This is the final installment in a three-part series that looks at the early years of Meadowview Village, the low income housing development that replaced dilapidated shacks along the cliffs of North Bergen in the late 1930s. The first two articles focused on information from an old box of photos and historical documents found recently in a North Bergen Housing Authority office. This concluding entry offers personal reminiscences from one of the development’s earliest – and youngest – tenants.
“It was a miraculous place,” recalled Patricia “Pat” Savino recently. “It was beautiful. The entrances to the apartment houses had shrubs from the sidewalk all the way up to the doorway.”
Savino was not yet 3 years old when her family, the Delle Donnas, were among the first to move into Meadow View Village, the low income housing development still in the final phases of construction in 1940.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had enacted the United States Housing Act of 1937 as part of his efforts to combat the paralyzing poverty and destructive effects of the Depression. That set the stage for North Bergen Mayor Paul F. Cullum to receive federal aid and ultimately raze the shacks and shanties crowded alongside the cliffs in a slum area known as The Jungles.
From that footprint rose Meadow View Village, a group of eight new buildings holding 172 apartments. Some of the residents of the shacks were suspicious of the new housing.
“A lot of my friends came from cold water flats in private homes and really envied us for being there.” –Patricia ‘Pat’ Savino
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“It was rented to folks who had small children and were trying to get on their feet at the time,” Savino explained. “People were given apartments according to the size of their family, and their income determined their rent. Lower salaries paid lower rent. If you earned a little bit more, the rent was higher.”
The Delle Donnas were notified on May 31, 1940 that they had been among the first 50 families accepted, from more than 1,000 applications submitted. “We were living in a cold water flat at the time,” said Savino of their previous accommodations. “The building we moved into was the first building that they finished, up on 61st Street.”
Around the beginning of July, her family eagerly moved into their brand-new, five-room apartment, including a kitchen and living room. Savino’s three brothers shared one bedroom, she got another, and their parents took the third. By Aug. 15, the entire complex was fully occupied.
“A lot of my friends came from cold water flats in private homes and really envied us for being there,” said Savino. “We had heat and hot water. We really had a good living and my father was glad he made the decision.”
Life in the 1940s
“It was just clean living Italian, German, American families,” recalled Savino. “Maybe a few Polish people. Everybody got along with each other regardless of your descent. They abided by the rules in those days. You did what you were told to do. And you were just happy to have this lovely roof over your head.”
The fridge was tiny with no freezer, so food had to be bought fresh each day. “There were a couple of delis on the corner,” said Savino. “My mom would go and get bread and cold cuts at Paladino’s Grocery Store. Then we had Mr. and Mrs. Blake’s German deli on the corner. She would have a lot of German salads and whatnot. She used to talk to us in German and count in German and write on the brown paper bag. She used to tally everything up so fast you would think she was a calculator, and she never missed counting.”
When war broke out in 1941, the government rationed food and supplies. “I remember my brothers going to the different stores with ration coupons,” said Savino. “My father being low salaried, we only had meat once a week. Saturday was the roast day; that was the meat of the week.”
Still, the family never felt deprived. “Everybody was poor, even the ones in the private homes,” she said. “But everybody was friendly and I can remember going to a neighbor and asking if they could help us out with a couple of eggs. My mom never locked the front door. Anyone in this three-story building above us would just knock and come in for coffee in the afternoon.”
Also knocking regularly were the radiators. “They used to bang-bang when the steam heat would come into the cold radiators,” laughed Savino. “We got so used to it that it didn’t even faze us. They had incinerators at the time in the hallways [for garbarge], but that was stopped because of too much pollution into the air.”
Residents cleaned clothes in the basement. “The washing machines belonged to whatever family bought them. You needed a big washtub, a big sink for it to drain out into, so you couldn’t do that in your kitchen. My mother had a washing machine with a ringer, and you would put the clothes over these heated bars and slide them into this electric dryer that belonged to the building, and be careful you didn’t burn the clothes. I remember being downstairs and helping my mother at the age of 8, 9, 10.”
She added, “Right in front of 6022 building, where they have parking now, they had poles that families used to hang their laundry. That’s where we used to ride our bicycles when there was no laundry. We didn’t have a lot of cars and trucks.”
Where the ‘meadow view’ was
Granton Avenue did not yet exist, so 61st Street came to a dead end with a genuine “meadow view” overlooking the fields and meadowlands down the hill and to the west.
“Down below they had trains and they used to whistle,” said Savino. “It was like a country home at that time. Not as many people, lots of children. I had a lot of friends living in the projects and in the private houses on Newkirk Ave. From 61st Street down was a nice hill that we used to go sleigh riding down.”
In a nod to the past, everyone called the slope Jungle Hill.
Moving on
“No one even knew we were back there,” said Savino about the early days of the development on the edge of the cliff. But eventually progress caught up with them, with new thoroughfares snaking through the neighborhood and public housing towers popping up nearby, including the senior buildings. The demographics of the area gradually began to change along with the rest of town, from predominantly European to largely Hispanic.
Regulations enforced after the war required that families move out of Meadowview Village (“Meadow View” now condensed to a single word) if their income levels rose above a certain threshold. “They were very strict about that, because they had so many people who really needed the apartments,” said Savino. “There were a lot of families that moved out after, say, five years. They got on their feet and moved away after gathering some money together to buy a home. Not everybody stayed there forever like my parents. They were quite unique, my parents.”
Savino’s parents never moved out of Meadowview Village, although they downsized into smaller apartments as the kids moved away. Savino was the last child to leave when she got married in 1958 and moved to Lincoln Park. (She is the aunt of former Guttenberg Mayor David Delle Donna.)
After Savino’s father had a stroke, her parents relocated from their one-family house with a staircase to a more manageable three-room apartment on one floor. They both passed away there in 1984.
“We had beautiful rooms and we enjoyed our life there,” remembered Savino about that special time in a place created to support families in need. “It was just wonderful. It was a very happy group of people living there.”
Art Schwartz may be reached at arts@hudsonreporter.com.