Our Streets, Our Stories: Kenneth J. Mahon and Yvette Soto

My name is Emma Clark from the Brooklyn Public Library and I'm sitting down with Kenneth Mahon and Ivette Soto from the Dime Savings Bank of Williamsburg. So, thank you for being here today and we're going to start off by asking both of you how long you have either lived and worked in the neighborhood.

Well, I was born and raised in the neighborhood. I was born in 1964. I lived in the neighborhood until 1991 and then I moved to Bay Ridge and I've been there since and still employed here in Williamsburg. So technically, I haven't left the neighborhood. It's always been a part of my life in one way, shape or form.

How many years have you worked for the bank?

I've been working with the bank 30 plus years and now let me leave it at that.

The reason I mention that is I started working for the bank in 1980 and the following year I had hired a vet. We had some neighborhood people working here at the bank and we were looking for some part-timers and she was still in high school. She was 16 years old when she started working here at the bank.

That's correct. So she's been working here with us for a long time. I've had her really for most of the time I've been at the bank. I started as assistant controller and now I'm chief operating officer of the bank. And some others here at the bank are working on the 150 year history of the Dime Savings Bank of Williamsburg, which has been pretty interesting. So we learned a little bit about actually about the Puerto Rican migration to Williamsburg in the 1950s. My family came during that period and they met here. They married here and they lived in the neighborhood all their entire lives, my grandparents included, aunts and uncles. So as the years went by, they left, but my parents remained here because my mom was the oldest, so she basically held everybody together. So that was the beginning of our history in the neighborhood. But everyone has moved along, but I'm still here. Work-wise, seeing the changes that have been happening have just been amazing and really makes me happy to see that it's come a long way.

Speaking of, when I got here in 1980, I was interviewed first by the fellow who hired me, who is still here today with the bank. It's Mike Divine, and he's here with the bank. If I'm here 35 years, he's here 40 years now. He interviewed me first over in Manhattan and then a few days later he asked me to come back for a second interview over here to Williamsburg. I had never been to Williamsburg before. When I got here, I came the day before just to see where it was so I could figure out where the office was located. When I got here, I said to myself, there's no way I'm taking the job in this neighborhood. The neighborhood was probably at its worst during those years, compared to what it is now.

Yes, for those years and the years that followed, cars burned out on the corner and abandoned buildings, lots empty lots.

And you grew up through that period, right? From the mid-60s through the mid-80s really. That was your whole period growing up. But even then, there was in fact probably in those days I think between the Latinos, mostly Puerto Rican I guess in those days, and the Hasidim we used to call Broadway the DMZ basically, because Broadway was really a big line of demarcation between the Hasidim on one side and the Latino on this side. I didn't really see too much, I mean I guess there was fighting and so forth mainly over housing in those years, from what I recall. Yes, there was, and it had a lot to do with when the projects were going up, that type of stuff. But we were lucky enough that we owned our own home, so I don't know too much about that, but from what I can recall there was a little bit of stress going on, probably natural stress. I think so.

So anyway, through the 80s, that's what most of New York City was like. Then I know there was still a lot of people don't like to hear this, but Rudy Giuliani changed everything. There were two things that happened at Williamsburg that made Williamsburg what it is today. One is when Giuliani became the mayor and just literally cleaned up the city. You didn't see broken cars around. All the quality of life issues we're still talking about today started when Giuliani got in. It really changed the neighborhood, and it suddenly became, it wasn't yet a desirable place to be, but then through the '90s, you started to see some of the artists move out of the Lower East Side and come over here because we still had all these factories from Williamsburg's industrial era, and they started to rent them out as lofts. The Latinos still were there, they owned a lot of homes and some of the multifamily apartments, but the neighborhood really hadn't become what it is today, the new Williamsburg, through the '90s. It didn't change until 2005 when Bloomberg changed the zoning laws down here and permitted a lot of residential to be built in areas that were only zoned for commercial industrial back then. As soon as that happened, you started seeing the tear-downs and what you see happening today going on with Domino and so forth. By the early 2000s, that's when you started to see a lot of the blue hair and nose ring crowd, because that's who has a lot of tattoos, a lot of nose rings, a lot of pink hair, a lot of purple hair. That's what we had for many years. Now you're really getting the yupsters, a cross between yuppies and hipsters. A lot of young families now down along Kent Avenue. You see strollers all up and down Kent Avenue now, bicycle lanes, and in a matter of 10 years from 2005 until now, you've had a city grow up in an area that was pretty much abandoned for many years.

