BY THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY, THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS of Irish immigrants fit into American society easily and quickly. The one Irish institution that they brought to America was the village tavern, where people got together to exchange ideas and information and to down a brew or two. In Irish neighborhoods the corner saloon was often the most important ethnic institution—a place where men came to meet and talk of the old country, women, jobs, and the Dodgers.
Windsor Terrace was a typical Brooklyn neighborhood, a small Irish enclave to the south and west of Ebbets Field. It is a neighborhood that exists today only in the mind, but to those lucky enough to have grown up there, it is as real now as it was then.
Joe Flaherty, a journalist and author, passed away in 1985. When he talked of his childhood in Brooklyn, his face would soften, and he would become a little kid again.
JOE FLAHERTY “When I think of my boyhood growing up in Brooklyn, I think of the magic of the streets. Whenever my saintly mother gets mad at me, she says, ‘Joseph, you were nothing but a street kid anyway.’ But hell, we all were. At that time the street was the center of neighborhood culture. The streets thrived. They weren’t dangerous. Strangers couldn’t walk onto your block and muck around, because so many people were playing in the streets at all hours. The only time anyone got hurt was when someone got hit with a stickball bat or fell out of a tree.
“When you walked out of your house, you would walk right into a stickball game, and if you didn’t have enough players for stickball, you played ‘catch a fly and you’re up,’ which was one guy at bat, the rest of you down the street, and if you caught a fly off his bat, you got to hit. On ground balls, you had to roll the ball in and hit the bat in such a way that the ball would hit the bat and jump away before the batter could catch it [so the batter would lose his turn at bat]. And if you only had two people, you would draw a batter’s box against the wall, and you pitched to the other guy. On the wall behind the pitcher there were marks indicating single, double, triple, home run. Football didn’t mean anything. Football was just another device to get broads. If there was a game, the football was just a rolled-up newspaper tied with a string. The game would be two-hand touch, and one of the great pass patterns of the day was, ‘Go down to the left, cut behind the blue Chevy, and I’ll hit you.’
“I remember, in the neighborhood where we lived, every house had a cement stoop, which was six or seven steps, off of which we played a game called ‘single, double, triple, home run.’ You put two guys in the outfield, playing across a gutter in the street. One of the guys would stand in the gutter, just off the curb, and the other would stand farther out. You would wind up and throw the ball against the stoop and try to hit the point of the step. If you could do that, the ball would really go, on a line drive.
“If not, you’d try to ricochet it from the bottom step, have it hit the riser above, and you’d get a long drive out across the street. If the ball bounced once before you caught it, it was a single. Two bounces, a double; three bounces, a triple; and four bounces or more, a home run. And if you hit the opposite wall across the street, that was also a home run, unless of course you caught the ball off the wall, in which case it was an out.
“And guys could play the wall as well as Carl Furillo. We even knew the bounces off the fire escape. The ball would be dangling up in the fire escape, and the outfielder would be running to the spot where he figured the ball would come down, and while we were playing, the older men in the neighborhood would sit out with their growlers of beer and watch the games, and these games would be echoing all over the streets. Cheers would be coming out from the different stoops. And the men would spend their evenings sitting on their stoops in their strapped undershirts, and women would be together on a different stoop, gabbing, and the radio would be blaring Red Barber and the Dodger game, and when it got dark, the kids began playing ring-a-levio or ‘kick the can’ or ‘three feet to Germany,’ all the exotic games that disappeared with the emergence of the automobile.
“I remember mothers constantly yelling out windows for their kids to come in, and the kids would never come. Whenever a mother called, the other kids would tell her that her son was on the opposite team playing ring-a-levio and was hiding and that as soon as we found him and captured him, he’d come. We’d tell her, ‘It isn’t his fault he’s late for supper. He’s been hiding for half an hour.’ So we always had an edge. The mothers didn’t particularly believe it, but they couldn’t beat their kids with a clear conscience, so usually they didn’t.
“There was no such thing as walking into the house and saying, ‘I’m bored.’ After the stickball and the stoopball, around nine at night we used to stand under the street lamps and have games of ‘fly.’ We’d throw high flies to each other, and you could see a glimpse of the ball coming down in the lights, and it was good practice. When we got a little older, at the end of the night, when everything was dead and you were exhausted and there was no more running left in your legs, no more peg left in your arm, we’d go inside and play seven-card stud for pennies or for picture cards. Believe me, if we had had the stamina, we would have stayed out there around the clock.
“Sunday was the day when there was always a stickball game, with one street challenging another. The kids would bet a quarter a man, or, if it was a big game, a half a dollar. That was big money in those days. The men on the block usually chipped in and supplied the Spaldeens. The bats were broom handles, not the aberrations they have now—the manufactured stickball bats, which shows you something about America’s lack of self-reliance around the globe, considering that a kid now goes out and buys a stickball bat made in China—we used to get old brooms from the women on the block, burn the straw off, and get pliers and take the wires and nails out.
