Of boys and arrows.....

  The strangest thing happened in the Bronx last week -- a woman in Riverdale, just standing in a driveway minding her own business -- suddenly got hit by an arrow fired from who knows where. Now a lot of people get shot in the Bronx, more get stabbed, but hardly anyone gets hit with an arrow! At least not these days.

But the story brought me back to another time in the Bronx, back when I lived in the James Monroe Housing Projects in the Soundview section. It was the mid-60's and believe it or not, the Bronx was like a wilderness. Really.

The surrounding lots, which had once been farmland, were undeveloped and had been left to lay fallow for decades. In the middle of all these lots, the city built James Monroe, and when my family moved there in the 60's, there was very little surrounding the projects except for these lots.

My friends and I wandered through these lots every chance we got. We spent days in there, and our parents had no idea where we were going or what we were doing, and I don't recall anyone worrying about that too much. What we found in those lots were honest-to-God tar pits that had been there who knows how long. We took turns throwing everything from rocks to car batteries into those pits, and every single object sunk, never to be seen again.

Those lots were wild, so wild that rabbits and pheasants were running around everywhere, and this is where the arrow story connects to my story. A few of us got the bright idea to buy bows and arrows from the nearby E.J. Korvette's department store so we could hunt the rabbits and pheasants. The salesman at Korvette's had no problem selling actual bows and metal-tipped arrows to 12 year old boys and so off we went on the hunt.

We never hit a single rabbit or pheasant but I did once hit a friend of mine in the thigh. He looked at the arrow for a moment, yelled at me, and then pulled it out and kept on walking. It was a different time.

Comments

[paul hebron]

Loved this entry, Paul. Even in Manhattan in the mid-sixties, vacant lots (and their rabbit, chipmunk and squirrel denizens) were an open door to a neighborhood kid's imagination. I knew every patch of earth between 89th and 96th Streets on the East Side, and every alley, fire escape and basement walk-through that took you there. And the street games.....Ring-a-levio, Box Tag, Hot Beans, Off the Point, Stick Ball-2 ways, Scully, Box Ball... Hard to explain to people who grew up elsewhere in "America", people with pre-conceived notions of what NYC is, but for a boy at least, it was a great place to grow up.

[writer418]

Paul, you know the way it really was. It's so amazing that sometimes even I can't believe how wild things were. Of course, we were forced to go outside and use our imaginations because we had no video games, cable tv, or the internet and, who cares I sound old, I preferred it that way.

[Regina]

Great post. The lots and the construction under Bruckner Blvd were playgrounds for those with imaginations...and we all had them. Concrete tunnels were time zones, supermarket boxes could be made into doll houses, large boxes made forts in the lots, hide and seek in the 7 feet weeds, or RCK [for those in the know]. The "hoods" in the early days were one great playground. Sorry not everyone had the opportunity to appreciate it as we did.
Rosedale Gardens 1962-1973