A story about one group of teenagers who grew up in the Bronx in the 1950s.

1. Park Plaza Sweet Shoppe
University Avenue and Macombs Road, Bronx
By Phyllis Deroian
The Park Plaza Sweet Shop on University Avenue
(now known as Dr. Martin Luther King Highway),
was home to a bunch of us during our teen years. It
was our meeting place before we went dancing or to
the movies. It was also our ending place, for egg
creams and burgers after the dances and the movies.
And when there was no particular place to go, we
started out there and plans were made. In the summer
months we met there and stayed there, hanging around
inside then outside for hours, just being friends and
being teenagers. I don’t ever remember a time when
we were asked to lower our voices or leave because
we were taking up tables. The owners, two brothers,
Rudy and Bernie Lombardo and their wives, knew us
by name. It was our “place.” In the booths of the
Sweet Shop we talked about everything, including very personal stuff. It was as good as being
home around the kitchen table.
Sometimes we walked next door to the school yard of Macomb’s Junior High School (PS 82)
which ran along University Avenue and Macombs Road to play team games like Ringolevio,
girls against the boys. Although the girls never won, changing the rules was never considered.
We weren’t supposed to win. We were happy to be caught and put in jail, fussing and
complaining all the way, plotting a rescue that never succeeded. Rare was the girl who could put
her foot over the jail line to free the rest of us. Dennis Murray calls it, “Our version of speed
dating.”
Sometimes we played Johnny on the Pony, but not with the boys-- too painful! Other times we
watched the boys play stickball, punch ball, or three box baseball, or we’d play handball against
the school building. For basketball, the fire escape ring was a perfect hoop. Some evenings we
would sit on the steps at the back of the schoolyard and play a game called Time or Time Out; a
game that no one seems to remember except that we were playing it one night when a bucket of
cold water came splashing down on all of us from an apartment above. We never understood
why because that was a relatively quiet game compared to the squealing of Ringolevio.
On the other side of the Sweet Shoppe was the Park Plaza Cinema and around the corner, on
Tremont Avenue, were cement steps and a fire escape leading to the emergency exit of the
theater. We would often sit on the steps and play silly word games or just gossip. One hot
summer day, when we were bored out of our wits, we plotted a way to get into the movie for
free. There were about six of us. We pooled what little money we had to pay for one ticket and

2. sent the perpetrator in the front door while the rest of us climbed the two flights of black fire
escape stairs to the balcony door. Waiting until after dark somehow didn’t occur to us. It was
such good mischief it couldn’t wait. So, in the middle of the afternoon, when the door in the dark
theater was opened and daylight came swathing in, not only the ushers but every patron of the
theater turned to watch us as we crept, low to the ground, into the last row. We were quickly
shown the front door and left quietly, being thankful that the management didn’t ask us to buy
tickets because none of us had any money. It wasn’t until we were safely around the corner,
tucked into a booth of the sweet shop, that we burst into the lunacy of laughter only teenagers
and small children can experience.
Mischief was the order of the summer months when we were free-birds. Every night we would
meet at the sweet shop, share food and then go outside and play. We were so silly and immature
but at the time we thought we were cool. We thought it was hilarious when the boys gave some
poor girl in Bermuda shorts, pennies to buy the rest of her pants. Lifting tiny sports cars out of
their parking spots and onto the sidewalk would put us into howls of laughter. The highlight of
the pranks was the summer of the shaving cream fights. They started off small and rather
innocent- someone got shaving cream from Mr. Whitaker’s drugstore across the street and
sprayed us with it outside of the Sweet Shop. But payback was always around the corner and
eventually the shaving cream wars developed into weapons of mass muck. Water balloons,
molasses, eggs and pretty much any other soft, gooey substance was within the realm of
acceptable weaponry. They went on and escalated through one summer culminating in what was
to be a night of terrorizing the girls. It backfired when Danny Lally, planting water balloons on
the roof of the Park Plaza theater, fell through the skylight and sprained his ankle, and Gene
Mitchel threw eggs off of an apartment house onto the head of a girl who was not one of us and
whose father called the police. With my head covered in shaving cream, molasses and eggs, I
was led blindly onto a side street to be cleaned off with someone’s sweatshirt. Then we all
quickly fled to the safety of our Sweet Shop booths and agreed the wars were over. But, not
quite, the wars made the front page of the Daily Mirror.
Money was scarce in those days but sharing was not. If one had money, we all had money. We
shared our egg creams, shared our pizza, shared our gum (anyone remember ABC gum?), shared
fries from Harry’s Deli that Mrs. Harry put in a paper bag. We shared food as easily as we shared
our laughter, and shared our good times. As each person came into the sweetshop, we’d squeeze
Opened in 1927, the Park Plaza
Theatre was located on University
Avenue in the Bronx, next to
Public School 82.

3. over in the booth so we could all sit together, elbows in ribs, girls on laps, picking French fries
from someone else’s order, taking sips from someone’s drink. No one cared. No one thought
about germs. We were family.
The sweet shop corner was also the bus stop. We met inside, then went outside and took the bus
to Orchard Beach or Manhattan Beach off of East Tremont Avenue, or Van Cortland Park. We
were walking distance to the subways going to Rockaway Beach or the Staten Island ferry for
picnics in the country. It was outside the sweet shop that I got my first motor cycle ride and
there, where the only two friends with cars would pull up and we’d hop in, sometimes 8 or 9 of
us in one car, to go off for adventure.
City kids never know real darkness. A favorite adventure was to squeeze into the two cars on a
moonless night and drive up to the country (Westchester) and onto a dark, wooded road. We’d
turn the lights of the car off and sit in unfamiliar, utter darkness scaring each other with terrifying
stories about escaped criminals, one with a hook hand, and mass murderers. Sometimes the boys
would get out and creep around the car, banging on it and making horrible noises until we were
all so thoroughly terrorized we’d beg to go back to the lights of the city streets.
For the Sweet Shop crowd, the memories are eternal, as they are for most kids who grew up in
the Bronx in the 50s. Our parents had experienced the shortages of food and money during
WWII. Most of them had jobs, not careers. They owned small businesses. Sal Moraldo’s parents
owned a candy story around the corner from the Sweet Shop where we went for sandwiches and
nickel candy. My dad owned a barber shop. They taught us right from wrong and trusted us to do
right. It was a time when the country was just coming off of the Korean War. Patriotism was
strong. The Army Air Force did flyovers on Memorial Day. Our guys would eventually serve in
the military. Perhaps that hung over us, perhaps not, but I have never known freedom as I did in
those days. I was always short of money but never short of friends and places to go, dancing
every Friday night at Our Lady of Mercy, CYO basketball twice a week, a bus ride to and from
the beach in the summer, Yankee games, Giants football; the boys harmonizing in the alley
between the Sweet Shop and the school yard or the girls piercing each other’s ears in someone’s
kitchen with a needle and white thread. It was all there for us, in the Bronx, and it began and
ended through the doors of the Sweet Shop.