Thanks to Pat Fenton for this fine piece of writing.
I just got back from a wake, Steve. An old friend from Windsor Terrace, Denny Scully passed away. It happened fast, and I heard about it from a message his brother John left on my phone.
The one night wake (Sept 22) was out in Bellmore on Long Island.
I grew up in the late 40’s and 50’s, and into the 60’s in Windsor Terrace. And I still go home again, sometimes writing about it for newspapers, and in a play, Stoopdreamer”, about what that amazingly, special neighborhood was all about to me.
Denny Scully was an important part of my memories of growing up on “The Hill. “ The Scully family lived down on 16th Street near the armory, and during the late 50’s and early 60’s he and his brother John were part of a group that hung out on the corner of 17th Street and 9th Avenue.
Every summer afternoon would turn into a carnival of street sounds, stickball games, dice games against the wall, card games on the metal, cellar doors, the King Kong ride swinging its huge carriage through the summer air, and all the while the large speakers on the front of it blasting out the Everly Brothers singing “Cathy’s Clown.” All of us with slicked back hair, and upturned collars, just happy to be young. It was our time in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, and it seemed like it would last forever. I often wondered what ever happened to all the pretty girls who were part of that world.
Holy Name, the church, the school, Farrell’s Bar, the other Irish bars that were once on 9th Avenue and down on the corners of 10th Avenue, Prospect Park, Jack the Wonder Dairy’s store on the corner of 17th Street, Izzey’s Soda shop a few doors away, the church bazaar’s in the school yard of Holy Name where you could win a new Chrysler on a quarter chance, the movie houses, the Sanders, the Globe, the 16th Street, the Avon, the Prospect, the Minerva, the Venus down on Prospect Avenue, reading comic books in a booth in Al’s luncheonette on Prospect Avenue in a time that seemed so innocent to me.
Gus’s Diner on the corner of 19th Street and 9th Avenue, Frank‘s Pizza across the street, the “Lucky Penny” variety store on the corner of 18th Street, the barber shop next to it with its striped pole out front, the red brick of the buildings, Scarpa’s on the other side, where we brought jelly apples in the fall; all of it once existing undisturbed, like a scene from an Edward Hopper painting, all before Robert Moses ran the Prospect Expressway through there, all bits and pieces of my life, all bits and pieces of who I turned out to be.
This too was Denny Scully’s Windsor Terrace. Later, when we were older, he hung out in Kerrigan’s Bar on 17th Street with us. This was the Windsor Terrace of Alice Murray, Tommy Purdy, Jacky Malone, Bobby Rice, John Scully, Tommy McLaughlin, Richie and Mickey Lang, and so many others like the Craig‘s, the McCarthy’s, the McGill’s, the Burke’s, all of it making up the hub of one of the greatest Irish working-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
In memory, where it still lives on, this was the Windsor Terrace of Holy Name Church before Vatican Two, before they tore out all the beautiful marble from the altar and the black, metal railings where you kneeled down for holy communion, before they painted over the murals that depicted the crucifixion in the dark green and red hues of a Renaissance painting, before they tore out all the dark stained, imported wood, it was a time when the crowds that filled the church during seasonal novenas were so big, they had to seat people on the altar.
Yesterday afternoon, I said goodbye to someone who was an important part of my memory of that Windsor Terrace. I was glad to have Bob Rice standing next to me.
Pat Fenton said:
What a wonderful title you gave this, Steve. It echoes how we all got by in that neighborhood. Much thanks for all your work in keeping the memories of Windsor Terrace alive on Container Diaries for all of us.
your friend,
Pat
hoopscoach said:
Pat, I have only known you a couple of months but between our phone conversations/e-mail and blog comments, I feel like we grew up together. That’s what our neighborhood was all about.
Keep writing!
Maureen Rice (Flanagan) said:
Pat, I am sorry for your loss- the only time I go into Holy Name Church is for weddings and funerals, mostly the latter- I was there yesterday for Mr. Pynn’s Mass- and every time I go in there, I recoil a little from the “modern” deco- I, too, remember the old Church, it just seemed more sacred to me. We lost another Windsor Terrace man- Mickey Breen passed- we hung out on Hippie Hill together 40 yrs ago, and I would always see him at the Vinnie Brunton BBQ and the Dinner Dance at Ford- this year’s dance at Ford will be the final one- the scholarship will go on, funded by the BBQ and donations.
TonyF16ST said:
Pat,
You truly hit the nail on the head. That is some piece of penmanship. You speak for all who lived, live and died in the greatest neighborhood ever.
Watch out Steveo you got competition LOL
I was fortunate to have gotten married (1976 ) in the old Holy Name Church and have many great pictures to remember it by.
hoopscoach said:
Tony, Pat Fenton is an outstanding writer – I welcome him to our blog. I encourage others to write too. One thing about me, I don’t have an ego nor do I compete with anyone when it comes to writing.
Glad to have him contribute his work; he has a gift.
