For a few years before the Mary Stevens Hammond Home for Children on Park Avenue in Hoboken closed for good in 1964, two of the children staying there, Denise Chemidlin and usually one of her four sisters, would get up each morning and walk the 12 blocks southeast to what is now Carlo’s Bakery on Washington Street. Employees of the bakery, at the time called Schoening’s, would fill the girls’ metal baskets with leftover bread from the day before. The girls would return to Hammond so they and the other children there could eat breakfast.
When the home ran out of funding and closed, Chemidlin and her sisters were placed back in their one-bedroom Hoboken apartment with an alcoholic mother who worked in a bar, Chemidlin said last week. Instead of carrying bread, Chemidlin and another sister would help carry their mother up the stairs each night after work.
“When you’re in the situation, you don’t feel sorry for yourself.” – Denise Chemidlin
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Forty years later, all five sisters, ranging in age from 55 to 65, reunited in Hoboken last weekend to share their similarities and differences, talk about memories, cry, and laugh.
Different memories
Chemidlin said last week that she and her sisters were born in various local towns – two sisters in Jersey City, one in North Bergen – before their parents brought them to Hoboken. Their home life was difficult, she said, as her parents were both alcoholics.
Some time in the early 1960s – she doesn’t know exactly when – state workers took all five of them out of their home.
“In the newspaper, there was a picture of all five of us being taken out of the house, and the quote was that our father had brought 100 chickens home to raise chickens in a one-bedroom apartment,” Chemidlin remembered.
They were placed into the Mary Stevens Hammond Home, created at 1036 Park Ave. in 1916 by a wealthy benefactor.
“It was a safe place to be,” Chemidlin said, although she added that her sisters have different memories.
“To me it was great,” she said. “My sister tells me she remembers being stuck in a broom closet and being punished. I’m 58. When you’re a child in that situation, you forget things.”
She said that she also doesn’t remember much about her home life before that, although her sisters remember being beaten and abused.
Chemidlin said that at school, none of the kids commented on the fact that she lived in the Hammond home. “Hoboken was different than it is now,” she said. “It was poor. Not ghetto, but lower class.”
However, the sisters’ time at the Hammond home did not last very long.
Didn’t tell them their father died
“While we were there, our father died,” Chemidlin said last week. “We never left to go to the funeral or anything. They never told us he died. We do know that in 1964 the home closed. Being that there was no place else for us to go, they gave us to our mother. But by this time, my oldest sister was 15. You leave the Hammond home when you’re 13. She was in a girls’ home in Elizabeth. The four of us were left. We went to live on Willow Avenue in Hoboken. My mother died three years later. By then my oldest sister was married.”
The state decided to place the other girls with their oldest sister and her husband, which was difficult.
“She did try, but it wasn’t a proper environment for a 20-year-old couple to raise 13-year-old kids,” Chemidlin said. “We all went to different foster homes. We tried to stay in touch.”
The sisters kept tabs on each other through letters and phone calls. Today, three of them live in North Jersey, although not in Hudson County, and the other two live out West.
Recently, the oldest sister, Joyce Brewer, decided to come from Nebraska to visit New Jersey. That’s when the sisters decided that everyone should get together in Hoboken for the first time in 40 years.
On Tuesday morning, they ate breakfast at Hoboken’s newly built W Hotel, where a relative works. Then they headed north to the Hammond Home.
While two of the sisters quietly took photos, Chemidlin remarked, “It looks the same.” The three-story structure is now a residence, but it has the same flat roof that Chemidlin remembers sitting on and “playing with bottle caps.”
Chemidlin said that the reunion was uplifting and sometimes “weird.”
“I personally think of my younger sister as the baby still,” she said. “She’s married with three children and she’s 55 years old. It’s good to see how we all – and I use the word loosely – survived, and our similarities. The best thing is going down memory lane. We all have different memories. We’ve had laughs and cries.”
But Chemidlin reported later in the week that she gradually had learned of some darker moments in her family’s past that she had forgotten. She said she was “lucky” because she doesn’t remember the abuse her sisters spoke of, either at the hands of their father or in the Hammond home.
“I thought the reason my sister was moved to the home in Elizabeth was because she turned 15,” Chemidlin said. “It wasn’t because she turned 15. It was because when our father died, she heard about it from a friend at school. She went to [a woman who worked at the Hammond home] and said, ‘Why didn’t you tell us our father died?’ The woman said, ‘It’s none of your business.’ My sister slapped her. So they put her in the home.”
But Chemidlin also remembered that each Christmas, Frank Sinatra and Phil Rizzuto would host a party for the kids living in the Hammond home.
Made them stronger
Looking back on her experiences, Chemidlin said they made her stronger.
“If I tell the people about it, they say, ‘Oh my God, I feel sorry for you,” she said. “When you’re in the situation, you don’t feel sorry for yourself. I feel I survived great odds. I was married and have three contributing members of society. My kids didn’t end up in a bad way.”
She added, “I still have emotional feelings about it. I’m tough, and I’m still tough on [my mother] that she gave up on us. She had a second chance. I’ll be darned if my kids ever saw a drop of alcohol in our house. I think I turned out to be a better mother because of it. My sister said, ‘Oh, she couldn’t help herself; you have to put yourself in that position.’ Me, my main thing was to raise my kids and do everything that wasn’t done for me.”
Caren Matzner can be reached at cmatzner@hudsonreporter.com or editorial@hudsonreporter.com.