1) The Park Plaza Sweet Shoppe in the Bronx was an important gathering place for teenagers in the 1950s. They would meet there before and after dances, movies, and other activities.
2) The owners knew all the teenagers by name and allowed them to spend hours talking and hanging out without disturbing other customers. It felt like a home away from home.
3) In the summer, the teenagers engaged in mischievous activities like sneaking into movies and having shaving cream fights. These antics built strong bonds of friendship and memories that lasted lifetimes.
Computer Scrapbooking Ideas for cars, your business, office photosBrad Angers
Almost everyone has to drive a car, go to the office so why not remember it with a powerpoint presentation to give to your family, friends and keep for yourself. No more ruined photos and so easy to send through the e-mail. This presentation has some individual radio clips about the page you are looking at.
Client Director Will Hodgess gives his account of 'The Black Diamond', the Stella Artois experience!
Read what he thought about the immersive theatrical experience created to promote Stella Artois Black.
Computer Scrapbooking Ideas for cars, your business, office photosBrad Angers
Almost everyone has to drive a car, go to the office so why not remember it with a powerpoint presentation to give to your family, friends and keep for yourself. No more ruined photos and so easy to send through the e-mail. This presentation has some individual radio clips about the page you are looking at.
Client Director Will Hodgess gives his account of 'The Black Diamond', the Stella Artois experience!
Read what he thought about the immersive theatrical experience created to promote Stella Artois Black.
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ALSO BY COLSON WHITEHEAD
The Intuitionist
John Henry Days
The Colossus of New York
Apex Hides the Hurt
2
3
For Maddie
4
Contents
NOTIONS OF ROLLER-RINK INFINITY
THE HEYDAY OF DAG
IF I COULD PAY YOU LESS, I WOULD
THE GANGSTERS
TO PREVENT FLARE-UPS
BREATHING TIPS OF GREAT AMERICAN BEATBOXERS
TONIGHT WE IMPROVISE
THE BLACK NATIONAL ANTHEM
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FIRST YOU HAD TO SETTLE THE QUESTION OF OUT. When did you get
out? Asking this was showing o�, even though anyone you could
brag to had received the same gift and had come by it the same way
you did. Same sun wrapped in shiny paper, same soft benevolent
sky, same gravel road that sooner or later skinned you. It was hard
not to believe it belonged to you more than anyone else, made for
you and waiting all these years for you to come along. Everyone felt
that way. We were grateful just to be standing there in that heat
after such a long bleak year in the city. When did you get out? was
the sound of our trap biting shut; we took the bait year after year,
pure pinned joy in the town of Sag Harbor.
Then there was the next out: How long are you out for?—and the
competition had begun. The magic answer was Through Labor Day
or The Whole Summer. Anything less was to signal misfortune. Out
for a weekend at the start of the season, to open up the house,
sweep cracks, that was okay. But only coming out for a month? A
week? What was wrong, were you having �nancial di�culties?
Everyone had �nancial di�culties, sure, but to let it interfere with
Sag, your shit was seriously amiss. Out for a week, a month, and
you were allowing yourself to be cheated by life. Ask, How long are
you out for? and a cloud wiped the sun. The question trailed a whi�
6
of autumn. All answers contemplated the end, the death of summer
at its very beginning. Still waiting for the bay to warm up so you
could go for a swim and already picturing it frozen over. Labor Day
suddenly not so far o� at all.
The �nal out was one-half information-gathering and one-half
prayer: Who else is out? The season had begun, we were proof of it,
instrument of it, but things couldn't really get started until all the
players took their marks, bounding down driveways, all gimme-
�ves. The others were necessary, and we needed word. The person
standing before you in pleated salmon shorts might say, “I talked to
him on Wednesday and he said they were coming out.” They were
always the �rst ones out, never missed June like their lives
depended on it. (This was true.) Someone might o�er, “Their lawn
was cut.” A cut lawn was an undeniable omen of impending
habitation, today or tomorrow. “Saw a car in their driveway.” Even
better. There was no greater truth than a car in a driveway. A car in
the driveway was an invitation to knock on the door and get down
to the busine ...
The New Yorker, January 9, 1989 P. 26Every so often that dead lourapoupheq
The New Yorker
, January 9, 1989 P. 26
Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again.
It’s twenty-five years later. I’m walking along Forty-second Street in Manhattan, the sounds of the city crashing beside me—horns and gearshifts, insults—somebody’s chewing gum holding my foot to the pavement, when that dog wakes from his long sleep and imagines me.
I’m sweet again. I’m sweet-breathed and flat-limbed. Our family is stationed at Fort Niagara, and the dog swims his red heavy fur into the black Niagara River. Across the street from the officers’ quarters, down the steep shady bank, the river, even this far downstream, has been clocked at nine miles per hour. The dog swims after a stick I have thrown.
“Are you crazy?” my grandmother says, even though she is not fond of dog hair in the house, the way it sneaks into the refrigerator every time you open the door. “There’s a current out there! It’ll take that dog all the way to Toronto!”
“The dog knows where the backwater ends and the current begins,” I say, because it is true. He comes down to the river all the time with my father, my brother MacArthur, or me. You never have to yell the dog away from the place where the river water moves like a whip.
Sparky Smith and I had a game we played called Knockout. It involved a certain way of breathing and standing up fast that caused the blood to leave the brain as if a plug had been jerked from the skull. You came to again just as soon as you were on the ground, the blood sloshing back, but it always seemed as if you had left the planet, had a vacation on Mars, and maybe stopped back at Fort Niagara half a lifetime later.
There weren’t many kids my age on the post, because it was a small command. Most of its real work went on at the missile batteries flung like shale along the American-Canadian border. Sparky Smith and I hadn’t been at Lewiston-Porter Central School long enough to get to know many people, so we entertained ourselves by meeting in a hollow of trees and shrubs at the far edge of the parade ground and telling each other seventh-grade sex jokes that usually had to do with keyholes and doorknobs, hot dogs and hot-dog buns, nuns, priests, preachers, schoolteachers, and people in blindfolds.
When we ran out of sex jokes, we went to Knockout and took turns catching each other as we fell like a cut tree toward the ground. Whenever I knocked out, I came to on the grass with the dog barking, yelping, crouching, crying for help. “Wake up! Wake up!” he seemed to say. “Do you know your name? Do you know your name? My name is Duke! My name is Duke!” I’d wake to the sky with the urgent call of the dog in the air, and I’d think, Well, here I am, back in my life again.
Sparky Smith and I spent our school time smiling too much and running for office. We wore mittens instead of gloves, because everyone else did. We made our mothers buy us ugly knit caps with balls on top—caps that in our previous schools would have identified us as weird but were ...
My cousin just sent me this nostalgic reminder of the way thinsg were when we grew up. No generation will understand how we feel about those days. I wish they good, but those days are gone and what is happening today....well I wish they were gone.
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.