The Heat Is On

In the prior reprise—a blast from the past—I recount navigating my way home from high school after a final exam. Perhaps even the final final—a New York State Regents Algebra exam—of my freshman year. I remembered it was a hazy, hot, and humid mid-June afternoon. The air quality was extremely poor and the sky a greenish-yellow overcast. On the last leg of my journey, I spied a flash of heat lightning—no thunder accompaniment  lightning—on the distant horizon beyond the High Pumping Station off Jerome Avenue. As Bronx architecture goes, this building is rather distinct. Built at the turn of the twentieth century—as an appendage of the Jerome Park Reservoir system—it is listed on, of all places, the National Register of Historic Places. With its red bricks and precipitously steep and slate-covered gable roof, which is not too common in the area, the High Pumping Station has always been an eye-catcher. Anyway, that was a memory blip from a June day forty-four years ago. In that momentary snapshot in time the heat lightning served as a welcome beacon, a portent of better things to come—for a couple of months at least.

Fast forward to the present and the heat is on once more. However, I’m not banking on any of Mother Nature’s natural phenomena—signs from the heavens—lighting the way for the coming summer season. Instead, New York City voters, including yours truly, cast ballots in the first consequential election with ranked-choice voting. I had forgotten that we the people said yay to ranked-choice voting by a margin of three-to-one in 2019. Honestly, I don’t think very many of us considered the potential consequences of this new way of electing office holders. While it makes sense in a lot of ways, leave it to the city’s Board of Elections to royally screw things up. With so many men and women on both the left and right believing our elections are corrupted nowadays, this is awfully bad timing. Apparently, the Board of Elections counted 135,000 test ballots in the first round of ranked-choice tabulations, which skewed the results. The bureaucratic tangle of an agency has since announced a do-over.

Riddle me this: If frontrunner Eric Adams, who was up by ten points in the actual tally on election night, somehow loses this substantial lead in the ranked-choice tabulations, will it be accepted as absolutely aboveboard? Adams got a plurality of votes in four of the city’s five boroughs. Only Manhattan demurred, giving “Defund the Police” Maya Wiley the most votes. Her core support was in the more upscale white neighborhoods. From voters who love to talk the woke talk from their door-manned buildings, their vacation homes in the Hamptons, and while consuming lobster gazpacho, chicken tikka basmati rice, and nori seaweed tots in trendy, hipster restaurants. Just sayin’.

While on the subject of just sayin’: There are more cars on the streets than ever before. Traffic time never takes a holiday. It’s not just the rush hours and the Friday evening exoduses anymore. Add to this mayhem countless variations of motor bikes, mopeds, and illegal ATVs. Traversing the highways and byways is a nightmare night and day. Crime is also spiraling out of control and it’s hot as hell on top of that. Looking on the bright side: It’s not as toasty as in the Pacific Northwest with its heat dome plus climate change one-two punch wreaking havoc on the animate and inanimate alike.

So, yes, while the talk the talkers will throw their full support behind things like the Green New Deal—without fretting over the fine print or even reading the fine print—are they willing to make any personal sacrifices, adjustments to their lifestyles? Sitting amidst an all-too-typical traffic jam—with my taxi driver alerting me that his outdoor thermometer reading is one hundred degrees—I think I know the answer to that question.

 

Summer Daze

(Originally published on June 23, 2017)

Once upon a time, I relished summer days and nights. The heat and humidity didn’t faze me in the least. No temperature or relative clamminess was too high to prevent a stickball game of ours. In fact, playing on searing asphalt on a scorcher—without water—was par for the course. There was no such thing as bottled water in the 1970s! Sure, we could have brought along a cooler, thermos, or canteen to our games, but it just wasn’t on our radars in those days. Looking back, we sometimes played doubleheaders in ninety-five-degree heat without liquid pick-me-ups. After game two, we were a parched lot in a mad-dash search for a non-contaminated watering hole—tap water from the kitchen sink or powdered iced tea. What American TV western didn’t feature its protagonists short of water and in a do-or-die search for it in super-dry desert climes?

