The Summers of Love

(Originally published 6/17/10)

Gaelic Park in the Bronx's Kingsbridge is a neighborhood institution. Bordering West 240th Street on its south side, it is now owned and operated by my alma mater, Manhattan College. The grassy expanse hosts college related as well as outside sporting events. It is an atmospheric piece of green, too, with a busy Number 1 subway train yard for a backdrop.

During my youth in the early 1970s, this snippet of terra firma hosted summertime rock concerts that attracted people from near and far. There were more than a few famous names who performed in Gaelic Park, but I was too young to know or to care. On those memorable summer nights, the back streets, including my very own, became clogged with too many cars in search of too few parking spaces. While neighbors sniffed at their overt violation of protocol, the Esposito family leased the available space in their concrete backyard for a welcome sum of money in what were hyper-inflationary times.

Locals of all ages sat transfixed on their front stoops, watching the recurring spectacles of not how many clowns could fit into the automobiles parking all around them, but how many hippies would pile out of them. A parade of peculiar looking sorts marched past us on their way to Gaelic Park. As I recall, neighbors debated the gender of many of the passersby. Other than the scraggly bearded, who were presumed to be the male species, the clean-shaven hippies with the long, scraggly hairdos often appeared as gender neutral as they were generally unwashed.

It’s a safe bet that these "flower children," who are now Medicare recipients, were looking with similar wary eyes at the urban ethnics passing judgment on them from the steps of their stoops, and on beach chairs on the sidewalks. They didn’t trust anyone over thirty—and the Bronx stoop-sitting brigades were as untrustworthy as they came.

Despite the peculiar smell that wafted up the stoop steps and into the sultry season’s open windows, and which seemed to linger especially long in the city’s muggy ozone, the species of hippie on parade were more Jim Henson than Weathermen. Except for a couple of guys relieving themselves against Mrs. Covello’s maple tree, the attendees came and went peacefully. The country at large may have been in turmoil, but these were the summers of love and tie-dye shirts, not iPods and iPhones.

Finger-licking Good Times

(A reprise from 2010: Another Pat Mitchell's Story.)

I sometimes feel the New York City Department of Health, via its eagle-eyed restaurant and food-related inspections and recent letter grading, is a wee bit excessive and punitive to beleaguered small businesses. Once upon a time, in a decidedly less regulated era, there was Pat Mitchell's Irish Food Center. The place: Kingsbridge in the Bronx.

Every Sunday morning after Mass at St. John’s Church, it was the tradition of an awful lot of us to call on Pat Mitchell’s near the northwest corner of Kingsbridge Avenue and West 231st Street. After offering one another the sign of peace, the race was on to the place with the fresh donuts delivered from Willow Sunny Bakery in various trays, including repurposed beer-box trays and an especially large one—like a tub you would mix cement in—resting on the unwashed floor. The latter accommodated the heavily powdered-sugared mini-jelly donuts, crullers, and crumb buns, while the former contained the young fan favorite: frosted chocolate donut.

Now, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the contemporary health department bureaucracy would find fault with this retail arrangement. For starters, the donuts were completely exposed to the shop's hustle and bustle and—it should be noted for the historical record—the establishment wasn't renowned for its cleanliness. Post-Mass crowds cramming into cramped Pat Mitchell's to purchase donuts and rolls no doubt contaminated the whole lot of them with their wagging tongues, competing body odors, and general disorderliness.

One particular Sunday morn, I recall handing several frosted chocolate donuts from an aforementioned beer-box tray to a local kid working behind the counter. He grabbed hold of them with his two bare hands. From mine, which weren’t likely the cleanest, to his—the same hands that had been conducting numerous transactions that morning, including taking customers' money and making change. Evidently, there were no disposable plastic gloves around back then.

