Aileen Jacobson

It felt a little like sailing to the end of the Earth, my father often said.

My parents became part of a community in Shanghai of some 18,000 European Jews who learned to live in barracks or crowded rooms, used chamber pots, sometimes ate only one hot meal a day from a communal kitchen and walked teeming streets filled with hawkers by day and, in the early hours, trucks picking up corpses. But they also had schools, cultural institutions and a thriving social life, complete with Viennese cafes. And they survived.

This fascinating, little-known and newly relevant bit of history is getting greater attention these days. “Hello Gold Mountain,” a chamber music composition inspired by the topic was performed in Nashville, Tennessee, in February and may be brought to New York. And most prominently there is a major project from the Brooklyn Public Library, “Jewish Refugees in Shanghai,” which brings an exhibition, films and other programs to four libraries through the month of May.

Frank Xu, the library manager who leads the project, grew up in Hongkou, the Shanghai district where Jews and Chinese lived side by side, and heard stories from his parents and grandparents. He realized that few Americans knew anything about it and thought that the “spirit of kindness” that permeated this unusual Chinese-Jewish bond could inspire a feeling of responsibility to help the refugee, when the very idea seems under attack today. “Others closed their doors,” he said. “Shanghai opened the door.”

My mother, named Ilse Ludomer at the time, arrived in Shanghai in 1939 at age 18 with her parents. The previous year, after the destructive rampage against Jews known as Kristallnacht, they had been forced out of their home, an apartment over the clothing store they owned, in the small German town of Koenigs Wusterhausen. They stayed with relatives in nearby Berlin and desperately searched for a way to escape Hitler’s rule.

My father, Erich Jacobsohn, already had a law degree in 1939, although he was forbidden by Nazi law to practice. He returned to his parents’ home in Stavenhagen, a tiny town in northern Germany, where he and his father were sent to a work camp after Kristallnacht. Other prisoners later went to Auschwitz, but Erich’s mother purchased the release of her husband and son from the Nazis before that happened. The parents then decided to send Erich away.

And so Ilse and Erich, permitted only items like utensils, clothes and photographs and no more than 10 Deutschmarks, made their way to Italy, where they boarded ships bound for China. Shanghai had no visa requirements and, surprisingly, had a support system ready for them, largely financed by wealthy Iraqi Jews with British citizenship who had arrived centuries earlier. They created ways to house and feed the needy, a job later taken over by U.S. Jewish agencies HIAS and the Joint Distribution Committee. Both my parents occasionally took advantage of the soup kitchen.

As it turned out, Ilse and Eric (who soon dropped the h from his first and last names) were among the more fortunate residents. Both were determined to enjoy their youths. My mother, quick to make friends, became her family’s breadwinner, waitressing in bars and restaurants. My father, who knew English, became a translator and English tutor. He also taught a British doctor’s son until 1943, when the Japanese occupiers interned foreigners and confined most Jews to the crowded square mile of Hongkou. My mother worked as a nanny. My father smuggled sausages.

It was a strange existence, tougher on some people than others. “Some previously important people collapsed,” said W. Michael Blumenthal, the U.S. secretary of the treasury in the Carter administration and the founding director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. He came to Shanghai from Germany with his parents in 1939 when he was 13 and left in 1947 — the same time span as my parents. “Others, who had little education, had inner resources and were willing to put themselves out there,” Blumenthal said in a telephone conversation.

“I chafed, of course, being young and feeling a sense of impotence, that no one would ever care about this miserable place,” he said. It provoked in him a desire to prove himself and to be successful, he said. “Secondly, it influenced my political views, caring for people who have nothing, who have no one to care for them.”

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor, a leading constitutional expert and an official in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department, also credited his direction in life partly to his years in Shanghai. These were very early years — he was born there in 1941 and left at age 6. His father, who as a young man had become a U.S. citizen, was interned, he said, and young Larry recognized the injustice. “I thought, My father didn’t do anything wrong — why should he be in this place?”

Life in China seemed normal to many children, who attended a refugee school, said Lisa Brandwein, 83, who spoke at a library program. She lived in Shanghai from ages 3 to 12. “We went to school, we played,” she said. “But we sensed that our parents felt helpless.” Their Chinese neighbors, generally much poorer than the refugees, were always kind, she said.

Recounting the Shanghai Jewish story “is definitely a statement on the present refugee situation,” said Rabbi Sholom Friedmann, director of the Amud Aish Memorial Museum in Brooklyn, which recently had its own Shanghai exhibition and is a partner in the library’s project, along with the Jewish Refugees Museum in Shanghai. The Jews “managed to set up shop and become a community there,” displaying “strength, courage and resilience,” he said. “The Chinese made the Jews feel welcome. You don’t hear about the tension that you might hear about in other refugee situations.”

