The Street Games of 153rd St., Flushing, Queens, NY

INTRODUCTION

This book is about the games we used to play in Queens, N.Y. before TV or at least before my friends and me had a tv in our apartment. No Nintendo, Gameboy, CD's, or videos to watch on a VCR. I guess we were deprived as you look at the “things” the kids of today have to play with but we did OK. In fact we even had fun. To begin with I spent most of my childhood years in Flushing, Queens after moving there from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. We lived in a three room, rent controlled apartment. I slept in the living room on a hide-a-bed. My father worked for the NYC Transit Authority and my Mom didn’t work during my early childhood years but began working in Bloomingdales, Fresh Meadows, N.Y.  when I was about ten years old. Anyway, one day while I was attempting to describe some of the games I played in my childhood to my two grandchildren, aged nine and seven I thought , “why not write some of these games down, seek an illustrator and see what happens”.

You have to understand the geography of my neighborhood. Our twin apartment houses were six stories high, with another apartment house right in back of it that was five stories high. There was a candy store on the corner and a few other stores in a line next to the candy store. At the end of the street facing the busy boulevard was a bowling alley and pool hall, next to that a gas station and then another street parallel to the street I lived on. When you crossed that street there was a huge Firestone Tire building whose left wall served as our “Strikeout” game wall. I will explain that game as well. When you turned left out of my apartment you headed for another busy street, 35th Avenue that went all the way downtown into Main Street, Flushing, if you again turned left. The boulevard in front of my apartment building led you to Main Street also, if you turned right. There were “tons’ of stores and two great movie theaters there; RKO KEITHS AND THE PROSPECT,  plus a real big soda parlor where we “hung out” as teens.....but that is material for another book that really describes the 50’s..

Yes, we did have two ball fields to play on, Memorial Field and Victory Field. Memorial Field was the home field for Flushing High School and Victory Field was the “home” of many football teams that played in the Long Island Football League. But most of our neighborhood games were played right on the street where you and your friends lived. As cars lined the streets, the car fenders were used for first and third base.

Most “working people” took the bus on the corner to Main Street and then the IRT Subway to their job. So their cars remained parked in the street in front of the apartment houses. Second base was a manhole cover.

Of course we played touch football in the streets as well and car owners were not very happy about us banging the football off their cars. In one case breaking a front windshield... man did we “cut-out” of there in a hurry.

We would pool our money and buy a broom handle from the hardware store across the boulevard and a pink Spalding Hi-Bouncer from the candy store, The “bat” was 75 cents and the ball 25 cents. We would drill a hole thru the bottom of the bat and have a bent hanger nearby, under one of the cars, to place thru the hole in the bat and hang the bat on a sewer grating “rung” when the cops would arrive on the scene to tell us to move on or keep the noise down because somebody complained. After the cops left we would retrieve the bat and continue play. Of course on Halloween night we always “got” the complainer.

I hope you enjoy this book of games and maybe attempt to get the “family” involved in a few of them. Fresh air never hurt anybody and it’s time spent away from those sometimes violent video games our children and grandchildren are currently “in to”. Enjoy!