“I played on a team called the Dwarfs. My older brother played on the team, and there was a great outfielder Joe Barberi, and the fastest guy on the team was Frankie Ramirez, who everyone lovingly called ‘Frankie the Spic.’ The Dwarfs had wonderful blue-and-yellow velvet jackets, and DWARFS written across the back. In front of the breast was a dwarf, and each of the players had the name of one of Disney’s dwarves. I wore glasses, so I was called Doc.
“And what was so wonderful was that in our world of street games, no one was excluded. Even if you were the worst schlub in the world, nobody said, ‘You can’t play.’ There was no Little League mentality. There was always a spot in right field where nobody hit the ball, or if someone did hit it there, it would be an event like the sinking of the Titanic, but at least you were in the game, and you got your lick up at bat. Maybe you were the last one picked, but by God, you got picked.
“There was no such thing as parental interference. When I think of my boyhood, I never think of parents. Parents came strictly as observers, and they tried to be as meticulous as possible about cheering good plays, regardless of which side made them. I remember my father, who died young, if ever there was a show of temper—and my brother Billy had some temper—my father would take him right off the field and hop him in the ass and send him into the house for being a bad sport. There was none of that parental pressure you see today, because all the fathers knew each other and were friends. They met in the same bars, and they went to the same church—all blue-collar workers, and there was little of that silly one-upmanship.
“Back in those days, the Italians and Irish people didn’t refer to their neighborhood by name but by which church you went to. Today the neighborhood is called Park Slope by the nouveau riche. In those days, when someone asked where you came from, you said, ‘Holy Name,’ or ‘Immaculate Heart of Mary,’ which in Brooklyn was always known as ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Help.’ And you never went to Manhattan. Manhattan was always referred to as ‘the city,’ and it was always said with a certain dread. Manhattan was where in the bars they served you bottled beer, where you never knew the price and you always thought you were getting bilked.
“Prospect Avenue was the main thoroughfare, where the bars and markets were, and all the shopkeepers were Dodger fans. It was impossible to go into a store with the Daily News under your arm without talking baseball. People just constantly talked baseball, arguing. They lived and breathed with the Dodgers.
“There were centers, like Jerry’s Hardware Store, and Jerry had a guy working for him, Bill Reddy, probably the greatest Dodger fan who ever lived, knew everything there was to know about the Dodgers, and I would go in there and shpritz and break balls, spend hours arguing baseball while Bill and Jerry waited on customers. Back and forth about the games we’d argue. Jerry’s Hardware Store was the place to go and talk baseball.
“And the idea of walking through Prospect Park to see a rare night game at Ebbets Field—you felt like F. Scott Fitzgerald first seeing the ivory towers of New York. You would walk around the lake on a balmy summer’s evening, and fathers and sons, hundreds of kids, would be chattering, talking, walking along, and then you would get to within perhaps two hundred yards of the ballpark, and from the horizon the rim of lights of Ebbets Field would become visible, and you’d keep walking, and all of a sudden the sky would be lit up. My God, it was like the Emerald City, and as you got closer, you’d pick up your pace, and you’d give your tickets and go charging inside.”
BOBBY MCCARTHY “I lived in Windsor Terrace. It was just a little area really, with Greenwood Cemetery on one side, Prospect Park on the other. When the Prospect Expressway was built, it cut our neighborhood in half. There wasn’t a store on Prospect Avenue that was ever broken into.
“There were a lot of cop fights with the Irish drinkers who got a couple beers in them and thought they were King Kong, but never any burglaries or robberies, and never a rape. It was almost like a little hick town in a big city.
“Everyone thought their neighborhood was the best. Other neighborhoods were Crown Heights, Flatbush, and Red Hook, where the tough kids were. The rich kids were from Bay Ridge. They went to bed with pajamas on. Canarsie was sand dunes in those days. Bedford-Stuyvesant you didn’t know too much about because it was all black. You didn’t know black people in those days. There was Borough Park, Bensonhurst, Coney Island. We used to hitch on the McDonald Avenue trolley to Coney Island and go down there with a dollar. The rides were 15¢.
Windsor Terrace in the 1950s. Brian Merlis Collection—Brooklynpix.com
“I didn’t play sports as much as some of the other guys. I often preferred to go to the movies. We went to the Venus Theater, which was better known as ‘The Itch.’ It had its own characters who ran the place. Mom Cosgriff wore a white dress—she looked like a nurse—and she was there to monitor the kids with her flashlight. Then you had Teddy Bentbelly, he was a hunchback, and Crazy John, who sold the candy for a penny apiece.
