Tearing Down the Wall of Sound Read Online Free Page A

first cousins? For this to be the case at least one of their respective parents would have needed to be the brother or sister of one of the other set. We can assume that the two Georges were not brothers. This means either that Benjamin’s father, George, must have been the brother of Bertha’s mother, Clara; Bertha’s father, George, the brother of Benjamin’s mother, Bessie; or that Bessie and Clara were sisters. Quite which, if any, of these permutations is the correct one is now lost to time. But an intriguing clue to how closely related the two Spector families were lies in the petitions for naturalization filed by both heads of family. The petition for George, father of Bertha, is dated June 2, 1923, and witnessed by one Isidore Spector, a tailor, noted as residing at 102 East 105th Street, New York.
    The petition for George, father of Benjamin, is dated four years later—June 1, 1927. This too was witnessed by the same Isidore Spector. There is also the name of a second witness: Clara Spector. Could this have been Bertha’s mother, and Bessie’s sister?
    Benjamin and Bertha settled in the South Bronx, and their first child, a daughter, Shirley, was born in 1935. Then came tragedy. Bertha gave birth to a son who died when he was just two days old. The birth of a second son, then, was a cause of particular joy. According to his birth certificate, Harvey Philip Spector was born in the Prospect Hospital in the borough of the Bronx on December 26, 1939—a birthday he shared with Mao Tse-tung and Henry Miller. But the birth was sufficiently close to midnight of the previous day for Bertha to tell friends that the certificate was wrong, that her son had actually been born on December 25 and, as she would joke, that she had “given birth to the second Jesus.”
    This confusion over Spector’s birthdate would be compounded in later years, when the year of his birth was misreported as 1940—an error that was perpetuated thereafter. For reasons that are unclear, he would also decide to add a second
l
to the name Philip.
    Spector’s birth certificate lists his father Ben as being “age 36. Birthplace: Russia. Occupation: Ironworker. Place of work: Factory.”
    Bertha is recorded as being “age 28. Birthplace: Paris, France. Occupation: Housewife. Place of business: Own home.”
    The family’s place of residence was listed as 1029 Elder Avenue, in the Bronx. But shortly after Harvey’s birth the Spectors moved a short distance to a new home in the Soundview district. In later life, Spector would romanticize his childhood home, saying that he’d grown up “in a ghetto…that’s how I came to write ‘Spanish Harlem’.” But Soundview was hardly that; a respectable working-class residential area, in the early part of the century it had been an Irish neighborhood, although by the time the Spectors arrived, its population was predominantly Jewish.
    The family home, at 1027 Manor Avenue, stood in a row of modest, jerry-built, two-storey gray-brick houses, each of which would usually be occupied by two families—one on each floor. The house’s crenellated fascia lent it the appearance of a miniature castle; a short flight of steps led up to the front door. In the heat of summer, the steps of the houses along Manor Avenue—the stoops—would become the social thoroughfare as parents pulled their chairs outside in the hope of catching a breeze, and children played on the street.
    A hundred yards north of the Spectors’ home, an elevated train clattered along the length of the area’s main shopping thoroughfare, Westchester Avenue, in those days lined with mom-’n’-pop stores, kosher delis, dress shops, tailors and family restaurants. A movie house, Loew’s—or “Lowees,” as it was known locally—showed films three or four weeks after they had opened in Manhattan—a few miles but a world