WE WERE COURIERS, NOT MESSENGERS

When I was eighteen, I worked as a messenger for a large
shipping company at 17 Battery Place in New York City. My job was delivering shipping documents: bills of lading, customs declarations and consular papers to various firms around town. The company was a large established firm and there were five of us in the messenger department. Although I was pleased to be working at all, what I really wanted was a desk job since I felt my talents were being wasted as a low-level messenger. Embarrassed by our low position, we five messengers called ourselves couriers and never messengers.

We weren’t bike messengers. We traveled all over the city by foot or by train or bus. Back then, in the early Fifties, it cost only a nickel to travel by train from Union Street in Brooklyn to Whitehall Street in Manhattan, which we called New York.

There were times when we also made unofficial trips for the bosses, the executives, especially around the holidays, which included picking up precious cargo, usually artwork, or various other expensive parcels at upscale stores and galleries. For those anticipated journeys we were instructed to take cabs and protect our precious goods and never dilly dally along the way. On one occasion, I delivered an expensive cigarette lighter to Alfred Dunhill’s for repairs. On another, around Christmastime, I picked up and delivered a large framed painting of one of the vice presidents’ wives.

For about a year and a half I traveled throughout the city, learning the location of many Manhattan streets and avenues. I trekked from the Battery and Bowling Green to Wall Street, to Canal, from Union Square to Times Square and north along Fifth Avenue. I thoroughly enjoyed my job and I loved the town. As I walked the streets of the city I felt an excitement and an electricity that was new to me. Although I was on the lowest rung of the company’s ladder I pretended to others (and especially myself) that I was a smart junior executive on the way up. To play the part I dressed with conservative panache, always a blue suit and tie and made certain to always carry my briefcase wherever I went. Unknown to the general public, along with the necessary shipping papers I usually had my lunch packed neatly away in the briefcase.

Usually I knew just how long I would be missed on routine trips so that I knew exactly when to speed up and when to relax and take my time. On bright sunny days, when time allowed and if I were in the area, I would enter Central Park for a brief stroll. If I were downtown I sometimes checked out the little cemetery at Trinity Church, where Alexander Hamilton and other famous individuals were buried. And there were times in the winter when I would stop my travels and enjoy ten or fifteen minutes watching the skaters at Rockefeller Center. On one occasion I even rode the elevators at the Empire State Building straight to the observation deck and stared mouth-open at the city I was learning to love. When I felt the least bit spiritual I would climb the steps at St. Paddy’s. Christmastime was my favorite time. Then I would stop and marvel at the displays in the decorated department store windows. Sugar plums danced in my head for sure while the falling snow flakes melted on my briefcase. At times in midtown I would make a point to see which headliner was appearing at the Paramount. Or if I had loads of time and felt the urge I would stroll Fifth Avenue as if I belonged. Briefcase in hand.


Once on Fifth, near Bergdorfs, I was unknowingly walking alongside Rita Hayworth and her daughter Jasmine. When I realized it I froze and I was so taken aback that I forgot to ask for an autograph. Another time, in the middle of Times Square, I saw a familiar gentleman walking briskly toward me. On closer look I realized it was a face I knew well, it was Pat O’Brien. Near Penn Station I almost physically bumped into Dagmar who used to appear on television’s Broadway Open House. I marveled at how tall she was. She smiled at me and I melted.

I enjoyed the city more and more while stealing minutes and sometimes half-hours from what I considered the menial work of a messenger. I convinced myself that Manhattan was there for my enjoyment. I was a good student and I quickly learned the basic geographic layout of the city and quite a bit about the town itself. I knew where the major museums on Fifth Avenue were located, and Carnegie Hall, and many of the fancy hotels, such as the Plaza and the Waldorf. I knew well the public library on Fifth Avenue, with its two imposing lions out front. I was thrilled when I first came across Tiffanys and Cartiers, places I had thought never really existed.

If I found myself in midtown around lunchtime without lunch from home, I’d eat at one of the many less-famous places on restaurant row. Usually however, I took lunch at a Cafe Sabrett, one of the many hotdog pushcarts around town. If I had extra money, I treated myself to Delmonicos on Beaver Street. There I would rub elbows at the counter with other aspiring go-getters. I also ate at the Horn & Hardart Automats and the Chock Full O’Nuts.


