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From Newsday, 2006
Still, Gordon Heights was a dream cone true for many blacks. Yvonne Rivers was 6 years old when her mother left her with friends in Gordon Heights for a week-long visit in the summer of 1943. When Rivers got home to her family’s Bronx apartment, she asked her mother, “can we move to the country?”
And Rivers kept asking until, in 1947, her parents scraped together $96 for the one-acre plot on which they erected a house sold as a kit at Gimbels.
“You’re six years old, living in New York and can’t get off your stoop and don’t really know why,” remembers Rivers, 60. “I found it so enchanting to be able to open the door, get off the stoop, run across the street and never have to worry about cars or anything. It was such a freedom.”
But she marveled at the sacrifices the early homeowners made. “Who would leave running water, transportation, electricity…Who would do this besides people who have a deep commitment to something?” she said. “They all came out for one reason. They wanted to build a community”
Brushed With Fame: Locked out of upstate resorts like the Catskills, black entertainers of the 1940s and ‘50s such as Ethel Waters and members of The Ink Spots vacationed in Gordon Heights. Prominent black leader Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1945, and Hazel Scott spent their honeymoon at a friend’s home in Gordon Heights.
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