Pat Fenton said:
Thanks for your thoughts, Maureen. Denny Scully was one of those guys that once you meet them, you never forget them. He had this sort of Burt Lancaster smile, and he was always fun to be with. I still rememeber him telling me and Jacky Malone how he went to see this “new” baseball team out in Queens, The Mets, and even though we were all still talking about the loss of the Brooklyn Dodgers(this was about 1963), he became a Mets fan.
And yes, you’re right about Holy Name, it did seem more “sacred.” Thanks for your note, and I’m sorry to hear about your loss also.
Pat
GTrapp said:
Maureen, When did Mickey Breen pass away?
Maureen Rice (Flanagan) said:
Gerard, I heard yesterday, he is being waked at Hanly’s Funeral Home in Staten Island today and tomorrow, the Mass is also out there- his daughter lives out there. I don’t know her, but she just lost her mom a few weeks ago, also.
Gladys Mastrion said:
Maureen, you are so right about Smiths, I would never had Mickey Breen laid out in Staten Island if Smiths were still open. He hated the new Smiths/Duffys.
If anybody asks, he died early Sunday morning of a massive heart attack.
Maureen Rice (Flanagan) said:
that is Hanley;s
BL said:
Pat your right in saying ” how we got by”. My father’s generation lived with a tremendous amount of contentment living in Windsor Terrace. The Bar life and street game mentality never left them. There was a big world beyond the little neighborhood between the park and cemetery.A world they never really wanted to explore. It fostered a yearning for my generation to want to get out and “see”. Personally I feel the adult’s I grew up around drank to much and spent too much time away from their families. I don’t know why that was. To me it’s not a good thing or bad thing, they were doing what they knew. In reading Pete Hamil’s “The Drinking Life” I felt it could have been the neighborhood’s manifesto. Pete’s life mirrored so many that I knew growing up.He really captured it. This post may not be a popular one to the reader’s of “Container’s”but it sum’s up my honest recollection of the neighborhood.With that being said there were positive forces at work as well. I can’t thank the founding father’s of the Holy Name Father’s Guild enough for giving my generation a fighting chance. Great men like Ed McGrath, Ed Cush, Tony Pinto, Bob “Broadway” Cunningham ,Jim O’Dea,John Toner, and Bob Galvin, I guess Charles Dickens said it best “it was the best of times,it was the worst of time’s” Thank’s Steve and thank’s Pat for a great read.
hoopscoach said:
No problem BL. We grew up in a great area.
Pat Fenton said:
BL, Much thanks for your comments on what I wrote about our neighborhood, Windsor Terrace. And I have to say to you, you are certainly right about the limited world of our fathers in Windsor Terrace. But I also have to say that for many of them, I think it was good enough for them. They were looking at an America, a life in America, that was fresh and new, or so it seemed to them. And for the ones who were born here, a job, some beers and a baseball game on their days off didn’t seem so bad.
I know for my father who came over from Galway, Ireland as an orphan it was good enough for him. I once wrote a full page piece for the Catholic newspaper The Tablet, at the urging of the writer Bill Reel, about Windsor Terrace and how my father shoveled coal into a furnace for Con Ed down on Hudson Street for 33 years, and never missed a day’s work.
And in the piece, called “The Way We Were in the 1950’s”, I remember ending it by saying “I was witnessing a time in America that we may never see again; a time when it was easier to believe in things.” It was a story about experiencing the innocence of being young and lining up in the silence of the schoolyard of Holy Name on some long ago fall morning when I was a kid.
And yeah, Pete Hamill, who is a friend, did catch it best in his book “The Drinking Life.” And you certainly are right, there were good times with the bad of growing up there. There was way too much drinking, way too much violence, but there was also something romantic and beautiful in between. I can remember slow dancing one night with this girl Janice up at the Hilltop Lounge that used to be on 18th Street and 9th Avenue as the sound of Tommy Edwards singing “It’s All in the Game”played on the juke-box. I was 18 and happy to be in that very moment of my life in Windsor Terrace.
One of my favorite parts of one of Pete’s stories on our neighborhood ends this way:”…The songs of those years were rich with violins, but they led to a lot of gray and sour mornings. There is no moral here, especially from the likes of me. But those people I used to know did at least have an incredibly romantic couple of years , when they were young. Maybe it was worth it what followed, although I doubt it.”
I’m not sure if I doubt it.
Again, thanks for your kind words, and your honest look back on our neighborhood, BL.
Pat
GTrapp said:
Maureen, thanks.
Gene Green said:
“Personally I feel the adult’s I grew up around drank to much and spent too much time away from their families. I don’t know why that was. To me it’s not a good thing or bad thing, they were doing what they knew.” Just a note on this Family for us on 16th between 8th and 9th was truly extended. Mom and Dad worked and many a friday and saturday night was spent drinking on the stoop when warm and inside when cold, but we still had supervision and displine. I couldn’t get away with anything because if my Mom didn’t catch me someones else’es did. It was truly a extened family. Growing in Windsor Terrece in the 60’s is a great memory and now looking back I wonder what my kids lost growing up in the suburbs
jimmy vac said:
Pat articulated what this blog was about.. When I used to talk to my dad, he grew up similar the way I did. Looking back, what was also great was the extended family we had… I lived in a two family with my aunt and uncle and two cousins which made me feel like I had more parents and siblings,, my aunt and cousin lived on 8th ave near Prospect and my cousins the Thomases on Sherman Street… there were other families like the Artzes that seemed to be related to everyone!