The icing on the cake, if you will, to this stroll down memory lane: When dropping the donuts into a paper bag, this teenage employee left his fingerprints in the frosting. He then did something that many people would have considered beyond the pale—even by Pat Mitchell's rather liberal standards. Just before Johnny on the spot took my cash, he vigorously licked chocolate frosting off his fingers. While they were finger-licking good times, for sure, this parting salvo took an unhealthy bite out of a one Sunday morning's breakfast a long time ago.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Special Memories

Since thirty full years have passed since my graduation from high school, I thought I'd elaborate on some of those very special memories, which I touched on in the previous essay. That is, memories of the not especially special special buses that chauffeured me to and from the place for four seemingly interminable years.

The special bus experience was unpleasant all around—an illuminating microcosm of the broader high school experience. As a bus pulled in close to the curbside, a select group of students—mostly brutes but some non-brutes, too—would literally attach themselves to its front and side doors. These brazen young fools sought to be the first ones in the bus when it came to a full stop and the doors opened. And right behind these fearless leaders of the wolf pack, a second tier of equally aggressive teens would jostle their way onto the bus, hurling articles—book bags, books, newspapers, hats, gloves, and pens—on top of as many seats as humanly possible. This daily onslaught was all about acquiring seats—not only for themselves but for their friends and acquaintances as well.

It was the accepted law of the special bus jungle that if somebody had an item of any kind on a seat, it was ipso facto saved. These bus rides were survival of the fittest tests—galootism run amok—where the weak among us more often than not stood for the duration of the trip from Broadway in Kingsbridge to Cardinal Spellman High School on the other side of the Bronx.

The buses, too, were packed like the proverbial sardines in a can; so, a seat was a cherished prize. It eased somewhat—for the twenty-minute or so ride—the all-encompassing misery of the school day ahead, particularly when the vastly overcrowded bus bended sideways and then back again as it careened around a dead man’s curve leading to the intersection of East Gunhill Road and Jerome Avenue and then repeated this extreme feat at another sharp turn onto Boston Road.

I am prone to wax nostalgic about many things from the good old days. But when I find myself fondly recalling the high school years, I resurrect these most special of memories and am promptly disabused of any and all warm and fuzzy feelings.

Garden of Paradise

From the late 1950s through October of 1971, a rather expansive and diverse garden bloomed on the northwest corner of West 231st Street and Tibbett Avenue in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. My grandfather—and eventually my father—planted it in concert with several locals. There were fruit trees (fig, peach, and apple), vegetables (tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants), and plenty of herbs (parsley, basil, and oregano). Marigolds, begonias, and sunflowers, to name just a few, added complementary colors to this vast field of green in a borough of mostly brick and asphalt. And courtesy of a makeshift well that tapped into Tibbetts Brook, which flowed undaunted beneath several feet of city landfill, the place never went dry. Employing a fifty-gallon drum with its bottom cut out, my grandfather knew exactly how to dig such a thing and make it work. These old timers from the old country knew how to do all sorts of things.

This sprawling "victory garden" actually sprang to life on somebody else’s property—land that was up for sale. A local realtor gave my grandfather and company the green light to plant on it with one proviso: Keep the place neat and clean. This sort of informal handshake wouldn't and couldn’t possibly cut it today. In essence, the garden’s days were numbered from the outset. Its demise could have come at any moment, without warning, and it subsequently did. Still, one and all in the neighborhood somehow assumed it would endure forever. It was so much a part our lives—an area fixture. Big parties were regularly thrown in the garden during summertime holidays and on weekends, while games of horseshoes were played in a makeshift horseshoe pit. The conscientious caretakers of this piece of earth not only converted a vacant parcel of urban terra firma into an oasis of green for more than a decade, but they also drank a brewery’s worth of beer within its confines.

When, in the name of progress, the garden was plowed under in 1971, it was a body blow to an awful lot of people, including the nine-year-old me. Written by neighbors, a short obituary even appeared in the local paper, the Riverdale Press. It was headlined: “Bulldozers Plow Under Garden of Paradise…Last Kingsbridge Farm.”