Ah, but summer days just aren’t what they once were to me. It's more like summer daze. This week, the calendar officially said that it was summer with the longest days of the year upon us. As a youth in the third week of June, I was uber-active in the great outdoors until the last sliver of daylight vanished. Now, I spend well-lit summer evenings inside and do all that I can to circumvent the infamous New York City heat and humidity. Air conditioning has its place. For me, there is no more stoop sitting and chewing the fat with neighbors on poor Air Quality Index (AQI) days. I don't recall whether or not the AQI was calculated in the good old days. However, I can say that the air quality in the 1970s was considerably worse than it is today.

Bad air notwithstanding, the summers of my youth found the Good Humor man turning up every night at around the same time. Good Humor’s cola-flavored Italian ice—a favorite of mine—was a rock-solid frozen block. In attempting to sliver off pieces of the ice with the tongue-depressor spoon supplied, its paper cup would get punctured beyond recognition. Actually, the only cola taste—if you could call it that—of their watery Italian ices was found at the bottom of the paper cups, which by then would be casualties of war. But what did we expect for twenty cents? They were worth every penny.

Summertime also meant a vacation on the seashore of New Jersey or Long Island. It meant day trips to the happening hot spots incessantly advertised on the New York City metropolitan area airwaves, like the Brigantine Castle—a haunted fortress on the Atlantic in Brigantine, New Jersey. A three-hour drive trip from the Bronx to the Brigantine Castle was a memorable summertime adventure. The equivalent for my peers’ kids today—on the satisfaction front, I'd say—would be two weeks in the South of France or Swiss Alps.

A final summertime footnote and memory from forty years ago. It’s the solitary snapshot kind not associated with anything monumental. I had completed a high school final exam during my freshman year. It was an afternoon in mid-June, 1977. I was alone and on my way home via mass transit—from the East Bronx to the West Bronx. Standing at a bus stop on Jerome Avenue across the street from two of the ugliest-looking buildings in the borough—Tracey Towers—I patiently waited for the BX1, which would take me on the last leg of my journey home. It was overcast, terribly humid, and I remember seeing lightning on the distant horizon—heat lightning, I think. This far-away hot flash nonetheless signified so much to me—school’s end, summer, and a couple of months of incredible bliss.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

A Shore Thing

With this being the first full day of summer, I thought I’d revisit the family vacations of my youth. Many of them were spent on the Jersey Shore as it was and is affectionately known. For countless working-class New York City families in those days gone by, this considerable slice of shoreline was heaven. Initially, my family stayed in small cottages in the town of Manasquan on streets named after fish, like Whiting, Pike, and Trout. In the late-1960s and early-1970s, weekly rentals set the folks back $75 to $100, bargains considering they were a few blocks away from both the Atlantic Ocean and the Manasquan Inlet, a busy boating thoroughfare that provided never-ending entertainment for kids, like me. It was a huge deal walking over to the inlet in the morning, where we would watch the fishing fleet from Point Pleasant—on the opposite shore—head out to sea. They would subsequently return with their catches, sometimes showing them off to land-bound spectators, including spellbound boys and girls. The flocks of seagulls inevitably trailing their crafts were likewise mesmerized.

In that colorful snapshot in time, cottages in a particular part of town were occupied by hard-partying hippies. Ever a source of fascination to little me, there was something so summery about the wafting smell of Mary Jane commingling with the ubiquitous sea breeze. Manasquan, too, had an extensive boardwalk, which was mostly asphalt as I recall. The houses along it were out of my folks’ price range, but I always wished we could stay in one of them. In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy’s destruction in 2012, those very homes’ front porches now have a bird’s-eye view of tall sand dunes, not the mercurial Atlantic.