I agree. Your mother went to Eastern District High School. She graduated from there and then she became a paraprofessional and she went on to New York City Technical College. From there she went on to Hunter College and then she got her masters from Pace. So she's a great example. I know you mentioned that you guys are celebrating your 150th. So why don't you tell us a little bit about the work you've been doing around that and maybe some of the things you found about the bank's history here in Williamsburg.

Sure. Well, I'll give you the migration uphill first and then if I can talk a little bit about what you found in the minute books. The bank was originally founded where Gandy's is now, the restaurant right at the foot of Broadway. That street which stops now at Kent Avenue used to go straight down to the water and that's where all the ferries were before the bridge got built. In the 19th century, savings banks were, I keep referring to them as the dot-coms of today, because there was no place for people who had just a few dollars to save any money. So you'll hear names like Dime and Germania, all ethnic names meant to evoke where people could come in and save a dime or a quarter and get a good rate of interest, because the commercial banks didn't want those people as customers. So you had this enormous increase in mutual savings banks in the 19th century. Dime was one of them. When we were formed, it was just basically a one-room setup in the basement of a commercial bank down by the ferry at the foot of Broadway. That was in 1864. By 1873, they had gotten big enough to require their own space, and they moved up to the corner of Wythe and Broadway. That building isn't there any longer. If you see a picture of that building, it reminds you very much of the arts building now, an open space museum type. That building is almost identical to the one that still stands today on the corner of Driggs and Broadway, which was Kings County Savings Institution. Our building was about two blocks further west on Broadway. Then in 1903, the Williamsburg Bridge was built and suddenly people weren't going down to that part of Broadway any longer, and the bank realized they were going to lose their customer base. So they bought this property on Havemeyer Street in 1906 and put the building up in 1908, and we've been here ever since. So that's the migration of the buildings. But why don't you talk a little about the minutes, what you found in them?

All sorts of interesting little tidbits, things that in this day and age really no one would think to put in there. We had this one woman who fell down a coal chute and she sued the bank for $50 for her clothing and medical expenses. After that happened, we went out and got liability insurance because we didn't have any until then. There was the robbery in 1869, that was a big one. They stole about $8,000 altogether in cash and bonds. As conspiracy theorists, we think it was an inside job. When I read a description in the minutes from 1869, they described the whole thing: the secretary was moving cash out of the vault and someone knocked on the door, so he went to see who was there. When he came back, he noticed the box was gone. A little German boy allegedly found the box and the box was crushed, but everything was gone. That was our first robbery in 1869. Back then that was a lot of money and value. And these are all recorded. We have the books, signature books, the very first signature book. When people came in, they used to have, and even the handwriting in the minutes, everything was handwritten.

When did you start seeing typewritten minutes?

It must have been in early 1900s, maybe 1911, something like that. Unfortunately, we lost a lot of our records because we didn't have copy machines, scanners, or clouds. They ended up selling about five tons of paper that they were storing in the basement, which was a fire hazard, for $28. Now here we are scrambling this year to find historical records. Ivet just told me about this or she reminded me, I guess she read it when she saw the minutes, and it breaks your heart because you think, my god, they must have thrown out stuff that today, as we're putting together the history of the bank, would have been so useful. Although you did find the family album, right?