The day would usually go by quickly because I thoroughly enjoyed my work. At the end of the day, my fellow couriers and I would usually visit a down home Puerto Rican bar on Pearl Street where we would munch on papas y chorizos, drink tap beer and sing Granada as loudly as if we were native Puerto Ricans. We were all just over eighteen then (the legal drinking age in New York at the time) and we swigged down our alcohol like adults, pretending to be refined couriers instead of the low-level messenger boys on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder we were in actuality. After all, we were couriers and not messengers.

THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD

I grew up in a neighborhood in Brooklyn they call Park Slope. Back then, linked to other neighborhoods, we called it South Brooklyn. Today it is one of the most desirable neighborhoods in New York City and was recently rated number one by New York magazine. The area is noted for fine restaurants, fashionable bars, trendy taverns and even a food coop. It's a great place to raise kids and young mothers are often seen pushing babies in strollers past stately brownstones that sell for at least two million dollars. Rents in Park Slope are exceedingly high even by New York standards.


Today, the area has been gentrified, pristine and proper, but when I was a scruffy kid growing up on Sixth Avenue things were different. Back then youth gangs were numerous, and it seemed that every block had its own. I remember swallowing hard when i had to walk past some of the menacing characters on those streets.

Union Street was our fun street. At least every Sunday in the summer, my friends and I played stickball against the older guys. We usually lost. On Union Street sometimes we would jump on the backs of trolley cars and hang on as they clanged up and down the street, never once thinking about how easily we might have been killed.

click to enlarge map

In those days, I saw second-rate movies and cartoons at the Garfield Theater three blocks from Union, on 5th and Garfield. I had no idea the area had an infamous history. For example, the notorious Alphonse "Al" Capone lived with his parents at 38 Garfield Place. They moved to two other places on the street, too, numbers 21 and 46. The young Al used to hang out at the pool room at 20 Garfield Place.

Al Capone

Three blocks from the Capones, another mobster named Johnny Torrio held court at the social club on the second floor of a restaurant on Union and Fourth. He later became Al Capone's boss in Chicago.

Garfield Place was also host to other criminals. Of lesser fame, but equally dangerous, were the Persico brothers--Alphonse "Alley Boy" Persico, and Carmine "Junior" Persico--who ran the notorious street gang, The Garfield Boys. Their father Carmine was at the time a made man in the Luciano/Genovese crime family.

Local wiseguys

During his early years, Alley Boy confessed to murder and was sentenced to twenty years in the New York State Department of Corrections, where he died in 1989. His brother Junior rose to prominence in his early twenties and became a made man in the Profaci crime family. He became known to his enemies as Carmine (the Snake, behind his back) Persico, and headed the Columbo family, one of the five major New York crime families.

Next to Union Street is President Street, where I worked as a soda jerk in my teens in a drug store at President and Fifth. I probably served egg cremes to the Persico brothers when they were kids.

President Street was the home base for the Gallo brothers, Crazy Joe, Larry and Albert "Kid Blast." They took refuge on this street and went to the mattresses during the Gallo-Profaci War. Later, in 1972, on orders from Carmine Persico, Crazy Joe was murdered in Umbertos' Clam Bar in Manhattan.

Deep in the bosom of the old Italian neighborhood is Carroll Street, between President Street and Garfield Place. It too is famous for old time wiseguys. Monte's Restaurant on Carroll was the favored eating place of Joe Profaci's boys. This Brooklyn crime family later evolved into the Columbo family. This is also the street where my grandfather owned a bakery and where, as a kid, I ate hot bread slathered with olive oil straight from the oven.

Joe Adonis

Back in the Thirties, Joe Adonis, who was affiliated with Little Augie Pisano and Brooklyn's top crime boss, Frankie Yale, became a major player himself. With Albert Anastasia, he directed criminal activity along the Brooklyn docks and ran a neighborhood restaurant called Joe's Italian Kitchen, on Carroll and Fourth. Joe Adonis would occasionally seen walking along Union Street.

There's a lot about the old neighborhood I don't know, especially all the nefarious goings-on behind closed doors. Back then a lot of whispering took place among adults but information was hard to come by.

Today, Park Slope has been thoroughly gentrified and is considered a most preferred place to live, but I doubt the local boomers and yuppies that can afford to live here have any clue about the area's infamous history. They would probably be horrified if they knew.


Modern day Park Slope, courtesy of Tracy Wuischpard