“Broken ones you got two-fers. The lowest price for the Venus I can remember was 13¢ for a kid, 17¢ for an adult, and on Saturday you went and watched six cartoons, a series like Don Winslow of the Navy or Tarzan adventures, and then Abbott and Costello. I lived at the Venus Theater.
“Kids would line up to go in on Saturday, and the line would go all the way down to Jerry Fine’s Hardware Store, and you would spend the whole day at the movies. When they were over, you were supposed to leave, and so you’d crawl under the seats to get away from Mom Cosgriff so you could watch it all over again without paying. And that’s why we called it ‘The Itch,’ because when you got home, you had bugs crawling all over you from all the candy getting thrown on the floor.
“Kids would play handball against the side of the Venus, and the manager would come out and chase them, because you could hear the thump of the ball bouncing against the wall while you were watching the picture. And when Zorro became popular, everyone ran into Jerry Fine’s and bought dowel sticks, and you dueled with them, and Jerry didn’t even up the price, which is what you could do these days. It was the same price, as if Zorro wasn’t there. And then something else would come along, Flash Gordon or Davy Crockett, and then something else.
“And because Irish people lived there, there were several bars in Windsor Terrace. There was McDevitt’s, the Terrace, Ulmer’s, Harold’s, and Behan’s. McDevitt was a hunchback, a bent-over guy, a great guy, and he had little doghouses on the walls, and the patrons had their names on the doghouses. And if you were in the doghouse with your wife because you spent too many hours in the bar, he’d put your wooden dog in the doghouse.
“But there was only one Behan’s. It was the place you went, where the elite met to drink. Jimmy and Margaret Behan owned it, and inside were all the old Damon Runyon characters: Mom Schultz, Mrs. Hughes, Kate McCarthy. The women would go to the twelve-thirty Mass, listen to the service, and then right up to the bar they would go, and their baby carriages would be lined up outside.
“The biggest thing was to get a ticket on the Friday Night Fights. The fight was at Madison Square Garden, but in every bar in Brooklyn you could go in and get a ticket for a dollar, and you’d bet who was going to win and in what round. You picked it out of a hat. Seventh-round Zale or fifth-round LaMotta. And if you didn’t have a ticket on the fight, it wasn’t a good fight.
“And if you won, you won $20. But the winner would always end up putting the $20 on the bar, and Behan would end up with the money. Behan won the fight every time! And when the Friday Night Fights was over, then everyone would start drinking seriously, and we’d have our own Friday night fights. They were held about three o’clock in the morning.”
BILL REDDY “Let me tell you what kind of place Behan’s was. I was working at the hardware store when we got a call from Behan that he needed a new lock put on the front door. Over I go.
“‘What’s the matter with the old lock?’ I asked.
“‘Ah, Billy me boy,’ Jimmy said, drunk as a skunk behind the bar, ‘I forgot my keys this morning, and I had to break the goddamn lock to get in.’
“So I start to install a new lock, and while I’m working, Jimmy arbitrarily decides that he doesn’t want booths in the place anymore. He’s yelling, ‘These booths take up too much goddamn room. I’m going to get rid of them,’ and he carries the first one out into the street.
“He comes back in and gets the second one and carries that one out, and while he goes in for the third one, Joe Comiskey, who was the first mop at Behan’s, sees the booths out on the sidewalk, and Joe carries the first one back in and puts it back. Meanwhile, Jimmy carries the third one out as Joe is carrying the second one back in, and now Jimmy is carrying the first one back out again. In the meantime I’m at the front door trying to put the lock in. Shut the door. Open the door. Shut the door. Open the door. Finally I said, ‘Listen, Jimmy, for Christ’s sake, you have to either leave the door open or leave it shut. I’ll never get this lock in.’ He says, ‘Have a drink and don’t worry about how long it takes.’ And out he goes with number one again as Comiskey is carrying back number four. This goes on for about two and a half hours! Finally Jimmy turns to me and says, ‘Bill, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’ I say, ‘What, Jimmy?’ He says, ‘I’m exhausted. I’ve never been so tired in all my days. I never knew I had so many booths in this place. No wonder it’s so crowded in here!’
“And with that he went behind the bar, Joe carried the last booth back in, I put the lock in, and everyone was happy.
“This neighborhood has so many stories, had so many characters. Roundy was a guy who had a wonderful talent. He would go up into Prospect Park, up into the hills, and he would howl like a wolf, and in about five minutes every animal in the zoo would be howling, and the zoo would sound like a Tarzan movie. The elephants would be trumpeting, the lions would be growling, the tigers would be roaring, and the keeper would be running wild. He wouldn’t know what in the world was the matter with the animals. And up on the hill, there would be Roundy, going, ‘Oooo oooooo.’
