Just Kids From the Bronx (28 page)

I was lucky and more fortunate than a lot of guys because in the early eighties a lot of them were hustling and doing bad things. There were a lot of drugs. There were the empty buildings, the robberies, crack cocaine. And a lot of them went to jail and a lot of them got into a lot of trouble. I saw like the friends of the friends, while you only made a few hundred dollars a week and they were making thousands, but I’d still see them coming to our place to get lobster and shrimp. In the restaurant business, the greatest part is that
everyone
has to eat. Everyone has to eat and drink and socialize no matter what their walk of life. When it’s dinnertime, you have to eat. You can’t exclude yourself. Then a week later, I’d hear that this one went to jail and that one got killed, so the more stories I’d hear, and I heard more bad ones than good, it encouraged me to stay working. I realized that at any given moment what was really going on in the street was Russian roulette. I didn’t want to be part of that.

My very first job in a restaurant was as a dishwasher. I thought that it was a lot of fun because you had to keep clean and organized. I also started working in a kitchen as a line cook/prep guy/expediter. I knew that whatever I did, I did with pride and that I was going to be good at it. No one was going to do a better job than I did. If I was going to make a delivery, I was going to be on time. I was going to be the best.

Some people have eyes, but they can’t see. I built Jimmy’s Bronx Café, which was a forty-eight-thousand-square-foot restaurant, which wound up probably being the largest Hispanic restaurant/lounge/bar in America. Before it was built I would tell people what my plans were. That I had a vision for what it would look like, but people—they all thought I was crazy. I couldn’t borrow a dollar from my friends. I had used up every penny that I had and all the banks had turned me down. A former baseball player, Ruben Sierra, who was an investor, had pulled out of the deal. After Ruben pulled out and left me to hang and dry, I had no choice but to continue.
All the money I have is in this deal. I’m already building. I’m putting forty guys to work every day. I’m already in. All my money, all my cash and credit is in. If I quit, I sink. Either sink or swim.
So I kept building. I was looking to borrow money and I need a million one to buy the property and the broker Lenny Katz came to visit me. I was walking him through the space, showing him what I was building, and he said, “Let me see your family.” So he went to my house and he met my wife and kids on Mosholu Parkway and he said, “I’ll get back to you.”

The next thing, his uncle Leon Katz, who used to be a councilman, came. I gave him a tour of the space, and he met my family too. He called me back and said, “I’m going to give you the money, at twenty-four percent. And the reason it’s twenty-four percent is that you’re building and improving someone else’s property. It’s not even yours, but I know that you’re not going to quit. You’re going to make this project win.” I had told Leon, “I can’t quit because this is all I have,” so I kept building. Probably a year and a half later I was able to pay him back. You know twenty-four percent is a high interest. It was the highest you could charge, but it didn’t matter because at the end of the day it was sink or swim. The restaurant was a big success and I paid him back everything that I owed him.

The saddest part is—and I’m so upset about this—that you send these kids to school and you spend thirty, forty, fifty, or two hundred thousand dollars on their education, and the first job they get out of college they get stuck with because they think,
What if I quit this job and I can’t get another job?
The biggest fear in people that teach us, the educators, is that you’ll be left without anything if you don’t settle for what you now have. That’s wrong. If you fail, it’s okay. It’s not failing. It’s just a test. So you take another test. Your whole life is going to school. When you stop being educated by the educational system and you walk into life, you don’t realize that that’s part of another educational system and that you have to continue to grow and evolve on a daily basis.

I’m still learning and I’m never going to stop learning, because in the restaurant business I consider myself a freshman in college. After thirty-five years! I still have to earn my associate’s or bachelor’s degree. I haven’t even gotten my master’s yet. In the past, I failed three times. After the fish place on Webster Avenue I bought a restaurant in New Jersey and I failed. I had an auto shop on the Grand Concourse and that didn’t work and then a car wash and that didn’t work out. I didn’t succeed in any of them. Each business, even though they didn’t work out for me, I didn’t quit. And when I started Jimmy’s Café, that was even a bigger project than the first three, but I don’t know how to spell fail. When I started the Café I said this is going to be great, and after the success of Jimmy’s Bronx Café I started Jimmy’s Downtown and Jimmy’s in Harlem.

I’ve been to the White House, and I’ve met Bill Clinton. I had dinner with Fidel Castro from Cuba, and had a dinner party for Tito Puente’s birthday. I never got my high school diploma and I didn’t go to college, but I’m still learning in the college of hard knocks. You can achieve or attain anything you want, but believing is half the process. And you have to surround yourself with people who will help you move forward and not keep you back. I was fortunate as a young man to have met people who could guide me. It’s very important to have people you look up to. To admire their work and learn from their hard work. You get out what you put in. If you put in apples, don’t expect oranges. You’re not going to fool anyone.

LUIS A. UBIÑAS

Businessman, former president of the Ford Foundation

(1963– )

The thing about growing up really poor is that there aren’t many carefree days. You don’t have enough days in a row without knowing whether or not there’s going to be enough food. You don’t have a day when it’s winter and it’s snowing without knowing whether or not there’s going to be heat the next day. It’s not just the moment of not having that’s challenging. It’s knowing that the moment of not having will either continue or return. I think what’s shocking is the permanence of the conditions of insufficiency we had. Of never having enough. Or even when we did have enough, knowing that not having enough would soon return.

We had a lot of housing insecurity. We were almost never in the same place two years in a row. Once we had an apartment that burned down. My mother had worked hard to buy a sofa, a bed, to buy things that you would need in an apartment, and then one day there was an electrical fire and our building burned to the ground. It was a wooden house of over a hundred years old. We lost everything.