I did. Yes, a photograph book with our original trustees going back. It's got about maybe 30 pages, some blank, but it has pictures of our first president, actually the first three presidents, the originator of the bank who is William Grandandy. Those pictures must have been taken around the turn of the century because even the Brooklyn Times doesn't have photos until later on. It doesn't say when they were taken, but they must have been taken sometime between the 1870s and the early 1900s, because you can see the change in the outfits and the men's clothes. They were more tailored towards the end than before, they had big mutton chops and sideburns. The vacuum cleaner—all right, don't tell that story. That was in the early 1900s, also in the minutes. They debated whether or not to buy a vacuum cleaner one month and the following month they decided to reject it because it was impracticable. Imagine that, too impractical to buy a vacuum cleaner. But that's the kind of stuff that used to make it to the minutes in those days. Even when they had directors pass away, the flowery language they would put in the minutes. So that was very interesting. The signature books are extraordinary by themselves. You go through and you can see what people's occupations were and they'd have to list their parents' occupations. There were several striking ones, but the one I think is most memorable to all of us is one fellow wrote down that his father's occupation was slave. That really drives home to you, and this was the 1860s. It's amazing stuff. Smith, miller, seamstress, metal work, refineries, oil companies. And Williamsburg itself, if you look at the housing stock even today, you can see the dividing line. On the south side of Broadway, that's where all the brownstones still exist where the Hasidim still live. If you walk up and down those streets, you see a lot of brownstones from the 19th century. When you get over to this side, a lot of frame homes, a lot of industrial. Any of these brand new buildings that went up generally knocked down some old frame buildings that had been there for however long. So the wealthy people, before the days of automobiles, used to live here and they would vacation out on Long Island. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle was great as a resource. You could see that some of the fellows who were managers and directors of the bank had their homes here over on Rodney Street or up and down Division Avenue, but then they'd say during the summer they were out on the island, they would go to Bayshore, one of the towns out there, and they would use horse and buggy to get there. It's funny because we still have a picture of the bank where they still have a watering trough in front of the bank in 1908, and you realize, oh yeah, they were still using horses back then. It doesn't seem that long ago. So the whole thing has been quite an experience developing the story. In those days, the Germans really owned this area. It wasn't until the bridge was built. It's funny what you could say in the newspaper in those days that you wouldn't dream about saying today, but they were talking about after the bridge was built, all the Jews from the Lower East Side moved over here and just forced everybody out. What they meant was they forced all the rich Germans out, and it became a community of Jews. Later on, Ivet and I pieced together the story of how the Latinos came here. Along the water, Domino Sugar wasn't just Domino Sugar. There were a dozen small sugar refiners up and down along the river. Sugar was huge in this area. When they made the importation of sugar so expensive that they started to substitute corn syrup, it drove out the industry. The people who lived down in the islands, their industry went away because the United States stopped importing sugarcane from the islands, and that led to the migration of the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans from the islands up to New York because there were jobs here, still industrial jobs around World War II and into the '50s. So we talked about how you ended up with all the Latinos in this community, but when you go back, all this stuff is in the paper. Through all of it, the book we're writing now, we decided to call it 'The Last Bank Standing' because we're the last Brooklyn savings bank headquartered still here in Brooklyn. I've got a list of 21 banks that were banks in the 19th century that no longer exist. Half of them are now branches of Chase Manhattan, HSBC, or a couple other banks. Some of them have just gone away altogether. But through it all, for whatever reason, the Dime Savings Bank is still here in the main office we put up 100 years ago. So it's been a lot of fun.

Why do you think the Dime has been able to last so long in this community?

