Dance and jump as much as you can. Created with Steepshot View in the web app

The city of Cleveland showed love to a young father with his son. They got over their own racial divides in the fifties; Sicilians married Scots. Anyone with red hair and blues could pass for Irish. This

Darryl had a son, named for the great explorer of 1492. Jamaicans did things like this; George Washington, Isaac Newton. Always naming their kids for someone great. Darryl hated it. He wanted a junior.

There were no cardboard boxes on the sidewalks of Brooklyn between 1979 and 1981, for kids to dance. I like the rest of the country saw breaking on That's Incredible. I was already in Florida. Florida

Hip hop was not just Sugar Hill Gang and cocaine stories from Queens.  It was as much "Roll Skate, Rock Bounce," as "Another One Bites the Dust."  As a matter of fact, in the alley of Fenimore

Darryl embodied the upper-school spirit of Berkley. By the time he lumbered down to the basement cafeteria, where Cleveland was chef, his gigantism loomed over us, his lower-school peers quietly from the

The lady of the house at 714 Fenimore used to be a tenant at 716. She claims she was attacked coming out of her shower in the street-level suite. Somehow the attacker mysteriously left his man-load on

716 Fenimore street was either a ticking-time bomb or land-bound cruise ship planted in a cement slab. There was a five-hundred gallon oil tank buried underneath the two-car garage and a ton of cement.

716 Fenimore was built in 1931. There was no central air or heat. You could sleep underneath an individual, window unit turned on high, in the summer time. There were parquet floors which befriended neither

If you lived on the parlor floor of the above address, you could stand on the stoop, stretch yawn, look to your left and see Kings county hospital. But inside, most tenants stayed in one of two units on

What would it have meant to be a childhood parent of a child in the seventies? There was Roe versus Wade, and the idea that abortion killed off a generation of thugs (Freakanomics) But unprotected sex

Could Big Darryl have been a father before middle school? He was only seven years older than me. Had Biggie been born after 1979, I would have said, without a doubt yes. But things were not happening in

Berkley was a bunker, the Pentagon above ground. There were wings. Wings for administration, upper school and lower school. Winding staircases from classrooms, to auditorium, to libraries, to the lower

Berkley was an old Victorian building with ivy on its face wall, like whiskers on an old man's chin. It was probably a rectory, or ancient place of worship, for new schools used to be old churches. Pre-school

Hard to speak on this trek without mentioning the cross-section of so many superhighways through history. The arc of triumph for Brooklyn, symbolized by varnished French construction, would be hard enough

Just because you knew your way around Downstate Medical and Kings County, did not mean you were an expert around Prospect Park and Park Slope.  Again bicycles were not run-of-the-mill in Brooklyn.

There was no disability in the streets. You got around the best way you could. If weed was luxury, bicycles were more luxurious, or the streets of Brooklyn would have been filled like Shanghai. If there

There must have been pressure for a heavyset, Brooklyn kid to prove his manhood in East Flatbush. Getting around quickly was not an option. Buses got you within a few feet of any destination, but cool