My brother and I play one-on-one on a handball court in Queens. We chalk a strike zone on the handball wall and pitch as fast as we can throw. A ball hit over the court fence and over the roof of the 7-storey apartment building across the street is a home run. I am 62 and my bro 58. We hail from the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. It’s as much fun as tennis or racquetball and a hell of a lot cheaper.
Since streetplay is mainly centered around sports, I would just like to relate how great a baseball / softball player my Dad was. His name was Howard Friedman and he played on the baseball team at CCNY in the early 30s. He starred as a center-fielder, batted .310 over 3 seasons and was All-City. He had a beautiful, level left-handed swing. While I never saw him play regular baseball, we played on the same softball team when I was a teenager in the 50s. He could hit 300 feet line drives with a mushy softball even when he was older and could barely run the bases. While I never even came close to being as good as he was, he did teach me how to hit, which I put to good use playing not only softball (which I still do), but stickball as a kid in Queens. Jay Friedman Decatur GA
Hi Jim, The game I’ve documented is based on 1970s vintage Bronx skully. It has definitely evolved through the years, and the memory of the way you played may be perfectly accurate (though not going backwards is like a day w/o sunshine IMHO–and I couldn’t imagine not hitting another player’s cap to get into the next box). For example, putting numbers in the trapezoids around the 13 box is definitely a Bronx/Harlem thing of the mid/late 60s, and never made it to Queens. And, believe it or not, if you played with 13 boxes, you definitely were higher up on the skully evolutionary cycle–we’ve seen pictures and talked to folk who played with only 9 boxes “back in the day.” There’s really no right answer about the rules–I know for a fact that we had rules on my block that kids 2 blocks away didn’t. Now that I think of it, the “bonus boxes” around “13” were introduced to my block by a kid who moved from another part of the Bronx! Please feel free to try the rules as we have here, or play the way you remember, or take a hybrid of both–just don’t change rules in the middle of the game! -Hugh McNally hmcnally [at] streetplay [dot] com
Played alot of roller hockey, Richmond Hill area mostly and up in Woodside. Don’t remeber the freeze rule, except when we played in the street and we would yell CAR! and everybody would freeze where they were until the car passed. Then you picked up play from there,unless of course you were on a break away and then the damn car just had to wait!!!
TAR HEAVEN!! I had a friend in Richmond Hill,Queens (Carmine), his mom was the super in the apartment building on our corner. He snuck the roof keys from her one day and we went to the hardware store (Moblegots)or something like that, We called it Moblegots & Ghoul! Any way we would sneak up on the roof to hang out, it over looked “The Bagel Factory” and a bus stop. GOD I LOVE WATER BALLONS!!!! I guess I don’t even need to mention Holloween! “When this old world starts getting me down…”