EMERALD ISLE TO EMERALD CITY Looking for a subject for today I took the easy way out and went back down memory lane by way of the neighborhood website that I’ve mentioned here before, which is rapidly becoming a fixture in my daily routine. I seem to need a daily dose of nostalgia to keep my system functioning properly and my mind operating on all cylinders. No, I’m not gaga or if I am, so is Frank McCourt. The man is in a time warp; he does nothing but reminisce, in one book after another. But people can’t get enough of it. And what about Dominic Dunne? Another raconteur, yakking away. If they can do it, I can. Once again Stratton Park History Pages came through with a large supply of cobwebbed conceptions that took me back supersonically to days spent in healthy sport on the sidewalks of New York. When it came to sport our lives resembled an Olympic festival that went on all year round. We went from stickball in the school yard, to roller hockey on a play street, where the puck was two ends of a wooden cheese box taped together and the goal was a manhole cover with a kid standing on it, to sandlot baseball and football, to sledding, to swimming, to basketball, to handball, to variants like box ball, baseball-against-the-wall, stoopball, “points” where you attempted to get your ball to bounce into your hands after hitting the groove between the brick courses of the building walls. There was “Land” played with pocket knives thrown to stick up in the ground which would then be divided between the players. There were other demanding activities as well, pitching pennies, marbles, cards, dice, roasting “mickies” or marshmallows (inedible when done), war games, hiding games, catching games, jumping games, everything up to roulette and baccarat. Being a kid was a full-time activity. And this was just the boys. Girls didn’t participate in these games too much. Today they do. Then they kept busy with jumping rope, skating, “potsy”, dancing and other things which didn’t require participation by boys. Boys came later. Eventually boys and girls began to show up on each others’ horizons and there was no stopping the march of events afterwards. It began with roller skating together at the roller rink, went on to holding hands, dates, dancing, necking, engagements, marriages, the normal progression in other words. With all this stickball interest declined and it was hard to get up a game. There was a new game in town. The end of World War II obviously contributed to this return to normality. The returning servicemen took their turn on the 52-20 club (Uncle Sam, president. Dues $20 a week for a year. Payable to the members, not from them,), some for the full term, others for less. They played ball games in a mixture of GI and civilian clothes and eventually rejoined the working class. But they still wore their gold honorable discharge pins in their lapels. Their return or at least the promise of it was a major occasion for the neighborhood. It gets mentioned in many of the contributions to the website. The promise of return was the message we got from the announcements of the surrenders of Germany in May 1945 and Japan in August. Such news called for a block party with traffic fenced out, music playing and drinks all around. Kids were not barred. They couldn’t be. Like the tide, they would seep in. All this comes from the messages flowing in to the website. Women predominate here, but their filings are usually shorter than the mens’. The don’t generally bring up as many names as the men do, but they are more likely to mention someone as their “best friend” while the men don’t make such distinctions. All pals together is their sentiment. The girls are far more likely than the men to write about favorite teachers and happy days in school. The men are better historians though. There are some entries by fellows with encyclopedic memories that remind me of the oral history pages in Google, which I came across lately and which feature journalists recalling news stories in which they participated. The Archers Street amateurs match up very well with these professional memoirists. I thought I knew a few things, but by comparison I’m an amnesiac. Something I didn’t know was the personal history of the godfather who created this Happy Valley in the Bronx where no man had ventured before. This was literally true. The O’Leary flats as they were immediately nicknamed, were built on totally undeveloped land where it was not necessary to tear down a single building to make room for the developer’s megablocks of six-story apartment houses extending for two full city blocks able to accommodate several thousand people. Fortunately they didn’t have to stand alone in a desert. The rest of the area had been developed, but with low-rise homes which prevented the congestion that would have existed if more apartments had been erected. The cliff-dwellers in the new buildings got more light and air and open space than they ever knew in the apartment-house neighborhoods from which most of them came. Now almost a century after all this was done I’ve gotten to know something about the man responsible for it. When I was one of his tenants I was too young to know anything more than his name. Probably most of the grownups knew no more than that themselves, since paying the rent was a little more important than checking out the landlord. Now a lady named Patricia O’Connor has contributed to the pool of knowledge accumulating about the old neighborhood by memorializing Mr. O’Leary in a monograph for the Stratton Park website. My own picture of him was of a cop who struck it rich with parking lots at the Yankee Stadium when it opened in 1922, but there was a lot more to him than that. The biography is not clear about his police dates, but it seems likely he left that job before ’22. He had arrived here from County Kerry in 1879 and became a cop soon after. He may have been the inspiration for Gov. Hugh Carey’s perennial St. Patrick’s joke about the immigrant who became a cop, a Chief, an Alderman, and finally a Congressman, at which point he asked his ‘rabbi’ for one last favor: could he make him a citizen? O’Leary didn’t take things this far, but he did understand politics well enough to marry into the family of Big Tim Sullivan, the Tammany boss of the East Side, who later broke down mentally and was found dead in a vacant lot. John Stratton O’Leary prospered however and didn’t die until 1942, full of years and honors. He built good houses too, which contributed to the “orderly and facile propagation of the species”. Today there are thousands of his tenants scattered across the land who can testify to this. He lives on.
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