Category Archives: Hanging Out
I grew up in the Highbridge…
I grew up in the Highbridge area of the Bronx. I lived at 1050 Anderson Ave and 901 Woodycrest Ave. What great times and great memories. Playing stickball in PS73 school yard, hanging out down by the Harlem river and running around in the abandoned subway “The Shuttle” than ran under our neighborhood. Nothing in my life has topped those times and if there was a time machine I’d be there now. Rob Auerbach Colleenandrob [at] yahoo [dot] com
Most people don’t realize…
Most people don’t realize that all the pigeons in New York City are feral (gone wild) descendants of domesticated pigeons kept on the rooftops as pets, for sport, for show and for food earlier in the century. (Pigeons of the type we know are not native to the U.S.) When you see a flock of wild pigeons spontaneously leap into the air and fly around in circles in a tight group, you are seeing the behavior their ancestors were bred to perform by rooftop pigeon fanciers. The breeders selectively intensified the natural behavior of the birds to fly out from the nest, forage for food, and return to the nest, resulting in specialized strains that can find their home lofts from long distances, covering 500 miles a day (homers), birds that can fly above their loft in circles continuously for 15-20 hours (tipplers, or as they are called only in New York, “tiplets”), aerial acrobats that spin backwards in a series of multiple somersaults (rollers), as well as the garden variety of New York flyers that circle above their rooftops in tight groups, trying to get the neighbor’s birds to defect to them. As a resident of suburban Bayside, Queens in the ’60’s and ’70’s, I kept pigeons, which I was first exposed to by “urban flight” neighbors, who came out of the inner boroughs, bringing their tradition of rooftop pigeon keeping with them. Pigeons, of course, are much maligned, especially for their dirtiness. All I can say is that domesticated pigeons, when fed dry grain and clean water, are clean animals. If you put a pan of water out on a sunny day they will even take a bath. It’s like the difference between an observer’s perception of a homeless person and one who has shelter, clean clothes, and eats good food. My Web site about Bayside in those times is: http://www.covername.net/bayside Dave T.
i used to go out every morning…
Spaldeens were great for…
intersted if anyone remembers…
In Queens in the 60’s, we…
In Queens in the 60’s, we played the five box version of boxball described above. Two players stood with five boxes between them; you would first bounce it once in the box closest to your opponent (your fifth box), and then once in each of your fourth and fifth boxes, and so on. I’m not quite sure if I remember the ping-pong style of two box that Connie describes above. We didn’t play hit the stick, but I do remember playing hit the penny. I think you scored one point if you hit the penny, and two if you flipped it. Players stood with two boxes between them, and put the penny or other coin on the crack between the two boxes. We didn’t like to use nickels because they were heavy and more difficult to flip. :^) This was a mostly a game for younger kids, whereas I remember still playing boxball into early adolescence, when we weren’t playing wiffle ball or stick ball or just hanging out. Another favorite game of childhood was ring-o-levio, which I played from early childhood right through high school. Those later HS games were neighborhood-wide.
I grew up in the Bed-Stuy…
I grew up in the Bed-Stuy section of BROOKLYN and when we stoped playing streetgames we went on the roofs to fly pigeons! Tiplets, Bald heads, Tumblers and Homers were some of the birds that kept my head in the clouds when the streets started to get roughf. Did your coop ever get tapped off? Also known as having your pigeons kidnapped.
I live in Long Island but…
I live in Long Island but grew up in Queens and my wife grew up in Brooklyn. When we are home relaxing and hanging out we sit on the front stoop. Another couple from Howard Beach moved in on the block and then sit on the front stoop too, but all the people who grew up on Long Island sit in the backyard. You don’t get to know your neighbors as easily as you used to.
I grew up in the western…
I grew up in the western suburbs of Minneapolis. There were lots of kids hanging out, as we’d all get kicked out of the house all day. We’d usually play baseball all day in the brief summers, but the rest of the year offered other playtime activities. In the winter could have as many as 30 kids in a giant snowball fight. We’d be running from one block to the other, and build big snowball forts and you’d try to capture from the other gang. There were always these forts in different stagers of repair When we were young teenagers, 13-15, during the warmer weather, we could steal lumber from these new housing construction sites and build tree houses. Sometimes there would be 10 kids involved (there’s nothing you couldn’t do with a critical mass of kids). We would get these big sheets of plywood and cut them around the branches, creating these elaborate multi-storied houses. We wouldn’t have ‘official clubs” and didn’t really hang out as much as just build the things. Still no girls were allowed. The houses would last a couple of years although they might get taken over by gangs from another neighborhood or vandalized by kids who might be mad at you. One time a contractor who got mad at us for stealing the wood sent a bulldozer over. They wrapped a big chain around the house and pulled it right our of the tree. This was the biggest one we had ever created literally 5 stories high, skewed all around the tree to fit in. That house was the culmination of our architectural endeavors. When it was pulled down, we were ready to move on.