Reporter Goes Home Again--to Pocket of Misery, Blight in the Bronx : Inner city: His old neighborhood--once clean, safe and solid--is now part of the nation’s most notorious urban landscape.

Almost a year ago I joined more than 400 middle-aged fellow alumni of Hermann Ridder Junior High School in the Bronx for a festive reunion. But we graduates did not meet at the school or even in the old neighborhood or even in the Bronx. Instead, the day of nostalgia was celebrated across the East River in Queens, almost nine miles away.

The reason was obvious. Most of the alumni were too nervous to take even the most hesitant step into the remnants of our past. It is hard to blame them. There is no more notorious symbol of urban blight in America than our old neighborhood. Until a decade ago, when new boundary lines were drawn, it was part of the New York police’s 41st Precinct, an area so denigrated for lawlessness and random murder that it became known as “Ft. Apache.” Hollywood even made a movie about it.

To show their commitment toward fighting poverty, Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan descended into the rubble of the burned-out buildings of Charlotte Street, barely a block from the school. In the flash of two television sound bites, our old neighborhood became the best-known pocket of misery in America.

There was an awful symbolism in our turning our backs on the school and the neighborhood. Like most of the inner cities of America, the South Bronx has long been caught in a vise of neglect. Outsiders do not care about its terrible troubles nor about its dogged attempts at restoration. Yet if even old graduates of Hermann Ridder refuse to show interest in what is going on, why should anyone else?

My old neighborhood--the streets just east of Crotona Park around the 174th Street station on the Interborough Rapid Transit line--metamorphosed from a poor Jewish quarter into a poorer black and Puerto Rican quarter around 1960 and then went up in flames a few years later.

I lived there from 1939 until 1950, a warm, secure and tranquil life in a neighborhood so homogeneous that when teachers lectured us about the need for tolerance toward minorities in America, I always thought they meant we should look kindly on Christians. The streets felt clean and safe and solid.

Now, when you approach the area by car on a fog-thickened, desolate day, driving down ugly, rutted lanes on a monstrous expressway hugged by despairing, abandoned apartment buildings, you feel as if you are entering a former war zone still suffering. The ravaged landscape seems gray, bleak and depressing.

After a short while, however, this mood dissipates, and you begin to realize how life, though far different from the past and far more troubled and anxious, still goes on normally in the transformed neighborhood.

In 1950, when I left home, almost 200,000 people lived in the residential areas now covered by the Community Board of District No. 3 in the Bronx. The district was then 54% white.

A few years later, Robert Moses, the insatiable New York public works builder, displaced 60,000 people from the district by tearing down apartment buildings to make way for his Cross-Bronx Expressway. The construction of two large public housing projects, bringing more poor blacks and Latinos into the district, frightened away more of the working-class and lower-middle-class whites. The opening in the 1960s of Co-op City, an enormous enclave of lower-middle-class cooperative housing in the North Bronx, encouraged still more flight.

Then the fires began. Landlords, insisting that rent control deprived them of profits, tried to collect insurance by hiring arsonists to set fire to their buildings. Angered by the lack of service from landlords, tenants set fire to buildings so that they could collect compensation for furniture, clothing and moving and could qualify for early assignment to public housing. Vandals set fire to buildings to collect abandoned fixtures. Children set fire to buildings for fun. The South Bronx was in flames.

After the fires died down, the 1980 census showed that only 54,000 people were left in the district. Almost every white had fled. The population was now 64% black and 34% Puerto Rican, living in what was now the poorest congressional district in the United States.

The contrast between the quality of life of the neighborhood in my childhood and today is, of course, so enormous as to confound any meaningful comparison. But there is no doubt that the blacks and Latinos who live there now are cheated.

In four recent days in the old neighborhood, I was struck most of all by the paucity of services available. We were poor--none of us could afford bicycles or tennis rackets or phonograph records--yet philanthropists and government and businesses offered us a host of services and opportunities that are now choked off.

Take the school itself. It was barely 10 years old when I entered, and the Ridder family was still enormously proud that New York had named a school after the family patriarch. Hermann Ridder, who died in 1915, had founded the Staats-Zeitung und Herold, the conservative German-language newspaper in New York, and the family showered attention on the school and its monthly newspaper.

As a teen-age editor, I would take the subway and carry our copy and layout every month to the Staats-Zeitung building on Park Row. The editors there would spruce up the layout, copy-edit our text, supply the photoengravings and then print our newspaper on heavy stock, all at no charge. It was no accident that scholastic press associations showered us with medals year after year.

The Staats-Zeitung has died, but the Ridder family now has a share of a great media empire, the Knight-Ridder chain of newspapers that includes the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Journal of Commerce in New York. Yet no one in the Ridder family or Knight-Ridder newspapers takes an interest in the publications of Hermann Ridder Junior High School now. Without outside help, the students now put out an amateurish newsletter, not a prize-winning newspaper.

