21 - 25 / Childhood Places

My parents lived in Greenwich Village when I was born, but moved to Queens when I was still very young. They chose an apartment in Woodside because it came with tennis courts. My parents met playing tennis, and loved the game. We lived on the third floor, and our apartment's windows faced the front and side of the 6-story building. It's possible the building was fairly new when we moved in. The lobby was rather grand, and the staircases and hallways were marble. I still remember the woodwork in the elevator, which my friends and I used most of the time.

The sidewalk in front of the building was our playground--the perfect surface to accommodate hopscotch or jump rope. Oh, those jump rope games! Running in . . . running out. Double Dutch. No phones in front of our faces. And we never sat.

For a long time the building had a vacant lot in back of it. We played games sometimes there too, and on occasion the adults would build a bonfire. The lot sat between our apartment building and the movie theater. That's where my friends and I could be found most Saturday afternoons. Back then we were offered double features, usually with a newsreel in between. Of course we ignored the newsreels. And of course we ate popcorn--probably made with real butter.

If you walked out the front entrance to our building, turned right at the corner, and walked past the building and then the vacant lot and the side of the movie theater, you'd come to another corner. If you turned right again, you'd be "down front." That's what we called the strip of store fronts that made up the block. The front of the movie theater was there, as well as a jewelry story, produce market, a bar, and our favorite teenage hangout, the Greeks. The Greeks was named something else entirely, but I can't remember what. We always called it the Greeks.  It was a soda fountain/luncheonette. When we weren't inside drinking Cokes or eating hamburgers, we congregated outside. You know those videos you've seen of teenagers from the 1950s, harmonizing on a street corner? That was us, except we weren't singing.

I went to five schools: PS 151 for Kindergarten through 4th grade, St. Joseph's Academy (a Catholic convent boarding school) for 5th and 6th grades, PS 10 for half of 7th grade, Lutheran school for the rest of 7th and 8th grades, and Bryant High school for the next four years. It was difficult to transition from the sheltered environment of the convent to rude and crude (or so it seemed to me) PS 10.  I did better at Lutheran school, although the thing I remember best about it was the disappointment of the teacher, who had counted on me to be the star of the big, multi-school spelling bee. I was disqualified early on for failing to spell ocean.

In the photo above, the vacant lot has been turned into a parking lot. And there's the back of the movie theater. It all looks so drab and rather barren, but of course that's not how it seemed at the time.