As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to appreciate the abiding garden ambiance even more. The mere fact that it survived for as long as it did, relatively undisturbed during the tumultuous 1960s, is remarkable in and of itself. Only a patchwork fence surrounded the place. And, too, empty lot after empty lot in the area were being developed.

I have mostly piecemeal memories of the garden and some pictures. But the photographers back then weren’t especially interested in posterity. They weren’t, for example, zeroing in on the well, the garden’s underground water source, nor were they snapping shots of the various shacks that were haphazardly constructed to accommodate tools, seeds, and such. In retrospect, these were all rather incredible things in a Bronx neighborhood.

On occasion, certain odors resurrect memories of the old garden. Smell memory. A combination of high summertime humidity, tomato plants, and the scent of marigolds do the trick every time. Talk about atmosphere! What I wouldn’t give to chow down on a couple of hot dogs and sample a few cold ones at a weekend barbecue amidst this leafy, aromatic sea of Bronx green, a sanctuary that is no more and will never be seen again. The bulldozers did indeed plow under a garden of paradise.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Grade A Pizza

For the first time in my life, I sampled a slice of pizza from a Grade A pizza parlor. Oh, I’ve had thousands of slices through the decades from this very shop, but today’s takeout came with the big city’s imprimatur. I had been reading of late that New York City’s Department of Health would be adding letter grades—A, B, or C—to their restaurant inspections. And by law, proprietors would have to prominently post their ratings. I can attest that restaurant report cards are now a reality in these parts.

But there’s something about this bureaucratic codicil that doesn’t quite pass the smell test. Essentially, it’s handing an additional cudgel to restaurant inspectors—men and women who make the rounds and assign points for health infractions that run the gamut from the trivial to the serious. However, the difference between an A grade and a B grade could be inconsequential where food safety and cleanliness are concerned, but very consequential in business gained or business lost. Ditto the difference between a B grade and a C grade. Restaurant inspectors have tremendous leeway and make some rather arbitrary decisions along the way. In other words: the city that never sleeps, led by its billionaire au pair, has just made the life of small businesspersons in the culinary trade more problematic.

The little guys are the ones who suffer most from the increasingly hefty fines levied with ever greater regularity against them. And the little guys will be the ones who suffer most from B and C grades. Even if we the hungry consumer are blissfully unaware how the Bs and Cs came to be, the psychological effect alone will drive business away, especially when there are A competitors nearby.

In theory, the letter grading is not such a bad idea. It places legitimate pressure on lax restaurateurs to remain lean, mean, and clean. But where pencil-pushing bureaucrats are concerned—whose mission is not only the health and wellness of the citizenry, but to collect fines to fill the city’s insatiable coffers—I remain justifiably skeptical. And I'd eat at my favorite pizza place regardless of its report card.

Down These Mean Streets

Stepping out into the mean streets of New York can be dangerous business. And I’m not speaking of getting mugged or becoming another crime statistic, which, while possible, is a long shot in a pretty safe town lorded over by the admirable men and women in blue. No, the danger I speak of lurks in the seemingly benign shadows, where unpleasant and unpredictable urban scenes await unsuspecting eyes.

Today, it was my unsuspecting eyes. While simultaneously running a few errands and accumulating invaluable walking time, I set my sights on Ewen Park, a rather steep grassy knoll that separates tony Riverdale from Kingsbridge, its less pedigreed neighbor. Approaching the traffic light directly across from the park, I came upon an elderly woman loudly berating a younger woman on a bicycle, who was planning to cross the same thoroughfare as me. “You don’t belong here!” she screamed, meaning on the sidewalk, I gathered, because the bicyclist responded, “I’m very careful.”

