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Published: April 27th 2012
Today was another day of discovery, but first I took some photos of the great little place we rented for our time in NY. It’s near the subway, buses, and shopping, and is not far from the block where I grew up. I highly recommend www.airbnb.com to anyone planning to visit a large city. Previous guests had rated our hosts very highly, so it didn’t feel like a gamble, and it has worked out beautifully.
Gracie and I started wandering, and found ourselves in an area with a Middle Eastern vibe. Apparently part of Steinway St is called “Little Egypt,” and the shops and restaurants left no doubt as to the culture of the neighborhood. Storefronts and buildings sported vibrant paint colors and graphics. We passed several hookah bars, and many of the store signs were written in what I later learned was Egyptian Arabic.
A block south, Steinway between 28
th and 25
th Avenues, seemed more Brazilian, with a Brazilian market, restaurant, hair salon and gift shop, although I read that most Brazilian people in NY live somewhat west of Steinway.
Gracie and I realized that we hadn’t taken pictures of the apartment house where I grew up,
or the inside of St. Joseph’s because it was locked the day we were there, so we headed that way. We went around to the back of the church. The parking lot, which used to be our schoolyard, is bordered by the backs of the convent (on the right), the church (the rounded pinkish building), and the two wings of the school. I attended St. Joseph’s School for 1
st through 8
th grades.
The photo entitled "Used to be our Schoolyard" illustrates the following: The original school had the lower three floors of the red brick part that shows in the picture. The yellow brick part on the left was added later, although it was already there when I started in 1955, and houses the auditorium, cafeteria, and administrative offices. The 4
th (top) floor of the red brick part was completed in the early 1960s. My 8
th grade class was the first to use the four new classrooms on that floor, beginning in September 1962. We thought we were pretty special to have the whole floor to ourselves.
I hated graduating from that school and splitting up from my friends. Unlike the American norm, where a larger number of
elementary and middle schools feed into a fewer number of high schools, NYC kids tend to scatter all over the city for high school. Even back in the early 1960s we had public specialty schools, such as Aviation HS and Brooklyn Tech, and a large selection of Catholic high schools, so the neighborhood kids we grew up with were unlikely to be our high school classmates. I remember being excited about the adventure of HS, but I was also very sad about leaving St. Joseph’s, and I cried throughout my 8
th grade graduation ceremony.
Gracie took the beautiful photo of the stairway going up to the choir loft. Every five years, the Mr. Fagin, the Choir Director, auditioned 7
th grade girls for spots in the choir. They had enough men and alto women, I guess. My 7th grade class was the chosen year, and I got in, staying with the choir for about four years. To this day I feel instant serenity when I hear Gregorian chant. Each Christmas the church gave us choir members a $5 gift certificate to a clothing shop on Steinway. In addition to singing for Masses and special church events, we performed Irish songs
for the parish St. Patrick's Day celebration.
Gracie and I walked over to the apartment house where I grew up. My father’s family moved into our apartment when he was 12. By the time he married my mother, his siblings and parents were no longer living there, and he just moved my mother in. He spent 50 years in that apartment, dying there at age 62. At that point, my mother moved to Washington State with us. Gracie took a few shots of the building's exterior. I wish I could have shown her the inside of the apartment, but the people who live there never answered my letter.
We went over to the Shillelagh, where my parents, mostly my father, lived much of his social life. They let kids into bars then, and I loved going in there with him. There was always someone willing to pay me a quarter to read the paper aloud; I developed reading skills early, plus I was small for my age, so they got a kick out of it. That quarter usually went right into the juke box. It was a family-friendly place, and I feel lucky to have grown up in
a city that allowed families to socialize in bars. My west coast friends remember freezing and hungry outside in the car while mom and dad spent “just 5 more minutes” in the bar. I have only good memories of the Shillelagh. My parents always told us if anything bad happened when we were home alone, to call over there and someone would come to help us. When our puppy got stuck under our clawfoot bathtub, I called the Shillelagh in a panic, and sure enough, an off-duty cop and a firefighter came over to rescue him. The Shillelagh looks the same as it did then, except now there are flat-screen TVs over the bar. The tin ceiling throughout is original, and the overheard fans in the back room haven’t been changed in my lifetime. I'm not even 100% sure they've been dusted, but it was too dark to tell.
There used to be a pool table in the back room. When my father realized that my eye surgery meant I could not perceive distances, he set out to train my good eye by teaching me how to shoot pool. We played a lot at the Shillelagh, and I loved
it. Unfortunately, I never got distance vision, but did getvery good at pool. It came in handy when I was 16, with fake ID showing I was 18, the drinking age in NY at the time, and played pool for drinks with guys at various bars from Woodside to Rockaway. I could party all day for the price of bus fare. I spent many a Sunday doing that.
We went to Key Food for some groceries, and headed back to our little place.
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Lyra Belacqua Riding Iorek Byrnison to Svalbard
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