In the house in Beverly Hills where our four children grew up, living conditions were a few thousand times improved over the old tenement on New York's East 93rd Street we Marx Brothers called home.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I grew up in Burbank - but not the Burbank of valet parking and TV studios. In the late 1950s, there was a small apartment complex on Elmwood Avenue that rented mostly to families on welfare. I lived there from age 3 to 11 and again from 14 to 18 with my mother, Shirley, and my younger sister, Toni.
But one sets of grandparents lived on Davidson Avenue in the Bronx and one lived in Manhattan and I had an aunt and uncle in Queens, so in my heart I was a New Yorker.
The suburb in the 1950s was a bedroom community. The father worked in the city, and the mother stayed home. Now people live and work in the suburbs, and businesses have grown up or moved from cities to certain pockets of what was once the suburbs and created these places that are like cities.
Home wasn't so much a house as people, family.
My family originally lived in Brooklyn. Our first apartment was a little place above my father and uncle's hardware store in Coney Island. Now, don't get the impression that we were surrounded by merry-go-rounds, roller coasters and Ferris wheels. Nope, this was a little side street.
Family makes a house a home.
My brother Mark still lives in the house we grew up in.
I grew up in a semi-attached row house in Queens in New York. And my family and my grandparents and my father's from Brooklyn, and so you're essentially an outer boroughs kid, you're growing up.
Just before the opening of the 20th century, the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, are born into great privilege on the Upper East Side of New York, in a mansion overlooking Central Park.
I grew up on 135th Street. I grew up on the poor side of New York. I grew up in Harlem.