Paradise Bronx

And The Spaldeen: The Bronx is a hand reaching down to pull the other boroughs of New York City out of the harbor and the sea. 

Its fellow-boroughs are islands or parts of islands; the Bronx hangs on to Manhattan and Queens and Brooklyn, with Staten Island trailing at the end of the long towrope of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, and keeps the whole business from drifting away on a strong outgoing tide. 

No water comes between the Bronx (if you leave out its own few islands) and the rest of North America. The Bronx is the continent, and once you’re on it you can go for thousands of miles without seeing ocean again. 

The other boroughs, for their part, cling to the Bronx for dear life. The chafing and strife of this connection have made all the difference to the Bronx.

So begins Ian Frazier's masterful essay - yes, about The Bronx, of all places - in the July 22 issue of The New Yorker. Want to know more about The Bronx?

Thirteen bridges connect Manhattan to the Bronx, and two more cross the East River from Queens. Other links exist underground in tunnels and pipes, which carry subway lines, drinking water, gas mains, power cables, and wastewater. 

Every which way, the Bronx is sewn and bound and grappled and clamped to the rest of the city. Every kind of transportation passes through it or over it. 

Walking on Bruckner Boulevard one morning, I was stunned by the loudness of the trucks. (No other borough has truck traffic like the Bronx’s, partly because its Hunts Point market, for produce, meat, and fish, is the largest food-distribution depot in the world.) 

I also heard cars, vans, motorcycles, an Amtrak train, airplanes, and, on the lower Bronx River nearby, the horn of a tugboat pushing a barge. Even during the emptiest days of the Covid shutdown, the Bronx’s pulse of transport kept pounding.

Interstate highways slice and dice the borough. The interstates within the Bronx’s borders are these: On the west, running approximately north and south, is I-87, also known (in the city) as the Major Deegan Expressway, or simply the Deegan. I-87 is bound for Albany and Canada. 

The Bruckner Expressway, a.k.a. I-278, connects to I-87 in the southern part of the borough. From there, I-278 veers to the northeast. 

Across the borough’s middle, I-95, a.k.a. the Cross Bronx Expressway, that road of infamous history, moves traffic east and west before merging with the Bruckner. Then it veers north, and follows the coast up to New England. 

A spur, I-295, splits off and goes south across the Throgs Neck Bridge to Queens. Another spur, I-678, also goes to Queens, over the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge. 

At the point where I-678 goes south from I-95, the Hutchinson River Parkway goes north from I-95, crosses the Bronx, and continues into Westchester County.

Too much information? You can believe Abq Jew when he says he understands. Abq Jew is a Brooklyn / Valley Stream boy, whose excursions into The Bronx have been precious few and extremely far between. 

For which, Abq Jew is very, very happy.

But ... Ian Frazier's writing is just too good to let Paradise Bronx pass. Especially when he talks about 

The Spaldeen

The so-called Spaldeen, that pink rubber ball cherished in memory, could be employed not only in stickball (with a bat made of a broken-off broom or mop handle, the broken end rubbed smooth on the pavement) but also in fistball (no bat required), handball (ditto), stoopball (in which you threw the ball against a stoop and your opponent played the bounce), and jacks (one game in which girls, who generally didn’t play ball, might also use a Spaldeen). 

Manhole covers in the streets were set into the pavement at regular intervals. 

For a stickball batter to hit a Spaldeen the distance of three manhole covers—“three sewers”—was considered amazing.

Abq Jew is extremely happy to report that he has, indeed, completed 74 revolutions around our Sun, his favorite star in the Milky Way! 

And Abq Jew reports this on what would have been the 100th birthday of his father, Richard W Yellin z"l. Still miss you, Dad!