At some point in the mid-1970s, there were no rentals available in Manasquan for the weeks of my father’s vacation. We ended up venturing a little south to a place called Lavallette, a cozy vacation spot on a barrier island with the ocean to the east and Barnegat Bay to the west. Granted, the Manasquan Inlet was a big loss, but Lavallette’s boardwalk was a boardwalk from beginning to end. There also was this great bakery in town, Kay’s, which supplied us with breakfast donuts galore. Eating four glazed donuts was a piece of cake in those days. Lavallette also had a takeout pizza restaurant, The Oven, which produced a tasty pie. Not too far away was The Pizza Parlor, where the wait for pies at dinnertime was hours. It served superb thin pizza and was worth the wait. On one occasion we had visitors at our summer rental and The Pizza Parlor supplied the fare, including a pie with anchovies—my father’s idea. As expected—by me at least—the plain pies were consumed with alacrity while one too many anchovy slices languished in a box. And I could have eaten another slice or two, I remember. Upon learning this and that I was not a fan of anchovies, a visitor—a burly Italian patriarch—rather curtly told me, “Just take them off!” No can do! Anchovies leave their mark.

In the waning years of vacations on the Jersey Shore, we landed in the town of Ortley Beach, just south of Lavallette, which was totally decimated by Superstorm Sandy, I learned. The house we rented there a couple of times would get flooded during a summer thunderstorm. Ortley Beach also bordered Seaside Heights with its boardwalk of more than just boards. It was a nice place to visit with its amusements, entertainment, and foods, but I wouldn’t want to live there. The one and only time I ever was on a log flume was on the Seaside Heights boardwalk. A relative of mine once sniffed at her time spent on Cape Cod, calling it “boring” compared to the Jersey Shore with its electrifyingly exciting boardwalks. I thought that odd. But maybe not for a person with an Attention Deficit Disorder. Whatever, I remember fondly my time spent on the Jersey Shore with its boardwalks, where no two were the same.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Of Late I Think of the Spaldeen

(Originally published 6/23/11)

During a recent stroll down memory lane, I unearthed an interesting tidbit of information. I knew that the Spalding Company, sometime in 1999, reintroduced to the marketplace what we—once upon a time—fondly called a “spaldeen.” Sadly, this formerly ubiquitous and amazingly versatile, high-bouncing rubber ball was discontinued in 1979, a casualty of waning consumer interest. I was, however, unaware that the manufacturer had subsequently trademarked the ball’s illustrious nickname. So, technically—since I don't have a TM symbol at my disposal—I should be capitalizing Spaldeen.

But since this blog permits me to work from my own stylebook—unlike my corporate masters—spaldeen will remain lowercase in perpetuity as a well-earned tribute to the urban youth of yesteryear who played with the ball. To the generations of young people who coined the nickname more than a half century ago and followed this bouncing ball to so, so many intriguing places, the spaldeen belongs to you. But let’s give credit where credit is due. Upon the ball’s reintroduction after a two-decade hiatus, the Spalding Company valiantly endeavored to teach a new generation a few old tricks, as it were, by familiarizing them with the myriad games played in the past with this multifaceted rubber ball. (It is widely believed, by the way, that one particular New York City outer-borough accent perpetually pronounced “Spalding”—the company named stamped on the pink and pleasantly rubber-scented ball—as “spaldeen.” And, as they say, the rest is history.)

Plucking out a fresh spaldeen from a plastic container on the counter of Bill’s Friendly Spot—famous for both its delicious egg creams and not especially congenial atmosphere—was a familiar ritual for many in the old neighborhood. Aside from the legendary game of stickball, I could rattle off several others that I played with a spaldeen such as Box Ball, Box Baseball, Curb Ball, Stoop Ball, Ace-King-Queen, SPUD, and Hit the Stick.

A couple of the games on a YouTube loop in my brain are true originals, unique to the concrete backyard lay of the land where I grew up. One we called “Single, Double, Triple,” which involved tossing a spaldeen against the back wall of a three-family brick house on Tibbett Avenue, with an opponent stationed in the backyard of a three-family brick house on Corlear Avenue. A spaldeen that wasn’t caught in the air could either be a single (one bounce), double (two bounce), triple (three bounce), etc. Another progeny of our singular topography was simply called “Throw It Against the Wall.” It necessitated throwing—yes—a spaldeen against a patchwork cemented wall, with an opponent fielding everything that came off of it from pop flies to line drives to ground balls. It’s actually a little too byzantine to explain here without visuals, but, suffice it to say, it was the game neighbors and I played more than any other and longer than any other—into the early 1980s, in fact, even after the spaldeen was temporarily consigned to the ash heap of history and many of us were, chronologically at least, adults. We used tennis balls by then. Spaldeens, after all, were originally reject tennis balls sold dirt-cheap, to wholesalers.