Pat Fenton said:
I started this whole conversation about the way we were in Windsor Terrace, Jimmy, after calling up memories of a good friend, Denny Scully, whose memory, like my brother Andrew’s, will always live on in Windsor Terrace forever, especially up on 17th Street and 9th Avenue. Irish wakes are like that. They bring you back home again. And whenever I go back there, like I did a few weeks ago to have a few beers with a friend in Farrell’s, and to walk again down 9th Avenue, it’s almost like I’m brushing by ghosts.
And you’re right, I think we all grew up with the feeling that we were part of an extended family. And that world doesn’t exist anywhere anymore(the brothers up at Holy Name would probably tell me that is not a proper sentence, but so it goes.)
The one thing about Windsor Terrace, particularly that great stretch of 9th Avenue from Bartell Pritchard Square down to the main gates of Greenwood Cemetery, is that it is like walking through a make believe movie set of the old neighborhood, past where the Sanders movie theatre used to be, part of it still there up in the old balcony, past Farrell’s Bar, past Holy Name Church, past the school yard on Prospect Avenue, and then after Prospect Avenue your memory takes you the rest of the way. Few people have that anymore, few people have anything left of neighborhoods to go home to.
best to you, Jimmy, and to Steve who we all owe a round of beers to in Farrell’s for making it all possible.
Pat Fenton
Maureen Rice (Flanagan) said:
I still cannot get used to Smith’s not being there- so many times, even when people had left the neighborhood, the families would bring them back to Smith’s- even though Duffy’s is supposedly Smith’s now, I have noticed a lot of people that I think for sure would have come to Smith’s don’t go to Duffy’s. The people that are still IN the neighborhood use Duffy’s, I am talking about the other scenario. Other than that, Pat, a lot of the neighborhood is remarkably the same- although I have long wondered how Holy Name could hold on to all that property up there, particularly the convent, cause I don’t think there are many nuns (if any) left- I notice they have scaffolding up and are working on the convent- in my mind, I am seeing a sign in a real estate office “coming soon- Convent Condos” one bedroom starting at 1.2M
Pat Fenton said:
You know what, Maureen? Something happened in that neighborhood we all came out of, Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, that has this sort of “Field of Dreams” quality to it. It goes on and on. And I don’t think it’s going to end soon. Hopefully, the “new people” who are moving in, and I’m being kind here not calling them “Yuppies,” will realize the importance of Farrell’s Bar to the neighborhood, the importance of the history of the immigrants who found this a safe place, and worked so hard to make it what it still is, in many ways.
With all the trouble and strife many of us found growing up there, including myself, I was no angel, with all the hard times, it still remains a place that held onto some beautiful memories of being young there for all of us. It runs on like the long running play, “The Fantastic’s.” And when I wonder why that is, the only answer I can come up with is, something special happened there to all of us.
In my years of writing for newspapers, along with having a real job as a Court Officer, and later a Court Clerk for 27 years, I spent some brief time with the writer Joe Flaherty who came from down on Vanderbilt Street in our neighborhood. His brother Billy was a bartender in Rhythm and Booze in the old Val’s Bar on 10th and Prospect. Joe wrote for the Village Voice, and sadly, he died way to young. Along the way he wrote one of the best descriptions of Windsor Terrace that I have ever read. Here’s what he said.
“My nook of Brooklyn was called Windsor Terrace, and Irish and Italian concrete principality that sleepily came to rest between the pastoral boundaries of Greenwood Cemetery and Prospect Park. The houses were mostly two-family affairs, and their occupants seemed to know every nuance of each other lives. It wasn’t the hip rendition of Brooklyn one came to expect from Hollywood but, in fact, a small town that could be found in mid-America.
If Dorothy’s twister had lifted Windsor Terrace from its roots and deposited it a thousand miles inland, I’ve always felt the windfall could go unnoticed.”
Thanks for the use of the hall, Steve.
Pat Fenton
mike slavin said:
I HEARD A RUMOR THAT THE METHODIST HOSPITAL HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE CONVENT. WE’LL SEE WHAT HAPPENS
jimmyvac said:
Gene is right… people in general drank more than but the discipline was there… my uncle and dad would get the mailman a beer and he would sit in the arie for a few minutes and they would shoot the breeze. one day, they were not around so I got him a beer and we sat and taled about the Mets(now you know why you did not receive your mail)
It’s funny, as a kid i always identified myself as being from Holy Name until high school or I woulld say near Farrells, a point of reference still good to this day… the new folks seem to be be blending in nice on my old block Windsor between 7th and 8th)…at the most recent block parties, we had wine tasting and we have a lot of music thanks to a guy on the block who is Paul Simon’s guitarist.. he and his buddies play with the locals like Dennis McGann and they sound great….My plan is to retire back to the house on Windsor…. gotta get the wife to go along!!!!