Growing Up Bank Street

Donna Florio is a lifelong resident of Bank Street in Greenwich Village. Nurtured by colorful, eccentric neighbors who taught her to "never wonder about life from the outside. Jump in!" Donna has, over the years, worked as an opera singer, a TV producer, a Wall Street executive, and an educator, and has backpacked around the world.

An absolutely delightful book about one of New York's storied city blocks. -- Graydon Carter Bank Street, which runs eight blocks through the heart of New York's Greenwich Village, is the lifelong home of Donna Florio, born to operatic parents at Number 63 between West Fourth and Bleecker. With Growing Up Bank Street Donna has done a great service to the neighborhood, bestowing great love on the colorful iconoclasts of the day. There was no one more Bohemian ("a person who lives free of conventional rules") than Marion Tanner, my Buddhist great-aunt and inspiration for my father Patrick Dennis's 1955 bestseller Auntie Mame. In the Thirties Marion knew Everyone, including George Gershwin, Martha Graham, D.H. Lawrence, Billie Holiday, and Eugene O'Neill. In the Sixties she turned Number 72 into a free boarding house and took in Anyone, to the chagrin of her Bank Street neighbors, my generous but not-infinitely-patient father, and the Internal Revenue Service. The reader of Donna's delightful pages will re-enter the Bohemian paradise of yore that has, sadly, been priced out of existence. -- Dr. Michael Tanner Bellevue Hospital, NYC An intimate and affectionate memoir that restores a vanished corner of New York to the vibrant life that nurtured the eccentricities of Upper and Lower Bohemia. Bank Street thrived for a century even though it was surrounded by a suspicious working-class conformity, but all shared a neighborhood in common humanity that was blown away by too much money. -- Lawrence Malkin, author of Krueger's Men: The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19 I can't recall when I've had a more engrossing read. Let Donna Florio take you through several decades in the walkup building and the street in Greenwich Village where she has spent much of her life. The Village has always been a creative caldron, attracting artistic and showbiz figures, and Florio knew many of them as neighbors and friends - and she provides you with an intimate look at them and also some lesser-known figures, taking you from the Broadway of the 1920s through the Cold War through the punks of the 1970s. A former child opera singer and excellent storyteller, Florio's characters are realized on the Bank Street stage. Along the way, you'll meet some of the Village's desperate, funny, engaging personages and you'll be convinced you know them too, even if you have never come within a mile of the neighborhood. * Kevin Walsh, author of Forgotten New York: Views of a Lost Metropolis * If you love a particular New York street, if you love any city street, you will be entranced by Donna Florio's Growing Up Bank Street, her poignant, sometimes hilarious, occasionally heart-breaking memoir about coming of age on an iconic stretch of an iconic neighborhood. In a city that seemingly grows more monied and more corporate by the day, she captures a moment when a neighborhood could be defined by the human bonds and connections forged on its streets. Thanks to Florio's book, we can return, at least briefly and in memory, to a golden if sometimes tarnished era in the city's history. -- Constance Rosenblum, author of Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak and Hope Along the Grand Concourse In The Bronx