My latest answer has been we're just lazy. We decided never to move out, couldn't really decide where we wanted to go. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. That's pretty much the way it happened. The reason we survived all those years is because we became a multifamily lender. We lend on a lot of pre-war apartment houses, anywhere from about 20 units up to about 100. That's our stock and trade. New York City is still a place where you have multifamily housing, so it's been a great asset for us to be involved in. We don't do a lot of stupid things in terms of lending. We lend on low loan-to-value buildings where the rents are low. A lot of our buildings are still buildings where low and moderate income people can afford to live, whether it's Brooklyn or Manhattan. A bigger portion of our lending is Manhattan, then a huge portion is here in Brooklyn and a smaller extent in Queens. We have branches out there as well. In the book, we refer to the corporate DNA because the old Germans were very conservative people, and I think generation after generation just hires people like them, and that DNA that formed the company in the first place kind of carried on through all those years. We had a couple of close calls. The bank was like a cat with nine lives. There were a couple of times where the place nearly went out of business in the early '80s around the time Ivet got here. She thank God she wasn't paying attention to the balance sheet, she would have quit back then. There was a time during the early '80s when interest rates went up so high that the tabloids, whether it was the New York Times or the Daily News, would have columns about how many quarters the savings banks had left of capital before they get put out of business. The Dime Savings Bank of Williamsburg, I remember because I had a young family then, the newspaper said there were five quarters of capital left before we got put out of business. I thought, what am I going to do for a job? This was about 1982 or '83. By the beginning of 1983, interest rates calmed down, the bank started making some money, and we got very profitable from then until the early '90s when real estate got bad. We didn't have those problems in the '90s. This place almost went out of business in the '70s during the John Lindsay days when the city was broke and Gerald Ford sent New York City to drop dead. There was a period then where the city was broke and real estate was just being abandoned. People would just not pay on their loans anymore. The bank went through a very difficult time. We have letters upstairs from the New York State Banking Department that instruct the board to start looking for a combination partner because, by rights, you ought to be out of business. There was a Polish fellow named Joe Juszkiewicz who came into the bank. He was the number two guy for a while and then in that period, they put him in charge of the company. He was stubborn, like a bulldog. He wouldn't let the bank go out of business. Ten years later, the bank was around, we got through the interest rate period, and from there on it's been profitable and prudent, conservative managers. We don't have the notoriety that a lot of banks around us had over those years, but because of that, we still survive. We're still here and they're not.

Do either of you have any particularly vivid memories of your time working in this neighborhood or challenging moments you'd want to talk about that stand out?

He's my boss.

Challenging moments here or particularly vivid memories, things that just really stand out in your time.

Oh jeez. Well, I can tell you one incident that I remember. We were still at the main office here at 209 Havemeyer. The building was built in two parts. The first two columns were built in 1908, then in 1925 they came back and built the rest of the building. You wouldn't know that standing outside, it all looks like it was built at the same time. But that building is basically walls, the inside isn't supported by anything. The columns are there but they're false columns, they don't really hold the building up. The building looks very secure, like it's never going to fall over. But one day, this could have been back in 1982 maybe, if you go back and look through the archives, you'll see they started to do work on the Williamsburg Bridge because the bridge was really going to, they thought it was going to fall into the river at one point. So they had welders up there. One morning, about 11 o'clock, all of a sudden we feel the building, like an earthquake. The building's rocking back and forth. Your first instinct is to get up and see what's happening, but you can't. If you've ever been in an earthquake, you know the sensation. This just went on for maybe 20 seconds, 30 seconds tops. We were all like, what the heck went on? We were on the second floor when that happened, so the shaking was even worse. We turned on the radio to listen to the news and sure enough, they talked about a barge that was floating under the Williamsburg Bridge. Apparently, there was some piece of welding that had fallen down and hit the barge and exploded. The barge blew up. People died in that thing. That barge kind of floated down into the river, floated down to the bottom of Wallabout Bay over here where Gandy's is located. It was probably the most exciting moment I had in all my years at the bank.

Anything else, Williamsburg wise, growing up or the bank hired you. That was three times we hired you, right? You learned your lesson, didn't you?

We hired her when she was 16, then she got married, moved away, then she came back for a while and she came back to the bank. I came back in 1991 and I've been here since. I went to St. Peter and Paul Elementary School, then from there I went to Cathedral in Manhattan. Prior to that, St. Angelo Hall in Brooklyn, but they closed down. Then I went to Katherine Gibbs. I've always been a neighborhood girl. Everywhere I look, I kind of remember I was there with my grandmother, I was there with my mom. I remember when that store used to be, when that building used to be this store and that building used to be that store. It was sad to kind of see all of that go away, but at the same time it's interesting to see the new life that's coming into the neighborhood. It's odd to see how things evolve, but they're evolving in a good way.