Bill Reddy of Windsor Terrace.
“One warm summer night Roundy got drunk, and he and a couple of buddies decided they wanted to cool off, and they jumped into the seal tank and had a swim with the seals. The seals, of course, didn’t quite know what to make of it, but they loved any new toy to nudge around and bang up against. Roundy and them got bruised up a bit, but they had a good swim.
“I remember the day Owney Fox, the neighborhood peddler, came through the neighborhood naked. It was bitter cold. I was opening the hardware store, and here comes Owney running down Prospect Avenue with only an undershirt on. Nothing else. The milkman was coming out of his truck to deliver the milk to the delicatessen, and he ran back into the milk truck and shut the door. A woman opened her front door on Prospect Street, saw Owney, screamed, and ran back into the house. Everyone was running away from him, and I was running after him trying to stop him. I was screaming, ‘Owney, where are you going?’ But he never answered me. Down he went past Greenwood Avenue. By this time a police car came up, and that was the last I saw of Owney for a while.
“Owney once was a policeman, and one morning he brought his horse into the hardware store. I thought Jerry the owner was going to die.
“Jerry climbed up onto the counter. ‘What the hell are you doing? Get him out of here,’ Jerry was screaming.
“‘What’s the matter?’ Owney said. ‘He’s just come in for a visit.’ At that point the horse plopped all over the floor. I had to get a shovel and shovel it out. I hit the horse a whack with the shovel. I was going to hit Owney next. ‘Get out of here,’ I screamed.
“‘Ah,’ he says, ‘you guys got no sense of humor.’
“We called Banty Diner ‘Banty’ because he was about as tall as a banty rooster. He was a character the likes of which you’ll never see again. Banty used to have odd jobs. In the spring he sold horse manure. He had a little pony cart that he rented, and a pony. And he’d shovel as much horse manure as the pony could make and the pony cart could carry, and he’d ride through the streets shouting, ‘Hoorrrrrsse shiiiiittttt. Get your hoooorrssssse shit here. Guaranteed fresh.’ And he’d sell it for 50¢ for a couple of loads to the people who had gardens. Around Easter time he would sell flowers. In between, he’d ask everyone he knew to ‘lend’ him a couple quarters. He’d say, ‘You’re a fine fellow. Can you spare a half? I want to get a drink.’ And you would never refuse Banty.
“One time Banty was selling flowers around Prospect Avenue outside of McNulty’s bar, and he was selling hyacinths that looked like no other flowers I had ever seen. Half the leaves looked like goats had been eating on them. As far as his lilies were concerned, the only way you knew they were lilies was by the sign on them. And a woman came over and started looking at the flowers, and he said to her, ‘Pick out any one you like.’
“She said, ‘How much is this one?’ He said, ‘Three dollars, for the pot and all.’ She said, ‘Three dollars? It looks like an old weed. You’re a robber. I wouldn’t give you fifty cents for it.’
“Banty looked at her and screamed, ‘Before I sell it for fifty cents, I’ll throw it out into the gutter.’
“She said, ‘That’s where it belongs.’
“He said, ‘Take your fifty cents and shove it up’n your arse.’ And he threw it past her head out into the gutter. And then he started throwing them all out there, and with every one he threw, his cursing became worse. And the woman was screaming that he was throwing the plants at her. The next thing I know, here comes the police, and there went Banty, wagon and all, down to Parkville Station. I didn’t see him for a couple of weeks.
“In the neighborhood we had a guy by the name of Eddie Decker. Eddie was a carny man, a con man from the word go. One night he decided he needed a few bucks, and he stood behind a tree waiting for his chance on Vanderbilt Avenue. In his own neighborhood, mind you. Finally, he hears footsteps coming, and he jumps out from behind the tree, and screams, ‘Hand over your money,’ and grabs my wife’s cousin, Willie Crane, who’s known Eddie all his life. Willie says, ‘For Christ’s sake, Eddie, what the hell are you doing?’ Eddie says, ‘It just goes to show that I’m a loser all the way. My first stickup, and I got a guy with no money.’
“Even the cops were crazy. Jack Harrison was the local cop on the beat, and one day as Willie Crane was walking along Vanderbilt Avenue, coming home, Harrison came running down the street hollering to someone to ‘Stop that man. Stop that man.’ And Willie, who’s wondering what’s going on, started to run. Harrison was drunk as a skunk, and he chased Willie into his house. Willie ran into the hallway, and Harrison followed him. Willie said, ‘What the hell are you trying to do? Everyone in the neighborhood is watching.’ Harrison said, ‘Yeah, but we had a fine run, Willie, didn’t we?’
“It was always something.”