouldn’t have been destroyed in the name of modernization.
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My grandmother’s closest friend was displaced by that “urban renewal” project. She never married, and had to surrender her apartment in one of the tenements. She moved/was moved into the Empire Hotel where she spent the last thirteen years of her life listening to the radio and eating what she could cook on a hotplate. The number of lives destroyed by razing that neighborhood is incalculable. I would like to see the movie but I am afraid I would cry through the entire thing.
Nelson lived on 148th St. before he moved to the Upper West Side. That street is not included in the neighborhood that is designated as the Upper West Side on most maps of Manhattan, but in Harlem (Hamilton Heights or Sugar Hill).
While I live in the District and moved here because of Lincoln Center, and I think moaning about the disappearance of San Juan Hill 70 years later is not going to get anyone anywhere, at the same time I think this speaks loudly about historic preservation and the need for revitalization and not destruction. One can see vestiges of the old neighborhood in the wonderful 1954 film, “It Should Happen to You,” starring Jack Lemmon (in his first feature), and the late, great Judy Holliday, who as the character Gladys Glover wants to become famous, and so she contracts a billboard at Columbus Circle to advertise herself! Both her character and Lemmon’s live in the brownstones that lined the area near Central Park. Of course, the opening scene of West Side Story (1961) was filmed on a large pile of construction rubble, although the rest of the film was shot on sound stages in Hollywood. Robert Moses was finally stopped by Jane Jacobs and her preservationist movement when Moses, who had already destroyed The Bronx with the Cross Bronx Expressway, wanted to put a similar highway through Greenwich Village. The episode of Ric Burns’ (Ken’s brother) outstanding documentary series on the history of New York addresses his work, for good and bad; but it was the destruction of the original Penn Station, not San Juan Hill, that galvanized the historic preservation movement all across America. The first City to take preservation seriously was Philadelphia, which started back in the 1920s. But New York was late into the thought process. America, being so young, still does not know how to take care of its history; hence the mindless trashing of the priceless, landmark Capitol Building on January 6th. Let all of this be a warning that once you destroy it, you cannot bring it back.
We should stop tearing down statues because it’s become fashionable as well. The removal of the TR statue from the AMNH was an abomination.
As a former resident of west End Ave and 67th Street I find that whenever the area is discussed, the Italian population there is never included. My Dad lost his business, which he worked for years to build
up and we were forced to find another place to live.