I really hate to end on a sour note here, but the Spalding Company's best laid plans of bringing back the spaldeen, and returning it to its former glory, have been largely unsuccessful. Most of the ball’s current sales end up on nostalgic baby boomers’ curio shelves, and not in the hands of boys and girls out and about on concrete or asphalt enjoying all that they can do. I'm not likely to spy local boys playing Box Ball anytime soon, or girls playing Composition. “Composition letter S, may I repeat the letter S, because I like the letter S, spaldeen begins with the letter S.”

Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer

When we have a cup of coffee in the afternoon, it doesn’t taste the same as that coveted morning brew. It’s something akin to the unforgettable and evocative hazy, hot, and humid nights of summer during our youths. The uncomfortably stuffy evenings of our adulthoods just don’t have the same allure. Once upon a time, being a kid in summertime had its benefits—school being out for starters—and we expected and more-or-less embraced the inevitable heat and humidity one-two punch. And, of course, there was baseball, the quintessential summer game—both the professional variety and the personal variations of the sport that we played with abandon in the warmest of warm and sticky air masses.

There, too, was nothing quite like attending a baseball game at night during the hottest of dog days. Dog days and hot dogs at the ballpark—who could ask for anything more? In the grips of pre-game exhilaration—days before as a matter of fact—a friend of mine would proclaim, “First round of hot dogs is on me!” The frankfurter in that singular time and place mattered. And as our sneakers stuck to Shea Stadium’s concrete stands, runways, and bathrooms as we exited into the soupy nights—courtesy of countless spilled watery beers and flat sodas—fond memories were made. I never minded coming home from a ballgame reeking of second-hand cigarette smoke. On the other hand, beginning and ending each day of high school stinking like a dirty chimney—from smoking teens on sardine-packed school busses—elicits no such nostalgia.

Recently, I watched the Netflix documentary The Sons of Sam: Descent Into Darkness. The series of murders and shootings by David Berkowitz—and probably others—occurred in 1976 and 1977, when the latter’s New York City summer also featured a brutal heatwave, blackout, and widespread looting and vandalism. The serial crimes were recurring headlines in the local tabloids and young people—who fit the targeted profiles—were understandably apprehensive to be out and about at night. When Berkowitz was finally apprehended, I was in Boston with an older neighbor and brother. We spied the front-page story on a newspaper in a then ubiquitous sidewalk machine and had to secure one to commemorate our trip and the huge news from our hometown—the “Son of Sam”capture.

The prior night—the night of the arrest, August 10, 1977—the three of us attended a game at Fenway Park, a slugfest in which the home team Red Sox eked out a victory, 11-10, over the visiting Angels. It was a night to remember, for sure, appropriately hazy, hot, and humid. And, yes, our footwear stuck bigtime to Fenway Park’s stands, runways, and bathrooms—the antiquated men’s bathrooms where one and all urinated into a long trough at our feet. But such once-in-a-lifetime experiences are the stuff of lasting memories. The “Son of Sam” denouement was colossal news and our trip to Beantown—from our perspectives at the time—was also a big deal. I was only fourteen during the adventure and Boston seemed far, far away from the world I knew in the Big Apple, which was then a mess but with a certain character and charm that it very definitely lacks in the here and now. The Democratic mayoral primary race in 1977—a heated affair in that sultry summer—featured the likes of Ed Koch, Mario Cuomo, Bella Abzug, Percy Sutton, Herman Badillo, and embattled incumbent Abe Beame. There were a few political heavyweights in that lineup vying to be mayor in what were troubled times. Fast forward forty-four years and troubled times are back with a vengeance. But where are the heavyweights? Perhaps they have gone the way of those hazy, hot, and humid nights—the ones we used to know.