That's kind of my take. One of the people maybe if you're interested, he's not here today, it would have been nice to have him sit in or have a separate interview with him, is Mike Divine. His family, Jewish family of course, I think his original name was Dinets when they first moved over here. When I first met him, I thought he was Irish. In fact, everybody thinks he's Irish. Mike lived here, he was on Pauli Street. His father was a house painter and at one time painted the spire on top of the Williamsburg Savings Bank across from Peter Luger. Those are the ties they have to the neighborhood. Mike's the only one that actually kind of grew up here other than Ivet in the neighborhood. The rest of us are from other parts of Brooklyn. I'm from New Jersey. I never expected I would spend 35 years of my life in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but I have and it's been a lot of fun watching it. When I first got here, there were only three or four places to have anything to eat. Peter Luger's was one of them. Then there were three Italian restaurants: Cono's, which is gone now, Bontanti, which is still here, and Milos was the other. There were still a lot of the old Italians around here, and still are really when you get up to the north side, a lot of Italian families still live up there.

As someone who grew up here, what about this neighborhood is unique to you?

Gosh, I'll think of all these answers once this is over because right now I feel like I'm being put on the spot. When I was growing up, it was mostly Hispanic, a lot of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. That was basically the neighborhood and everybody got along. Everywhere you went, there were little vegetable stands, supermarkets, bodegas. There was a period when I was growing up, I remember we had gangs and things like that, but that was on the other side of Bedford, there were areas where they were concentrated that we just never went to. Your mother wouldn't let you go out at night anyway. We weren't even allowed to have sleepovers. You sleep in your own bed, that's it. There's still some of that flavor to me in the neighborhood. It's shrunk and gotten smaller, but I'm glad it's still here. I'm proud that I'm a product of this neighborhood. I was just promoted in September. I've been here a long time, I've seen a lot of faces, a lot of changes. It just makes me happy to look around and remember, because those memories don't go away. You always carry them with you.

There are a few community organizations here in the neighborhood which are trying to, I'm listening to Ivet talk about this. One of the things that makes the neighborhood attractive, which I think is becoming less and less and now diminishing, is the presence of the Latino population in the area. They're down now to maybe about six or eight square blocks, really when you get to the other side of Broadway Place over there. The real estate is so expensive now that it's very hard for them. But we've got a few organizations that the Dime works with. One is Los Sures across the street, and Brooklyn Neighborhood Services, and El Puente. And NHS is more citywide. Between Los Sures, El Puente, and Brooklyn Legal Services, they are always out there fighting to make sure people don't get evicted from their homes because a lot of these building owners know they can get more money for the apartments. I think it's fair to say that some of them do make it hard for the indigenous population to stay here. The shame of it is if you lose that, you lose the character of what attracted people to Williamsburg in the first place. So they've got to make sure there's a place for that. Dime does lending in those kinds of properties, so we'd like to see that continue in the neighborhood. We'll see what happens over the next few years. There are so many new buildings going up and new services, which is all great, but then you start to lose the character, especially if you go down along Kent Avenue with all the new buildings. If I don't go down along Kent Avenue for a month or two, there's something new there that I haven't seen before. That's how quickly the construction is going up. The nice thing is, across the street from us, when you go out of the building later you'll see a building going up that's going to be 12 or 13 stories where it used to be a two-story industrial bakery called Spoiled's where they made fruitcakes and matzah. That was there forever. Now it's going to be residential. We have parking lots here. I wouldn't be surprised if one day that turns into residential too. But Dime would like to stay here. We've been here for 150 years and it doesn't make sense to pull up roots now.

I'm curious about Dime's involvement with the community. Do you have patrons who have been here for decades or things like that?

We have customers in the bank that have been here for a long time. A few months ago, we had four of our depositors in who've been here for more than 30 years. We have a woman who is Latina, she lives in the Bronx now but she has her account here at main office. Her name is Carmen, I don't recall her last name, but she was banking here and she's in the Bronx now. So we do have customers that have been around for a long time. We have landlords who know the bank too, many of them intergenerational owners. The grandfather owned properties and gave them to the kids who gave them to the grandchildren, and a lot of them still have loans with us.