As for my parents, they finally met in Hongkou during an air raid drill in 1945, shortly before the end of the war. My father, who had moved into an apartment near the one where my mother lived, had already noticed her, he told me. He made sure to stand next to her in a bucket brigade and introduced himself. Their romance began. A year later, they married. The following year, I was born.

Three months later, we were on a ship to America.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/nyregion/jewish-refugees-shanghai.html" id="7eff6b27-4a0a-3a3d-aa2b-ca6db63fd17f">The New York Times</a>.

Shanghai was the only option. That was what my parents discovered when they fled Hitler’s Germany. By the time they left, in separate journeys, they wound up in that international city in China, the last place in the world that would take in Jewish refugees.

The Secret History of the Jews From Shanghai

<h1>They had been living on the East Side and needed a larger apartment for their family. </h1>

He loved the location, across the street from the Hudson River and from Riverside Park South, a band of greenery that stretches from West 59th Street up to West 72nd Street, as does the boulevard. Now, he and some pals from his building regularly work out with a trainer in the park, he said, moving to their building’s gym when the weather is bad.

“We bought off a floor plan and moved in early in 2008,” he said of the three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment, for which they paid about $2 million. “It’s the best thing we ever did.”

He and Karen Hazin, attorneys in their early 50s, have a 20-year-old son and an 18-year-old daughter who, before college, attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the Bronx, a quick school-bus ride on the West Side Highway, which is also across the street from their building. Easy access to prestigious private schools, in the area and beyond, is one of the neighborhood’s draws, said residents and real estate agents.

“It’s a family-oriented neighborhood. It feels like you’re in the suburbs, but you’re 10 minutes from Broadway,” said Slava Hazin, who has since become president of his condominium board and of the Riverside South Property Owners Association, which collects fees from all the boulevard buildings to help maintain the park. “It’s absolutely its own neighborhood. Some people don’t even consider it part of the Upper West Side.”

Until the 1990s, Riverside Boulevard did not exist. It was built over a Penn Central train yard, starting at the northern end, part of a project with a complicated history. The street and park have grown over the years, Hazin said, with the final three buildings and park areas nearing completion: “The neighborhood has only gotten better.”

Molly MacDermot, 44, moved to the area 14 years ago, when her son was born. She and her husband, Gene Boxer, an attorney who is also 44, wanted more space than their rental on West 56th Street afforded. MacDermot works for Girls Write Now, a nonprofit mentoring organization. Ten years ago, after their daughter arrived, they moved to a rental on West 77th Street, but they missed their old Riverside neighborhood. So a few years ago, they bought a four-bedroom apartment in a different building on Riverside Boulevard.

“We love the park,” she said. “We go there all the time, and the children bring sketchbooks. We look at the barges going by.”

They also watch people walking dogs, pushing strollers and whizzing by on Rollerblades. In the summer, they attend free activities like yoga, Irish dancing and movies, and often have picnics. “It’s like mini-vacations,” she said.

Renee Simons, 69, a retired marketing communications executive, and her husband, Eglon, 72, a retired media management executive, looked “downtown and uptown” for a place to downsize from their Chappaqua, New York, home after their three children grew up, she said. In 2009, they bought a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in the neighborhood with water views for about $2 million.

“We love being near Lincoln Center, the amenities within the building and the general neighborhood,” Renee Simons said. “It was just fitting for us.”

What You’ll Find

A parade of tall buildings with tall windows runs along the eastern side of Riverside Boulevard, from West 72nd down to West 59th Street. On the west lies Riverside Park South, which has graceful landscaping with walking paths, play areas and other features, mostly below street level, along the Hudson River. A raised portion of the West Side Highway hovers over the park.

The earliest buildings, toward the northern end, opened in the late 1990s. The most recent — three glass towers and a park between West 59th and West 61st Street, collectively called Waterline Square — are not yet finished. All the boulevard buildings have doormen, water views and extravagant amenities. Common areas may include pools, gyms, indoor and outdoor lounges, and children’s playrooms.

“These are lifestyle buildings,” said Annie Cion Gruenberger, an agent with Warburg Realty. “They look like hotels. Everything you need is right here.”

Residential plans for the area began in the 1970s with proposals from Donald Trump, none of which were executed; in 1994, Trump sold his controlling interest in the project to other investors. His company still manages some of the buildings, and seven were given the name Trump Place. Since 2016, the Trump name has been removed from four of the buildings.