Another time it was very hard to pay the Con Edison bill, so even if you can pay the rent you still need electricity. Once Con Ed cut off our lights there was no going back. We couldn’t meet the monthly payment and certainly couldn’t meet the back payments of three or four months, so we lost the apartment because we couldn’t pay the electric bill. Many times we lost places because we couldn’t pay the rent itself. Other times we lost places because they were condemned. Those were very hard times.

Unlike other great New York communities, the housing stock in the South Bronx was never good. There weren’t beautiful brownstones, wide and made of stone, like in Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. In the Bronx there were little wooden houses with little rooms, built almost like temporary housing about a hundred and twenty years ago. By the seventies they were way beyond their useful lives. They had never been upgraded for plumbing. They had never been upgraded for heating or electricity. In the sixties and seventies the city rules were different, and the enforcement of those rules was almost nonexistent. When you drove through parts of the Bronx in those years, the entire horizon as far as the eye could see was of entire blocks of rubble fields. And the rubble fields would end in abandoned buildings with birds living in them. That city with rubble—that place looked more like Dresden in World War Two than a part of New York City.

My mother was a seamstress. She sewed dresses in South Bronx sweatshops for thirty-five cents each. That somehow she managed to raise us is almost a heroic act, and it cost her her life. She had a form of colon cancer, but if she were middle class she’d probably be alive today. Health care wasn’t available to her in any real way, and taking a break from work meant not making tomorrow’s breakfast. My father died in his early thirties from drug and alcohol abuse. He grew up on the Lower East Side in the fifties and sixties. There was a business then, a business of addicting young people, mostly Hispanics, to create heroin addicts. They would actively take boys of fourteen or fifteen. Boys who weren’t old enough to have their first kiss were encouraged and brought into the world of drugs.

One reason education mattered so much to my Hispanic family is much like it mattered to other immigrant families, whether the Jews in the 1890s or other Hispanics in the sixties or seventies. Education is the pathway to prosperity and prosperity is the pathway to safety. Safety means being able to wake up in the morning and having a place to eat, having hot water. Safety is knowing that when you wake up and you’re hungry there’s food. Safety is knowing that when you walk out the front door you’ll be able to make it to the subway without being robbed.

By the time I was ready for first grade, we were living in my grandmother’s apartment in a housing project. For us it was a safe haven. Every time we lost our own place, we knew we could go there. We also knew that my grandmother, with her limited resources, would feed us and make space for us. When we were there, we also knew we wouldn’t be in a homeless shelter or in one of those homeless hotels, which were so horrible at that time.

I hadn’t gone to kindergarten because we had moved so much, so I was put in a first grade with other kids who hadn’t gone to kindergarten. Very quickly the teachers there realized that it wasn’t the best environment for me. But I stayed in that school for the second and third grades, and in some way they gave me my own curriculum. At the end of third grade arrangements were made for me to go to a special school for gifted and talented children. In September, when I was supposed to go there, we found out that we hadn’t received the paperwork because we had moved again. So I was put in a fourth grade in the only school that had space.

It was a bilingual school where instruction was in both English and Spanish. By then I was flat-out depressed. The chaos there! There was no teaching going on. Luckily, a guidance counselor–teacher looked at my record and realized that not only should I have been in the gifted program but that I scored among the highest in the city on the reading and math tests. I scored on a high school level in both those tests from third grade. So the initial solution was to put me in sixth grade. For many reasons, that solution had its own problems. First of all, I was a ten-year-old in a class of fourteen-year-olds, many of them having repeated a year or two. I think there was even one fifteen-year-old there. And many of them didn’t speak Spanish, because they were either African American or non-Spanish-speaking Hispanics.

But this amazing teacher, who made such a difference in my life, who saw that I shouldn’t be there, realized that my being in the sixth grade was not an ideal solution. So he then did something that I don’t think would be possible now. He personally took me to the Bank Street School, Allen-Stevenson School, and St. Bernard’s—all private schools in Manhattan. He took me out of school, took me by the hand, bought me subway tokens, bought me lunch. Where parental consent enters in all of this I have no idea. But he, thank God, took that step.

Miraculously, I was accepted in all three schools. He turned to me, in a way that would horrify helicopter parents in this day, and said, “Where would you like to go?” I said, “I’d like to go to the school where all the kids were wearing jackets and ties, where, when the kids ran through the hall, the teacher stopped them and where there was silence in the hallways.” And he said okay. At the cost of twenty-five dollars a year, which was an enormous amount for my mother to come up with, I got to go to the Allen-Stevenson School on the East Side. That was a seminal moment in my life. From Allen-Stevenson I went to Collegiate, and from there to Harvard and then to Harvard Business School.

At the Allen-Stevenson School I was with kids who were living a different kind of American reality. They lived on Park Avenue and West End Avenue and had things that were unimaginable to me. We would play soccer on Randall’s Island. We would play baseball in Central Park. We would go on field trips to the art museums. A parent even donated a box at the Metropolitan Opera. Every chance I had, I’d go sit in that box, which seemed unfathomably and miraculously glamorous.

One of the least understood but perhaps one of the most important things about being in an environment where people come from different backgrounds is that they have different aspirations. It has to do with what the horizon looks like. The horizon from the South Bronx was limited to an everyday survival worry about clothing and shelter. The horizon when you’re in a place like Harvard or a place like Collegiate is a distant horizon, and that one has things in it, like becoming a senator or even becoming president of the Ford Foundation. It is one of the gifts of a place like Allen-Stevenson or a place like Collegiate that they not only educate you, but they open up limitless horizons for you. My course was changed and set from that moment in fourth grade when a teacher decided to take matters into his own hands.