Who knew?
Who knew that playing stoop ball in front of my childhood home on Avenue W in Brooklyn could have gotten me arrested? Or that playing stickball on the street could have similarly been my ticket to a ride to the police station on Avenue U?
I’ve never been arrested and hope I never will be, but by the letter of the law I conceivably dodged the long arm of the constabulary hundreds if not thousands of times as a youth growing up in Brooklyn.
Reading a New York Times article Monday on an effort to rescind an old, still on the books Los Angeles law that prohibits ball playing on sidewalks and streets (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/us/los-angeles-catch-sidewalk-law.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share), I googled to see if New York City had a similar prohibition.
Yup, it does. Who knew?
The front steps of my family’s attached row house on Avenue W were perfect for playing stoop ball, a baseball-like game played with a ball, usually a pink Spaldeen (New York slang for Spalding) or Pensy Pinky. The batter would stand to one side of the twelve-foot walkway to the stairs; his (it was never a girl in the 1950s) opponent stood in the middle of the sidewalk, an obvious obstruction of foot traffic.
The batter would throw the ball against the stairs. If caught on the fly you were out. If the ball bounced the batter was awarded a single, maybe even a double or triple depending on rules set at the outset of a game.
Most front porches on our street had sharp, right angle brick steps. Our steps were pink concrete, rounded in front, making it harder to get a “pointer,” a line drive comeback that, if caught was an out but if traveling untouched a pre-determined distance in the air would be a home run.
As my friends and I got older, we began playing games on the roadway of Avenue W—stickball and football.
For stickball, home plate would be a round sewer cover. Games were played as long as a bat was available, either a real stickball bat with black tape spiraling on the handle or a purloined broomstick from an unsuspecting mother’s utility closet.
Avenue W had a canopy of leaves from maple and sycamore trees. If during a stickball game a ball was hit into the leaves it was a “hindoo,” a do-over, unless a fielder was agile enough to catch it for an out before it bounced.
The trees, however, were not the biggest obstacle. Balls rolling into storm drains at each corner could wash out any game. Unless … unless you had a wire clothes hanger you could stretch out into an elongated fish hook. Lowering the hook end into the sewer basin, you would fish the ball up from the murky bottom. Whomever had the longest reach would lie flat above the sewer grate to fish out the ball.
Stickball definitely required our being alert to oncoming traffic, from both sides as Avenue W was a two-way street. Of course, it’s doubtful street stickball resulted in any arrests. Heck, Willie Mays himself would play it on the streets of Harlem (see photo).
As we got into our teenage years, football games dominated Saturday afternoon play time after we returned from synagogue and eaten lunch. Three or four players to a side. Four downs to each possession. No first downs. Two hand touch. No tackling. Ten Mississippi’s to pass the ball before a defender could charge over the scrimmage line to down the quarterback. Precision passing required to precision pass route running, between and around parked cars. If a team scored a touchdown, losers walked the length of the “field” to accept the throw-off (we weren’t accurate enough to attempt kick-offs).
I can recall only one person ever getting hurt. Jerry caught a pass running across the width of the avenue. From behind, Marty tagged him hard. Jerry spun around, lost his balance and fell, his head hitting a fire hydrant on the curb. Blood, not water, gushed out.
We raced to a friend’s house on the corner. His father was a doctor. But he was no ordinary doctor. He said he was an insurance doctor and would not, could not, help, an answer I have yet to understand.
We needed to get Jerry to an emergency room. But Jerry was Orthodox. He had never ridden on the Sabbath. It took some convincing but Jerry finally agreed to go to Coney Island Hospital where several stitches closed his wounds. A week or two later he was playing again.