The Trump-instigated development known as Riverside South includes a few addresses on nearby streets, including two new buildings on West End Avenue and one in Waterline Square, at 400 W. 61st St.

Jennifer Kalish, sales director for One West End Avenue, said her 42-story building, which abuts Waterline Square, is part of an area called Riverside Center and part of the boulevard community. It includes a large Morton Williams supermarket, soon to open, that many boulevard residents are anticipating. Like other new buildings, it is a condo that also has middle-income housing units, which gave the building a 20-year tax abatement.

What You’ll Pay

Of the 100 homes with Riverside Boulevard addresses listed for sale on The New York Times real estate site in early February, the least expensive was a studio with “panoramic river and sunset views” at 120 Riverside Blvd., offered at $690,000. The most expensive was a six-bedroom, eight-bathroom condo listed for $13.95 million.

The average closing price for the 12-month period ending Jan. 10, 2019, according to data provided by Warburg Realty, was $2,155,297; the active-listings average, including apartments in the more expensive Waterline Square, was $3,339,619.

“This is a neighborhood in transition,” Gruenberger said, adding that, as elsewhere in the city, “there is a lot of price revision” downward.

Of 97 rentals on The New York Times site in early February, the lowest priced was $2,565 a month for a studio at 180 Riverside Blvd., one of three all-rental buildings. The highest, at $55,000, was a five-bedroom, 6 1/2-bathroom corner unit with a terrace at 50 Riverside Blvd., a condo building.

Pier I Cafe, at the foot of a recreational pier that juts nearly 800 feet into the Hudson River at West 70th Street, is “a frequent gathering spot for people in the neighborhood,” said Dan Garodnick, president and chief executive of the Riverside Park Conservancy, which helps to take care of the park. He described it as “a New Yorker’s park,” partly because it is too out of the way for tourists and also because “people who live in the area are wildly committed to its upkeep.”

The conservancy offers 250 free programs a year, from May to October, as well as public art projects like Sarah E. Brook’s “Viewfinding,” at West 67th Street through Aug. 22, 2019. New sections of the park, which will extend it on the street level, are in the works, Garodnick said.

Spencer Sloan, 41, a resident of the neighborhood since 2010, with his wife, Alma, and two children, ages 7 and 8, has noticed “more action” on the boulevard, he said, including new schools, new medical offices and the first two restaurants: BLU Café, at 120 Riverside Blvd., run by the BLU Realty Group next door but open to anyone; and Vin Sur Vingt, at 100 Riverside Blvd., a wine bar that serves brunch on the weekends. Sloan said he is looking forward to the new Cipriani restaurant and food court scheduled to open this year in Waterline Square.

James E. Linsley, president of GID Development Group, which is building Waterline Square, said he moved into a nearby building with his family so he could better understand “what might be lacking” and “how to create a real heart for the neighborhood.”

Food and beverage venues topped the list of things that were lacking, he said, and a second restaurant will be part of the Waterline complex. A park that runs through the middle of the development, at what would be West 60th Street, will be open to the public and provide a link to Riverside Park South.

PS/IS 191, the Riverside School for Makers and Artists, is in a new location with a new name, at 300 W. 61st St., and is being upgraded to appeal more to area residents. It has 570 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. In the 2017-18 School Quality Snapshot, 32 percent of students met state standards in English, compared to 47 percent citywide; in math, 22 percent met state standards, compared to 43 percent statewide.

Collegiate School has moved into a new building at 301 Freedom Place South, between West 61st and 62nd streets. It is one of several prestigious private schools in the area, including the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, at 30 West End Ave. near West 61st Street.

Most buildings run a shuttle bus to the West 72nd Street subway station on Broadway for the 1, 2 and 3 trains, and some also have shuttles to Columbus Circle, where the A, B, C and D lines are available, in addition to the 1. Some residents find walking easier. The 1 line also stops at Lincoln Center, which is closer to several buildings.

The 69th Street Transfer Bridge, one of the few visible remnants of the neighborhood’s railroading past, is in the Hudson River just offshore, south of Pier I. It once allowed barges loaded with train cars to cross the river between New Jersey and New York. The bridge was abandoned in the early 1970s, after the New York Central Railroad went out of business, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.

Tall buildings above, a band of greenery below

NEW YORK — Slava Hazin had never heard of Riverside Boulevard when his wife, Karen, “found an ad for this brand-new condo,” he said, and “dragged” him there a dozen years ago.