But this oldster was far from done in speaking her piece. Getting increasingly more apoplectic as the seconds passed, she eventually screeched, “I hope you get hit by a bus!” This rather vicious sentiment prompted the bicyclist to remove the baseball cap she was wearing, revealing a bald head and the telltale signs of cancer treatments. “I have cancer,” she offered, essentially imploring this ranting and raving old woman to put a lid on it and be on her unmerry way. But this plea for sympathy and a little understanding fell on deaf ears—both literally and figuratively, I think.

This ugly encounter turned downright surreal with the next toxic volley: "You can go to hell with your stupid bald head." As the bicyclist began crossing the street when the light turned green, the fusillade of vitriol continued, even as growing distance separated the two. “I hope you get raped in the park,” the old coot bellowed in her last shout, prompting the bicyclist to give her a flailing smorgasbord of well-earned one-finger salutes.

Having bore witness to this sideshow, the air was completely sucked out of my morning constitutional. I tried to imagine how this woman afflicted with cancer must have felt like in the wake of this bizarre encounter with a senior citizen, with a woman who wished her brutalized, and even dead, for the egregious transgression of riding her bicycle on the sidewalk.

I think the most unpleasant component of this city street snapshot was the individual’s state of mind. She just didn’t quite appear to be mentally unhinged, which could have at least explained her rabid performance. She seemed to be, first and foremost, a very mean person turned several notches meaner by the sands of time. But I don't really know. As for who really should get hit by a bus…well, nobody, of course.

Where Is Everybody?

The pilot episode of Rod Serling's classic Twilight Zone series is titled “Where Is Everybody?” It stars actor Earl Holliman as an astronaut who, unbeknownst to him, is undergoing a mind game—a stress test of sorts to measure a human being's psychological tipping point. In his induced hallucination, Holliman emerges in what appears to be a quaint small town—a busy little hamlet going about its business. The only thing missing are its inhabitants. He walks into a diner and spies a percolating coffee pot and sizzling bacon on the grill; a church bell is ringing in the distance. He calls out “hello...hello...hello,” but nobody answers him—nobody's around. After an extended and futile search for a living soul or two, he finally flips his raspberry and cries out in a state of panic, "Where is everybody?"

It's kind of the way I feel on hot summer days and nights. "Where is everybody?” I ask myself time and again. For in my Bronx youth, summertime equaled activity and lots of it. The dog days meant stoop sitting, game playing, and constant commingling with friends and neighbors.

We played games morning, noon, and night. We always managed to find something to do as kids, and it was often based on who was out and about at any given moment. Greater numbers of us inspired more epic games like Round-up, Ringolevio, and Johnny Ride-a-Pony. The incredible, multipurpose spaldeen, as it was affectionately known, busily bounced in the heat of summer and supplied us endless hours of entertainment with games like Punchball, Boxball, Ace-King-Queen, and Spud. Without a ball, or any prop at all, we played Mother, May I?, Red Light-Green Light and In-the-Refrigerator. Even after dark, the game playing continued with what we, very cleverly, dubbed Flashlight—an offshoot of tag based on a beam of light, not touch of the hand. Flashlight commenced a little after sunset with the ritual "the odd number is It." The unlucky "It" was handed the flashlight, while the rest of us dispersed, plotted our strategies, and found hiding spots in the neighborhood's backyards, alleyways, and alcoves.

The summer scene was alive and well thirty and forty years ago, with both young and old sitting out on their front stoops. Neighbors kibitzed and gossiped every single evening. Even in the awful nighttime humidity teeming with lightning bugs, the locals were undeterred. They were a tougher breed indeed, preferring the great outdoors to basking in the cool of air-conditioning.

There are plenty of adults and kids in the old neighborhood now. There aren't very many vacant apartments around. So, where is everybody? Apparently, social networking instead of socializing is today's rule—in all seasons. Neighborliness has by and large vanished along with the iconic spaldeen, although Spalding, I see, is still manufacturing them. Today's spaldeen is the iPhone, I suppose, and stoops just aren't meant for sitting on anymore.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)