NYC Residences

While in NYC, I decided that I would also try to identify where Nama and Dampa had lived in the late 1940s. My mom didn't know precisely, so I went to the venerable New York Public Library to check on their city directories. It didn't take long to locate some records.

NYPL Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

According to the stories that Dampa wrote,

Mother worked as a practical baby nurse in wealthy New York homes. At first, in 1947, when I got an interesting research assistant's job at New York University, we lived in a very little apartment on the West Side (not far from where Marteece O'Neil lived ... !)

Elsewhere he said,

My mother and I found an awful "first" apartment on 95th Street near Central Park West...

I found confirmation of this at the library. The November 1948 directory showed Lona living at 20 West 95th Street.

(the directory also shows a Fred Leitner at 82 Avenue C
in the East Village, but I suspect this isn't him given what
he wrote in the stories)

Another thing he wrote about the 95th Street apartment was that,

Its principal advantage was that it was close to the apartment where the O'Neils lived, at Central Park West and 103rd Street

His memory wasn't all that bad 53 years later. Despite his frequent claims of being senile, he'd only mis-remembered by one street! They were at 2 West 104th Street.

Of course he married my grandmother, Marzia / Marteece O'Neil:

The wedding took place Thanksgiving Eve 1948, and the three of us, Marteece, my mother and I, moved into a new apartment development called "Fresh Meadows" in Flushing - a part of Queens, NY.

188-1 71st Crescent, Fresh Meadows still exists!
https://goo.gl/maps/5GBV4JNeMgT2

He went on:

It wasn't easy for my mother, it wasn't easy for Marteece, but we survived. Our Kathy was born in Flushing Hospital, and when she was a year old, us young ones moved to Michigan State in the fall of 1951. I helped my mother move into an apartment in the region of 72nd Street and Broadway, where many other Viennese refugees lived - as I have described before.

I will need to go back to the library to check on Lona's address after 1951, and hopefully I will find an afternoon to visit some of these places.