Lillian Edelstein, 2F

[867 East 176th Street, East Tremont, The Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Lillian Edelstein and her husband Sam lived in this building in apartment 2F. Lillian’s sister lived in 3F. Her mother lived in 3G. This building is one of the 159 buildings, housing 1,530 families, that Robert Moses tore down in 1953 and 1954 for the Cross Bronx Expressway. Moses said that the buildings were “slums,” “walkups,” “tenements.” “Tenements? ” a former resident of the neighborhood said to Robert Caro. “Listen, I lived in tenements. These were not tenements at all.”

Lillian Edelstein, a self-described “housewife,” became the leader of the East Tremont Neighborhood Association and kept up a valiant fight against the destruction of her neighborhood. But the fix was in. Here is an affidavit in which she told her story. Here is a 2015 obituary. And here is a 1989 episode of The American Experience, “The World That Moses Built” (aired January 10, 1989), in which you can see and hear Lillian Edelstein talk about Robert Moses and her fight, briefly at 6:13 and at greater length in a segment about the Cross Bronx that begins at 41:47.

What does Robert Moses think about the constuction of the Cross Bronx Expressway and the destruction of East Tremont? From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

Asked if he had not felt a sense of awe — of difficulties of a new immensity — when, beginning active planning of the great road during the war, he had first seen the miles of apartment houses in his way, he said he had not. “There are more houses in the way [than on Long Island],” he said, “there are more people in the way — that’s all. There’s very little real hardship in the thing. There’s a little discomfort and even that is greatly exaggerated. The scale was new, that was all that was new about it. And by this time there was the prospect of enough money to do things on this scale.” Asked if he had ever feared that the tenants might defeat him, he said, “Nah, nobody could have stopped it.” As a matter of fact, the East Tremont opposition hadn’t really been much trouble at all.

“I don’t think they were too bad,” Robert Moses said. “It was a political thing that stirred up the animals there.”

As you can see in Google Maps, there is now no there there, only the polluted air above the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives : Two more East Tremont buildings, now gone : All OCA Robert Caro posts