<h1>NEW YORK — Although the term NoMad has been used intermittently for about two decades to refer to the area immediately north of Madison Square Park, many New Yorkers remain unfamiliar with it and the location.</h1>

Nicole Risener wasn’t among them, however, when she and her husband, Edward, both 31, began looking for an apartment in a family-friendly neighborhood close to Penn Station. They found it in 2014, at the northern edge of NoMad. “I knew it was an up-and-coming neighborhood,” Risener said.

Recently married, they were living in a one-bedroom rental in Chelsea and planning to have children. In addition to a family-friendly area, they wanted easy access to trains to Long Island, where Risener teaches history at a middle school in Nassau County.

The two-bedroom, two-bathroom condo they bought for $2.14 million “was the largest apartment we saw,” Risener said, and they found everything they wanted in their new neighborhood.

“It was a little less formed then,” she said, noting that even now it isn’t fully settled. “I’m looking at two major construction sites out my window,” she said, with a third down the block.

She is happy, though, that historic buildings in the area are being refurbished, that new hotels and condos are going up and more restaurants are opening — and that Madison Square Park is in peak condition, especially after the arrival of her son a little more than a year ago.

“We go there every day when it’s nice out,” said Risener, who worked for a nonprofit before leaving to stay home with her son. “It’s a really interesting neighborhood to be in, and a central location for all our friends to visit and congregate in our apartment.”

Also, she said, “I see strollers everywhere and young families everywhere.”

Doron Zwickel, 44, a broker with CORE, can confirm that NoMad is conducive to family life. Zwickel moved there in 2014 when he was single and interested in the many trendy restaurants, after he became director of marketing for a new condominium. He bought a three-bedroom loft in an older building for $1.8 million and renovated it.

“It seemed like the perfect neighborhood for a single guy,” Zwickel said.

Four years later, he and his wife Kimberly, 35, a special-education teacher, have a son who is nearly 2 and a daughter a few weeks old. “Now I’m finding it’s great for young families,” he said of the area, calling the park “the gym of the neighborhood.”

Mario G. Messina, 73, is an advertising executive who has lived in a large one-bedroom co-op in a converted 1920s office building with his wife, Geraldine, for 38 years. They paid $74,000 at a time when the area was largely commercial, before it was known as NoMad.

“Somehow,” he said, “our neighborhood has become very desirable.”

Messina is president of the 29th Street Neighborhood Association, which champions historic preservation and quality-of-life issues for NoMad and the surrounding area. His group wants more buildings to be given landmark status, he said, even as the population grows: “Young couples come here and have children, and instead of moving to the suburbs, they buy the apartment next to theirs.”

Keats Myer recently noticed a placard blown over in Madison Square Park and ran to get one of the 25 people on the park’s winter staff to secure it properly. As executive director of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, keeping the grounds pristine is part of her job, but it’s also a source of satisfaction. The 6.2-acre park is “the pride of the City of New York,” she said. “We view ourselves as a town square.”

With year-round art exhibitions, summer concerts, events for children, a horticulture program and numerous benches, the park — or at least the northern part of it, bordered by Madison and Fifth Avenues and East 26th Street — is an anchor for NoMad, which stretches from 25th to 30th Street between Lexington and Sixth Avenues (although definitions differ).

After a period of decline, when the park was considered dangerous, a refurbishment began in the late 1990s and continued into the early 2000s. But the surrounding neighborhood didn’t really start to blossom until around 2013, Myer said.

Older stores endure, including wholesalers offering T-shirts, socks and beauty products, as well as spiritual advice, especially on Broadway and Sixth Avenue, and the streets in between. Intermixed are sleek new cafes, well-known restaurants like Scarpetta and Blue Smoke (part of the group founded by Danny Meyer), and trendsetting hotels like the Ace and the NoMad.

The irregularly shaped Madison Square North Historic District, created in 2001, protects the exteriors of 96 structures, including hotels, apartment buildings, high-rise offices, row houses and lofts that once were used as showrooms. But that hasn’t stopped new construction from rising around them.

At least four new high-rise hotels are under construction, including one from AC Hotels by Marriott, at 842 Sixth Ave.; one from Virgin Hotels, at 1225 Broadway; a Ritz-Carlton, at 1185 Broadway; and one at 250 Fifth Ave. from a new chain called Flaneur Hospitality, combining a renovated historic building with a 23-story addition.

