The Beginning of The End

Growing up I lived in a pink-brick, vertical neighborhood of a New York City project. In the late Forties through the Fifties, the projects were a haven for the young family just getting started out in life. Next stop Queens or Long Island: a small picket-fenced tract house with a swing set and aboveground pool out back. In the projects we kids would play our made-up neighborhood games (with neighborhood-only rules) or go to the playground and climb the jungle gyms, swing the swings, slide the sliding ponds, and bounce up and down on the see-saws. We’d play hopscotch, double-dutch rope (which I was never coordinated enough to even turn the ropes, never mind jump the loops). Some ballgames could be played against the wall (hand ball), bounced in each other’s zone of a square concrete sidewalk, or patted by hand to the ground up and over an extended leg. Stickball was played with the handle of our mother’s sawed off broomstick. Mothers yelled at us for ruining their good brooms and mops. Skellie was played with bottle caps, which was especially good when weighted with PlayDoh for sliding across the square chalk-drawn on the concrete playing field. We got yelled at again for leaving air-exposed half-filled bottles of soda and not quite empty jars of mayonnaise in order to create our playing instruments. I liked hot summer evenings best when everyone was driven out of sweltering apartments for “a bit of fresh air.” That’s when the kids got together and played games like Red Rover, Red Rover, or Red Light, Green Light, or Johnny on the Pony. The projects were never known for being quiet, but those evenings threatened loss of hearing with the screeching sounds of laughing, sweaty children, yelling and encouraging each other to break the human rope, or jump the piled on bodies forming a head-braced and butt-in-the-air “pony” against the brick wall. Properly tapped, the energy we expended could have replaced the city’s power company for the entire year. And then somebody had to invent window air conditioners. No one came outside anymore just to hang out – not if you could cool out in your own home. Visits to each other’s house (that’s New York-speak for apartment) stopped entirely if no air conditioner was in sight. A whole summer of that isolation, and no one knew anyone by fall, through the winter, or the awakening spring. People were into themselves, and mind your own business, thank you. I can list a few things since then that has diminished/eliminated the camaraderie achieved through physical activity and the simple sense of neighborly community. But need I say much more than two words: video games. Let’s not forget also that, since more than one person in the building now owned their own TV, neighbors didn’t have to bring their kitchen chairs to that lucky person’s living room and gather to watch The Whoever’s Entertainment Show for an hour – when the TV was then turned off! – and then sometimes stayed longer to just . . . talk. I don’t care what anyone says - window air conditioners were the beginning of the end.