Category Archives: Locales
For skully caps our favorites…
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For skully caps our favorites in my bronx neighborhood were the plastic liquor bottle tops filled with some tar scraped out of the street; or the metal cap from the bottom of the school chairs legs that made the chairs slide on the floors. The school chair pieces were heavy enough the you didn’t need to give it any additional weight, the only problem was the extreme difficulty of getting it off of the bottom of the chair leg. In all the years that I tried I don’t think that I ever got one off of a chair.
I played Hot Peas & butter…
Riverdale @ 256th St. is…
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Riverdale @ 256th St. is where I was raised. I lived just up the hill from PS 81 on Riverdale Ave. We had lots of kids my age living there – I can’t imagine growing up anywhere else being better! Later I attended JHS 141. I hung out at the Neighborhood House on Mosholu Ave. and had a pass to the pool every summer. Winters I had a pass to Kelton’s ice skating rink by 234th St. & Broadway – Cortland Park area. If you continued West on 256th toward the Hudson, there was a monastery. They gave me a scapula – many there took a vow of silence. I had a friend, Steve Talerico, and when I met another Talerico years later, I mentioned knowing him. He told me it’s a common name. He said Steven Tyler (Aerosmith) was originally a Talerico. In 1999 when I got my computer I looked up his bio – he lived in the next building. We used to put up signs that there would be a carnival, then we’d make up games of skill where for a small sum you could play and possibly win one of our old toys. We’d also take what appeared to us to be unused & unwanted carriages and dismantle them to make gravity powered go-carts. One day, Robert Kennedy was in a parade on Riverdale Ave. & I followed his vehicle to a retirement home in the rural looking parts down the hill toward the river. I snuck in thru bushes, walked right up to him, handed him my pink, zippered, autograph book, filled with pages of “Yours ’til Niagra Falls” type signatures from my classmates, handed him the book, and he signed it! There were many wooded areas, lots of BIG rocks like the Adirondacks. One such was a 30ft tall (at least) single smooth outcropping on Riverdale Ave. that was dynomited and carted away when I was young to make way for a shopping plaza. And there was a Magic Shop filled with so much stuff you could barely squeeze thru. All the games I’ve read about here I played – seemingly forever. I was outside as much as possible. I now bike & kayak a lot, but I rarely see kids out, it’s mostly people my age doing these things. Geeze, sometimes instead of going to the Neighborhood House pool – I’d walk to the river & swim there. Now even the public pools where I live are almost devoid of life. One by one they’re closing. Nice site this Streetplay – brings me back!
I’m from the Southwest Schuykill…
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I’m from the Southwest Schuykill section of S/W Philly until we left in 1971. Back in the day we called “Handball” >> “Socket it out” A couple of street games not mentioned are: Ring up, hide the belt, “Buck Buck” ,2 hand touch street football (Not flag football) as well as schoolyard softball (Special ball because of the concrete field) in Mitchell school yard.
Anyone remember Louie’s on…
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Anyone remember Louie’s on Nostrand Avenue,near Glenwood Road, close to the Junction? The library was nearby and a fur place … what the hell was it’s name — Mitchell’s??? Louie and his wife, Bea, worked their butts off in a hard business, literally working for pennies and putting up with bratty kids like us. Thanks to Milky Ways,Three Musketeers and too many egg creams, I put on mucho weight. Best wishes to the crowd from Vanderveer Estates.
In Astoria, we called it…
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In Astoria, we called it Ace,King,Queen. Asses. up had to be called in the beginning. We also had rules about who chased the ball if it went into the street. Last player to touch the wall had to get the ball. Chips were often called in case the ball went down the sewer. Spaldeens were the preferred ball but sometimes we used a Pennsy Pinky. We also had a rule that if the ball hit a car after only one bounce you could hit “off the car” legally. We the “Ace” got “out” he went to the end of the line, as did anyone else who faltered. I don’t recall if only the Ace scored points but I think so. A good, low “slice” would generally take out a player. We generally used the sidewalk boxes for each players area. Sometimes we would mark it off with chalk but that usually only happened if the landlord with the sidewalk boxes chased us away!
Several years ago, I was…
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Several years ago, I was trying to explain the game of skully (skullies) to my wife, when I came upon this site. I told my brother and sisters about it, and haven’t been back here since. Recently, we were talking about other games we played in the city (Bronx) and we all remembered the game SLUGS. We never knew it as any other name, no one on the block called it Chinese Handball, Ace-King-Queen, etc. It was always known by us, and everyone around the block, as SLUGS. We lived and played this game around 181 St., on Valentine Ave, and over at P.S. 9/115, which isn’t even called that anymore (damn, imagine that, they changed our school names). Guess I shouldn’t be surprised, it’s been 30 years since I lived and played in the Bronx. Can’t tell you how much I miss playing stickball, and off-the-point (stoop-ball), off-the-wall and skullies (we use to take the school chairs into the hallway or stairs where they had those big iron grids covering the radiators, the grids just the right size to pop the metal chair slide off the bottom of the chairs – which we all know kicked ass over the bottle cap tops, or the bottle rings tops). And then there was kick-the-can, Ringoleavio, and on a hot summer day, we open up those fire hydrants and use a can with the lid removed on both ends to direct volumes of arching water all over… damn, it was great. Anyway… just wanted to share, and will be forwarding this forum to my brother and sisters so that they too can be assured, we weren’t fooling ourselves… it was called SLUGS.
Oh, my god!!!!!!! I cannot…
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Oh, my god!!!!!!! I cannot believe I have found this site. Skelly was my all time favorite street game growing up in the Bronx, though I first learned the game during the short time my family and I lived in the Edgemere projects in Far Rockaway in the mid-60’s. They called it skully there, skelly in Co-op City, but no matter the name, it was so much fun! I moved to Rochester, NY 8 years ago, and no one has ever heard of it, their loss. I am going out as soon as I can, get some sidewalk chalk, and draw a skelly board on my driveway come this spring…….Maybe I can teach these hicks up here what a good game looks like……… Thanks to the webmasters, and the creators of this website, you have brought back a flood of great memories for me, and I am going to pass this along……