On the residential side, a different kind of old-new combination recently opened: Known as 88 &amp; 90 Lex, it combines a restored prewar exterior (88 Lexington) with a modern, postwar one (90 Lexington) to create a single condominium. Other condominiums in the works or just opened include Rose Hill, a 45-story building at 30 East 29th St.; the 24-story NOMA, at 50 West 30th St.; and a 55-story building at 277 Fifth Ave.

In early January, there were 79 homes listed for sale on StreetEasy, ranging from a first-floor studio in a Madison Avenue co-op for $475,000 to a 20-room penthouse in a Fifth Avenue condo for $62.8 million. The median asking price for a one-bedroom was nearly $1.5 million.

But prices have been dropping here, as elsewhere in the city, said Zwickel of CORE: “There are some solid deals out there.”

The 83 rentals available included a studio on East 30th St. for $2,175 a month and a duplex penthouse in a Broadway condo for $16,500 a month. The median asking price for a one-bedroom rental was $4,615 a month.

Hip as NoMad is becoming, it resonates with echoes of its past.

West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues was once known as Tin Pan Alley, where songs like “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and “Give My Regards to Broadway” were published as sheet music. There is not much left of the music business there, apart from a commemorative sidewalk plaque, but a group is trying to get landmark status for the remaining historic buildings.

The venerable Rizzoli Bookstore, which resided for many years on West 57th Street, moved into the Gilded Age St. James Building, at 1133 Broadway, in 2015, creating an elegant interior to match the handsome facade. That building and several others in the neighborhood belong to Kew Management, headed by Leslie Spira Lopez, who lives in NoMad and heads the nonprofit NoMad Alliance, which she said works to shape the community’s identity.

“It’s a wonderful live-work neighborhood,” she said. “There are great places to go to lunch and for a drink in the evening.”

There are several significant historic churches in the neighborhood, including the Church of the Transfiguration, at 1 East 29th St. It’s been known as the Little Church Around the Corner since 1870, after officials permitted an actor to be buried there when other nearby churches refused. Across Fifth Avenue, at 1 West 29th St., is the Colonial-era Marble Collegiate Church, where Norman Vincent Peale, author of “The Power of Positive Thinking,” was the senior minister for 52 years. Both churches offer public tours.

The National Museum of Mathematics, at 11 East 26th St. (or 11 Madison Square North), is a hands-on museum that attracts thousands of visitors annually. And the Appellate Division Courthouse of New York State, at Madison and 25th Street, is a beaux-arts building with landmark status that has marble statues outside and handsome murals in the entrance hall and courtroom.

Students in NoMad are zoned for three elementary schools. P.S. 11-William T. Harris has 888 students in prekindergarten through fifth grade. In the 2017-18 School Quality Snapshot, 72 percent met state standards in English, compared with 46 percent citywide, and 74 percent met math standards, versus 47 percent citywide. At P.S. 33-Chelsea Prep, which has 638 students in prekindergarten through fifth grade, 67 percent met state standards in English and 65 percent met state standards in math. P.S. 116-Mary Lindley Murray has 503 students, 65 percent of whom met standards in English, and 66 percent in math.

There are two zoned middle schools. At J.H.S. 104-Simon Baruch, 73 percent of the 1,117 students in sixth through eighth grades met state English standards, compared with 47 percent citywide; 70 percent met standards in math, compared with 38 percent citywide. M.S. 297, a new school that does not yet have a School Quality Snapshot, has 562 students in sixth and seventh grades.

Many residents walk to work or have short subway rides. The W and R trains make local stops at West 28th Street, and 6 trains stop at East 28th Street. Other lines are nearby.

The original Madison Square Garden (1879-1890), named for James Madison, was at Madison Avenue and East 26th Street, as was the second (1890-1926), designed by Stanford White. The latter building had a rooftop theater where, in a notorious 1906 incident, Harry Kendall Thaw killed White for having an affair with his wife, Evelyn Nesbit.

After the second building was demolished, it was replaced by the New York Life Building at 51 Madison Ave.

This article originally appeared in <a id="165e790f-bdab-4f8f-8ed4-266a3088e30c" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/realestate/nomad-a-rapidly-evolving-neighborhood-with-a-storied-past.html">The New York Times</a>.

NoMad: A rapidly evolving neighborhood with a storied past

Nicole Risener wasn’t among them, however, when she and her husband, Edward, both 31, began looking for an apartment in a family-friendly neighborhood close to Penn Station.

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Aileen Jacobson

Articles written by the author

The Secret History of the Jews From Shanghai

Tall buildings above, a band of greenery below

NoMad: A rapidly evolving neighborhood with a storied past