The tenement stoop was for summer. Our building didn’t allow air conditioners since the wiring was old and crumbling. Particularly handy if you live alone, when, if no one was around, just go outside, and, by just sitting for a few minutes, a small knot of people would form. But if you’tre married have children or just a roommate, the stoop was equally important to catch a break from the two windows in front, two in back, wooden, no-law, railroad rooms that were to the left and right as well.
In the Italian, section where I lived, the stoop was home to the ladies of the building, who, every night, would gather until dark, on the stoop.
Since we had one of the numerous social clubs directly across the street, it’s stoop, a single large raised slab, was where the men who grew up on the block hung out at night.
I mentioned ours was a busy stoop, but the club, across the street, on many evenings would be standing room only. Sal, from around the corner, before he was murdered on his steps, a young guy, would often be heard “arguing” using one of his pet lines beginning with, “Yeah? I’ll bet cha, 35 thousand…” Sammy, a big guy, in his fifties, who’d drove a cement truck, amongst many things, and would die before he was sixty, would blast Sinatra from his Cadillac, with Johnie, Angelo’s girlfriend’s son, upstairs, yelling, to turn if off, with everyone else, on the block, hanging out their windows, laughing at the commotion, and groovin on Sinatra.
Across from the club. our stoop was dominated by the women of the block, and was the most active stoop on the block. Later, by the 1990s, when the ladies had died off in our building, their cheap rent-stabilized homes, were taken by men from the block, and then our stoop life was mostly guys from the building, block and neighborhood.
The homes on the block, particularly the men’s were sparse as hell. You’d wonder how someone could spend 60 years on earth and having nothing to show. I suppose, ya can’t take it with you. But the summer, spring and fall, would allow us to roam the block, comfortably, if we ever needed to decamp out little railroad flats for some air and a sky.
By 2000 with so many forced out, and so many dead, i remember cruising out at the Bushwick border with Williamsburg, and ran across a knot of old ladies sitting on their stoop, actual remnants when it was Italian Bushwick. It was like a dream.
