“Someday I’m going to write a book about this place and call it ‘The Yard.’†So spoke my friend, Sid Daniels, talking about the P.S. 69 schoolyard in Jackson Heights, Queens. He said it over fifty years ago, and since no book on the subject has materialized, I’ll pinch hit for old Sid, wherever he may be.
In the 1950s, the P.S. 69 schoolyard was an after-school oasis for kids who wanted to recreate, or socialize, or just hang out. This was before it was covered with asphalt to make it a safer place to play. We played on rock hard concrete peppered with pebbles that glittered like diamonds in the sun. Cuts, scrapes, and contusions that simply came with the territory.
The Yard was a chain-link sanctuary that was open 24 hours a day. It had courts for handball and basketball, a brick wall for stickball, and just enough space for cramped, urban versions of baseball, softball, and touch football. Grownups rarely set foot in the Yard. One exception I can remember was a hoopster named Polachek who was there for so many years he outlasted every kid who played him for quarters, grew up, and moved on.
Then there was Joe the Cop. I never found out if he was a real cop or not, but I tend to doubt it given his fondness for playing poker with
juveniles.
Left to our own devices, we found plenty to do in the old schoolyard. We played Chinese and American handball and box ball with pink rubber balls called “Spauldeens,†a corruption of “Spaulding.â€
Stickball was big, too. You stood in front of a wall and swung a broomstick wrapped with black electricians tape and, if you really connected, the ball made an arc that seemed to double back on itself and was a beautiful sight to behold.
We flipped baseball cards, read comic books, and rode bikes that clattered and buzzed with playing cards stuck in their spokes. In the summer we bought ash cans, cherry bombs, and lady fingers from older, harder kids who weren’t afraid to stock up on illegal fireworks in Chinatown and Little Italy.
Moe & Archie’s provided sustenance. Fifteen cents bought you a giant pretzel and a bottle of Mission soda.
There could be so much going on in the Yard that you had to constantly be on the lookout for people and objects in motion. On a busy Saturday the Yard could look like a modern version of Peter Breughel’s Flemish Renaissance masterpiece called “Children’s Games,†a painting crammed with Flemish Renaissance children entirely absorbed in their games and pastimes.
Despite the high volume of kids the Yard supported, we coexisted in a way that would have made Rodney King proud. The hoodlums (we called them “rocksâ€) occupied the steps near the basketball court at the northeast corner of the Yard. Basically they just sat their smoking cigarettes and looking sour. My friends and I lolled around by the handball court to the southwest of the Yard -- and never the twain did meet. . . except once, one summer night. . . when a confrontation did occur and we discovered to our great satisfaction that the rocks weren’t as hard, and we weren’t as soft, as we thought we were.
Where are they all now I wonder? The jocks like tall Paul Wladzarck who smacked into a pole going out for the pass and wound up in the hospital.
Fellow handball players Nick Carter, Bill Baglive, and Doc Simpson, and a guy named Milo who could beat us all. Big Aaron, at one time the only African-American who played in the Yard. Assorted tough guys: Donny LaRosa, Buster, Kevin Young and the Rubino brothers. And the kids who lived across the street: my friend Mike Tate who graduated Bronx Science High School at fifteen; curly headed Dennis Malpedi; Leo Gaumont who joined the Navy, and Michael Steinfeld who played the Cello.
Memory comprehends them, and myself as well. For some persistent reason my thoughts will drift back to a fine Spring evening when it‘s still light out at seven o’clock , and privet blossoms scent the air, and I climb a low brick wall and look out across the Yard and there it all is -- that Breughel painting!
It’s April. I‘m twelve again. And everything lies ahead.
Topic: The Yard (Read 6264 times)