Other than that, there was a building down here over on Rodney Street and Division that used to be called the Hanover Club. It was a social club back in the 19th century up through what we would call the Gilded Age here in Williamsburg. That's where all the old Germans, politicians, all used to meet there at night because there was no television, nowhere to go. Everybody lived in the neighborhood, they would go to the club and have drinks, play billiards. That was the element that was Williamsburg, and they were the board members of the bank for many years.

Now tell me about this book that you're putting together. What is that about?

Back in 1914, I only have the first 10 pages here. Back in 1914, the managers of the bank wrote a book called 'The 50th Anniversary of the Dime.' So when we came up to our 150th anniversary, I said we should put together another book for the 150 years. So what does Ivet find? She's going through the minutes at the 100-year anniversary of the bank in 1964, the board was discussing it and decided to write a book about the 100-year anniversary. That's the only reference she ever saw. They never wrote a book, nothing ever came out. So now we decided to make the 150-year anniversary book. They probably stopped because they came across the same situation we did, they didn't have anything to go by because they had already destroyed the information, so they threw their hands up and let it go. But when you write your family history, your family tree, you wish your grandfather was alive because he could take you back two generations. If they had done it in 1964, there was that whole fill-in period that we don't have as much information as we ought to. So it was the 50-year book and we decided to write the 150-year book for that reason. We're working with a creative director and a researcher. This fellow goes to the Brooklyn Public Library and finds the leather-bound version of that book. They only printed 50 copies of that book, and it's still over there at the Brooklyn Public Library. I hope somebody over there never throws it out because it's really an artifact. If they're going to throw it out, tell them to call us, we'll be happy to take it off their hands. When this book is finished, we're going to give copies to the Brooklyn Public Library too. It's a great weaving of the story for 150 years. We're not just talking about the Dime Savings Bank, but the history has some of what we're talking about today: the immigration of Latinos, the Hasidim when they came over here, what the neighborhood was like in the 19th century. The sugar industry was enormous. There were so many banks in the 19th century and up through the early part of the 20th century because New York State did not allow branch banking. So if a neighborhood wanted a bank to be nearby, they really had to start their own bank. I should talk about the Dime Savings Bank of New York, because a lot of people who come across this Dime Savings Bank will think, 'Oh, didn't they get sold?' That was the Dime Savings Bank of New York, which was originally the Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn, located on Fulton Street. That building is still there if you think over where Junior's is, there's a block behind. You might think it's the Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn, but when these companies were formed in the 19th century, it wasn't a problem having a Dime over there and a Dime over here. Dime Williamsburg itself was its own city until 1855 or 1853, so it wouldn't have been unusual for a bank to call itself the Dime Savings Bank of Williamsburg because in those days, Williamsburg still considered itself, even though it merged with Brooklyn, there was still a lot of patriotism about this community. If you look at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for those years through the 19th century and into the early 20th century, it was always 'Eastern District, Eastern District.' They referred to themselves as the Eastern District because they felt very strongly about what was going on here in this community. That's how we ended up with two Dime Savings Banks. When the Dime of Williamsburg went public in 1996, the Dime of New York, which had changed its name from Dime of Brooklyn to Dime of New York somewhere along the line, turned around and sued us because we had the same name. They enjoined us from doing certain things. We had to be careful to always use 'of Williamsburg' in our name anytime we advertise, that was one of the things they required. Mike Divine and I, when we were going through the judicial hearing, we had to go back and they wanted to settle out of court. We went back and forth with the Dime of New York. When we finally came to settlement day, we hammered out the agreement and we were going to sign it. We were shaking hands with them, everybody went happy. Mike said to them, 'Yeah, well, we'll be around a lot longer than you are.' Five years later, they were out of business. Here we are 15 years later still doing business. Mike was kind of a prophet. Now we can just call ourselves Dime because there is no other Dime here in New York.

Is there anything else you guys would like to add? Final thoughts?

No, this was a lot of fun. I think we covered everything. Read the book, right?

Thank you so much for your time.