My grandmother Anna Rudnick Wander was born on July 15, 1898. This great woman of Brooklyn would have been 110 today.
Born in Cohoes, New York a small town near Albany, my grandmother moved with her father to Brooklyn after her mother died. Her mother’s death was the great tragedy of her life.
As a girl, she lived in a big, green Victorian house on Westminister Road with her father, her stepmother and three stepbrothers. The house is still there and it’s still painted green with a billiard room on the third floor.
About ten years ago, my mother and I introduced ourselves to the current owner of that house which is between Rugby and Albermarle Road. She knew of the Rudnick family and told us that they were the first occupants of the house.
Hepcat and I once looked at a pink house practically across the street. I always thought it would have been cool to live across from the house where my grandmother grew up.
Anna attended Adelphi College and trained to be a nursery school teacher. She married Samuel Wander in 1921 and wore a flapper-style wedding dress to her wedding. My grandfather was a wonderfully industrious, elegant and kind-hearted man. He started a plumbing chemical business, owned a building on Canal Street and later, a factory in New Jersey.
After their two daughters, Edna Mae and Rhoda Hortense, were grown up and married, my grandparents moved out of Brooklyn to an apartment at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Although my sister and I spent the first year of our lives in my grandparent’s house, I have no memory of it.
I do, however, have wonderful memories of their three room apartment at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which later became a co-op apartment building. Who can forget having dinner with my grandmother, or Nanny as we called her, at One Fifth, the iconic Manhattan restaurant—the first one started by the McNally brothers in the 1970’s—that was located in the lobby of her apartment building; we used to enter through a secret door.
A treasured nightly customer, she was welcomed by Richard, the tall, impossibly dapper maitre’d who would invariably say, "Mrs. Wander, how wonderful you look tonight."
Indeed, she was a familiar face to the trendy crowd, which included Patti Smith, Robert Mappelthorpe and Andy Warhol, who frequently dined there; Nanny was usually departing by the time the cognoscenti came in.
An unusually loving grandmother, Nanny made each of her five grandchildren feel like her favorite. Growing up, my sister and I would meet her just about every Saturday at Schrafts on Madison Avenue, for turkey sandwiches and hot butterscotch sundaes. She took us to see Thoroughly Modern Millie, Funny Girl and many other movies at the Ziegfield, and to the stuffed animal department at FAO Schwarz. My mother says she’d always buy us new underwear at Best and Company on Fifth Avenue.
In 1964 she told me that the Beatles were on the steps of the Plaza Hotel and asked if we wanted to see. We were right across the street at FAO Schwarz.
"Beatles?" I remember saying. "Giant bugs?"
Well, we didn’t see the Beatles on the crowded steps of the Plaza Hotel that day. My loss. But I probably got a great Steiff stuffed animal courtesy of Nanny that day.
