The weekday lunch crowd at New Rochelle”™s Mirage Diner is a sea of college kids and employees eating quickly, talking loudly and proudly getting a 10 percent Iona discount on their tabs. Mixed in are tables full of white-haired retirees drinking decaf, eating breakfast food well into the afternoon and moving in slow motion when it”™s time to get up.
Soon none of this will be here. Even the kitschy murals painted on the walls showing ritzy men and women dining on the East River across from a pre-9/11 Manhattan skyline. The college recently bought the Mirage, which is on North Avenue, and Iona will raze and replace it soon with administrative and college space.
The entire city could look very different in the next decade. City government is thinking about hiring master developers to orchestrate a number of redevelopment projects downtown: residential buildings, retail and medical and office space.
Bob Marrone, who will replace Eli Gordon as executive director of the New Rochelle Chamber of Commerce May 5, sits in a far corner of the diner. The changes in the city, he says, can”™t ignore New Rochelle”™s Hispanic population. The latest Census figures said the city”™s Hispanic population had grown to nearly 30 percent and Marrone says the emerging Hispanic-owned business segment needs a seat at the table.
“If you want a vibrant downtown, you”™ll have to include Latin Americans,” Marrone says. “That”™s who we are in New Rochelle.”
Marrone is 64, with white hair, black-rimmed glasses and a sense of humor that”™s part Manhattan neurotic with pangs of existentialism and religious guilt, and part Brooklyn street kid with one-liners and snappy comebacks. His Park Slope accent has mostly dissolved under a rhythmic, rehearsed pace he counted on as the former host of “Good Morning Westchester” on New Rochelle”™s WVOX Radio. He left that post in late 2012 and has been working freelance as a consultant and writes a column for the Westchester Guardian, a weekly tabloid.
Today he lives in New Jersey, but says he has a special connection to the city that grew from his time on the station. “I became a big fan of Westchester but I fell in love with New Rochelle,” he says. “I love it because of its diversity.”
One thing that struck him as a newsman covering the city was how its residents were passionate, but even those on opposite ends of an issue seemed to be “frenemies,” each side thinking its viewpoint represented what was best for the community. He says he covered passionate arguments with members of the community and Mayor Noam Bramson. “The people yelling at Noam call him ”˜Noam,”™” he says.
New Rochelle has often been noted for its complexities and fragmented demographics and geography. There are neighborhoods of sprawling affluence and coastal country clubs. There are high-rise housing projects, ethnic enclaves and retail strips with dollar stores.
Marrone says New Rochelle needs to start looking at the city, its demographics and businesses as one unit aware of its multiple personalities. The chamber has to be willing to help businesses and work with other business organizations, he said (he is suggesting to the chamber board of trustees that it should offer a discount for new members that are part of other business organizations).
“Businesses need to join for more than just getting a sticker to put on the wall,” he says.
Marrone”™s own background comes with its own complexities. He says he spent years coming to terms with the sometimes conflicting sides of his mind. Bob Marrone as he is today didn”™t exist until several years ago, he says, and “Bob Marrone” as a name didn”™t exist until he was about 32 years old.
Marrone”™s memoir, which he hopes to publish next year, deals with his years prior to becoming a radio host when he battled debilitating depression, social anxiety and phobias. It also details his childhood, during which he says he first established an “Omega dog” sense of not belonging at the table.
Chapter 2 begins: “Sometime in the late summer of 1949 my mother was date raped by a close family friend. It wasn”™t as if she had never been with this man before, but she wanted to end the affair and move on. What she got instead was me.”
Marrone says he spent his first seven years with a foster family and went by the name “Robert Forte.” He was reunited with his biological mother and took on the name “Robert Ferrara,” he says, but grew up being told he had two mothers and to never ask about the reasons why.
“I was an illegitimate child before it was fashionable,” he says matter-of-factly in between bites of a scrambled egg and bacon sandwich. It”™s nearly 3 p.m. He didn”™t adopt Marrone, his mother”™s maiden name, as a surname until he was older than 30.
He grew up in Brooklyn having difficulty bringing together two conflicting sides: The book worm, science geek side and the street hockey side. Marrone was short for a hockey player, but skated quickly and established himself as a presence in the “gangs on ice” roughness of New York City leagues.
He married, had a child and became an executive at Merrill Lynch, where he worked from 1971-2002. Immersed in the cutthroat world of banking, he says he read Machiavelli”™s “The Prince” every six months.
He remembers the exact date things went wrong: April 6, 1975. He went numb, he says. “It”™s as if someone took a vacuum and sucked my insides out.” For years, he dealt with panic attacks, episodes where it felt every muscle in his body cramped simultaneously. He suffered from suicidal thoughts, hypochondria, incapacitating agoraphobia that made it difficult to leave his house, and daily night terrors and difficulty concentrating.
In four months from the day it went wrong, he had lost 40 pounds and began seeking professional treatment. The tentative title of his memoir is “No Guarantees,” based on what one psychiatrist told him: that there were no guarantees he”™d ever get better.
He was able to overcome, or at least control, most of his neuroses he says and today is generally happy despite having an expected cynicism from years spent in a newsroom and on Wall Street. He was able to slowly control his phobias and return to the ice: today he plays in a senior league and has logged more than 1,000 games.
He left Wall Street to pursue his life dream of becoming a radio host when he was 50 years old. When he became WVOX”™s radio man, he said he began to read all the news he could. “I stopped taking showers and started taking baths,” he says. This way, while in the tub, he could thumb through copies of U.S. News and World Report and other magazines and newspapers.
During the worst of his episodes, he wasn”™t able to read effectively, taking hours to ponder one sentence. Today, he says he has more than 25,000 books organized into categories. He”™s read every single book written by a major league pitcher or about major league pitcher he knows of. Most recently, he read some existential work by Leo Tolstoy.
If New Rochelle”™s diverse parts and layered business community are able to come together remains to be seen. But Marrone says that despite there being no guarantees, he feels the chamber can show businesses that it”™s working for them.
“People do what enriches them,” he says.
