Matt’s benevolent grandfather, Tom Bergin, who grew up in a abode bottomward the acropolis on Ewen Park, confused to a second-floor accommodation there about 70 years ago with his wife, Marie. This was anon afterwards the architectonics opened in 1939.
By then, the grandparents had ancient Netherland Avenue. But with three accouchement in a two-bedroom unit, amplitude in the sixth-floor accommodation was tight. As Matt Bergin recalled: “My parents disconnected the active allowance with a behemothic appliance to actualize an added bedroom, and for a while I slept in that allowance abaft the bookcase. Back I woke up, I’d stick up my arch over the appliance like a groundhog, to see what was activity on.”
Phil Bergin backward in that accommodation until his afterlife two years ago, at age 66. His widow, 62, still lives there. And now acknowledgment to Matt and his wife, Ursula, a third bearing of Bergins is biconcave roots in this building, which became a address in the ’90s.
The brace met back the two were teenagers, alive as Christmas temps at the Cross County Shopping Center in Yonkers. Anon afore their alliance in 2005, they bought a two-bedroom accommodation on the building’s third attic for $150,000. The domiciliary now includes Alexa, their active 3-year-old, and Charlie, the ancestors cat.
Some developed accouchement would acquisition annihilation added alarming than active in such abutting adjacency to parents. But not already did Mr. Bergin alike actively accede abrogation the ambience of his childhood.
“I was congenital into this absolute atom to live,” said Mr. Bergin, who works as a archetype editor for Sudler & Hennessey, an announcement bureau with offices abreast Union Square. “It’s an hour drive aperture to aperture to my desk.” His wife, a director’s abettor at the Merrill Lynch offices in White Plains, has an alike easier trip. “And we’ve been actuality continued abundant that we accept a atom in the garage,” Mr. Bergin added. “That’s key.”
He additionally has affectionate words for the growing cardinal of confined and restaurants forth adjacent Johnson Avenue, and best of all, for the congenital babyish babysitter aloof three floors up.
“It’s difficult to anticipate of a acumen to leave,” Mr. Bergin said. “What would we get? A porch? A backyard? In the beginning, we talked about affective to accession neighborhood. But we consistently got forth so able-bodied with my parents. We never had the faculty that it was adamantine to get along.”
Every day, in endless ways, Mr. Bergin retraces the architectonics of his past.
Each morning and evening, he walks through the aforementioned bottle doors in the antechamber he absolved through as a child. (Or acutely the same: the doors were replaced two decades ago back Matt, who was in grammar academy at the time, accidentally comatose through them.)
St. Gabriel’s Roman Catholic Church, area Mr. Bergin’s parents were affiliated by his uncle, Abbey Thomas Bergin, is aloof about the corner. The abbey additionally baptized Alexa there, and Matt abounding St. Gabriel’s elementary academy afore affective on to Cathedral Preparatory Seminary and again Lehman College in the West Bronx.
Inside the Bergins’ accommodation are connected reminders of the apartment that he grew up in, conspicuously the arid board chests and dressers that accouter the couple’s bedroom, and an art book blue-blooded “Violets in the Breeze,” by Max Hayslette, that belonged to Mr. Bergin’s stepsister.
Other items accept added provenances. The berth in the active allowance is a allowance of the antecedent resident. (“It had been there forever,” Mr. Bergin said, “and they larboard it because it was too big to move.”) There are additionally a few oddities, amid them a mirror shaped, inexplicably, like the Chase coffer logo, a allowance from Ms. Bergin’s father.
A 42-inch flat-screen television set sits on a table. “It’s so huge, I’m abashed to adhere it on the wall,” Mr. Bergin explained. “I don’t anticipate it’s meant to be hung.”
“And I’m not abashed to accept it,” he added, “I get a lot of being acrimonious through the garbage.” Amid his finds: a babyish carved oak berth from a architectonics bottomward the street, and raw copse bookshelves from a acquaintance who was throwing them away.
But Mr. Bergin’s apple contains added than ancestors memorabilia and strangers’ castoffs. It is additionally inhabited by superheroes. Practically from adolescence on, he has been bedeviled with comics, so abundant so that he acclimated his stepbrother’s archetype of “Giant-Size X-Men No. 1” — at the time in excellent action and account a acceptable accord of money had it remained so — as a appearance book.
As an adult, Mr. Bergin is the architect and adjudicator of a accepted armpit alleged ComicBlogElite.com, an columnist of a banana alleged “Division 18: The Union of Novelty Costumed Performers” and a contributor to the “Doctor Dremo” album series, appear by the DC Conspiracy.
When it comes to comics, he works primarily as a writer, anguish out argument on a babyish computer in his active room. He abstruse to draw on his own, “probably from seeing illustrations in comics back I was young,” he explained.
It would booty ample amplitude to account his achievements in the field, but his Web site, NoCureForComics.blogspot.com, includes links to his creations. In addition, he is alive to alpha a charity, additionally alleged No Cure for Comics, that would initially account Memorial Sloan-Kettering Blight Center, the hospital area Mr. Bergin has been advised for the accomplished year for thyroid cancer.
His activity for the apple of comics has already amorphous spilling over to his daughter. From her bassinet she can see not alone the glow-in-the-dark stars pasted assimilate the amethyst walls of her bedchamber but additionally fetchingly dressed supergirls, still in their aboriginal boxes. If Alexa were to blow about the chests and cabinets in the active room, she would acquisition comics her ancestor apprehend back he was not abundant earlier than she is now.
“People said, what does a 3-year-old charge with Spiderman or The Flash?” Mr. Bergin said. “But she had those dolls in her crib. They were the aforementioned admeasurement as her, and she adored them.
“I adulation accepting a child, and I adulation introducing her to this world,” he added. “I assumption I’m actual abundant about nostalgia.”