Crotona Park, with its tennis courts, playgrounds, ballfields and lake, is still the neighborhood center of recreation. But the large pool complex at the Fulton Street side of the park, built by the Works Projects Administration in 1937, has only limited use. Budget cuts have undermined it.

The city does not have enough park officials to keep its park pools open on summer nights. But it also does not have enough police to keep people from climbing over the fence when the pools are closed. Unsupervised night swimming brought on two drownings in other city pools some time ago.

To prevent more drownings, the parks department has decided to keep all its deep pools empty all the time. It takes too long to drain pools at night and refill them in the morning. When I grew up, 174th Street was a lively market, bustling with shops like Bucknoff’s Delicatessen and Julie’s Bakery that had savory reputations far beyond our subway stop and with a host of other shops and stores that took care of all our needs.

Some relics of the past remain. The old synagogue on 174th Street is now a Protestant church called “Iglesia El Calvario.” Two Stars of David are still carved in its facade, but a lighted cross hangs between them. The window of the old barbershop now proclaims: “David’s Barber Shop, Specializing in Afro Hair-cutting.” The familiar Dover Theater movie marquee advertises two movies: “Red Scorpion” and “The Horror Show.”

There are few other shops. The neighborhood’s crime and extreme poverty have driven businesses away; 174th Street can hardly supply the needs of anyone anymore.

Yet it is difficult not to be impressed by the reconstruction of housing in the neighborhood. They have cleared away the rubble in which Presidents Carter and Reagan once stood, demolished the burnt buildings nearby, built 89 wood and concrete private homes with metal fences and lawns in their place and sold them at subsidized prices to lower-middle-class families.

Many of the old apartment buildings have been rehabilitated. My old block looks as normal as any city block in a poor neighborhood should, the facades of its building cleaned, many of the rooms rebuilt and most of the apartments occupied.

Much of the credit goes to Genevieve Brooks, a dynamic, articulate South Carolina-born woman who organized the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes Community Housing Corp. in the mid-1970s, a small group of residents determined to halt the decay of the community. The Desperadoes tapped every government and private source they could find to encourage construction and restoration of homes, even urging tenants, in some cases, to take over ownership of their buildings. The struggle was eased somewhat by the visits of Carter and Reagan.

But the neighborhood still has ugly expanses of despair. Eldred Hill, the 65-year-old, white-haired, white-mustached former firefighter and War on Poverty official who now serves as district manager for the community board, led me one morning to 1724 Crotona Park East, an abandoned, city-owned building that has been seized by homeless squatters. Edwin Martinez, 37, and Vickie Miller, 33, two friendly, earnest squatters who described themselves as formerly but no longer “into drugs,” showed off their work like hosts in a tour of gentrified brownstones.

Although 22 families are pooling their labor to rehabilitate this building on the rim of Crotona Park, only four occupy makeshift apartments now. The marble steps of the lobby have been cleaned, their cracks filled with putty. The squatters are installing wiring and beams and plumbing.

But, in fact, despite all the work, the five-story building still looks as if its innards had been shattered into debris by bombs. Squatters get their water by filling buckets from a fire hydrant on the street. But nothing seems to dampen their enthusiasm. Miller showed Hill that they now have a regular lock on the front door of the building instead of the padlock and chain they were forced to use a few months ago. “You see, Mr. Hill,” she said, “we’ve come a long way.”

Typical of most inner city neighborhoods, the area is ravaged with crime and drugs--although the fears of my fellow alumni did not seem warranted. No one bothered me or even looked much my way during the days I visited. Yet there is little doubt that there is a sense of insecurity. “Don’t worry,” said Hill as we began our tour of the neighborhood. “We won’t walk. We’ll drive.”

New York Assemblywoman Gloria Davis complained about the failure of the police to eliminate a brazen crack market right across the street from her office on 169th Street.

There is a new political tension in the Bronx that reminds me of the old rivalry between the Irish, Italians and Jews. The blacks who now dominate the old neighborhood feel threatened by the Puerto Ricans who dominate the Bronx as a whole.

After a breakfast between community leaders and the police of the 42nd Precinct, which now covers my old neighborhood, Hill let all his resentments burst forth.

“Did you see?” he said. “Three ministers stood up to give blessings. One was white, and two were Hispanic. And we are the majority in the 42nd Precinct. Did you hear the police officer address us in Spanish? That’s insulting to us. It’s another example of the Hispanics trying to take over everything.”

The outburst surprised me, because I had not known very much about the enmity between the two main ethnic groups in the South Bronx. But, like most of my fellow alumni, I really had known very little about my old neighborhood except that it had served me well and had somehow turned into one of the shames of America. As Assemblywoman Davis, an angry, eloquent politician put it: “No place should have the stigma that we have.”