The sidewalks of New York

A regular visitor to the Manhattan Board Web site, which says it’s for “misplaced, displaced, and nostalgic ex-Manhattanites,” she listed Frances Keenan in its “Missing Persons” section.
All over the country, people regularly tap into a precious resource — the happy halcyon days of their childhood in one of New York’s ethnic neighborhoods.
Increasingly, though, they’re using the internet to help them reach across the decades.
The Manhattan Board, which seems most popular with former residents of once Irish neighborhoods in the upper third of the island, features a “Nostalgia Message Board,” a gallery of streetscapes and scenes from other eras, a class portrait gallery and a school alumni database.
Its roots go back to 1996 when Larry S. Bermel, who owns SofTech Consulting in Chappaqua, N.Y., wanted to contact some friends from his 1960s schooldays in the Bronx.
Bermel said what resources were available “were either poorly maintained, inadequately advertised, or available only to subscribers of specific online services like AOL, which, of course, limited the scope of their reach.”
“My initial intent,” he said, “was to support a collection of ‘Looking for . . .’-type messages, and I focused on ease of use and simplicity in presentation.”
He established the Bronx Board in January 1997. “It blew me away with its immediate success. Within one month, it was receiving 2,500 hits or visits each day,” Bermel recalled.
That’s the number of hits the Manhattan Board gets now, but the Bronx Board far outstrips it with 14,000 separate visitors each day. His Queens and Brooklyn sites are also popular.
Surveys have shown that the typical Manhattan site visitor was born between 1939 and 1954 — so is a baby boomer or a little older — and went to parochial school.
Almost none of the visitors to the four sites live in the borough in which they grew up.
“I think it’s just great,” Murphy Kory said of the Manhattan site.
It turned out that her long-lost friend lived in California.
“Someone who knew her read the ‘Missing Persons’ and after 45 years we did make contact with one another,” she said.
Murphy Kory added that another friend who lives in Hampton Bays, N.Y., and with whom she’s never lost contact since they were girls in Yorkville, also visits the site regularly.
Gerry Donnelly, who moved from Long Beach, N.Y., three years ago to settle in Lauderdale by the Sea, Fla., visits the site every day. “It’s a great medium,” he said.
Donnelly spent his first 17 years in Inwood in Upper Manhattan, before joining the Marine Corps in 1958. After three years service, he applied successfully to become a police officer with the NYPD. When he retired after 20 years, he was married with a family and had two college degrees.
“It’s a way of keeping touch,” he said of the site. “Somebody will ask in a message: ‘Who are you?’ “
When discussing Inwood, though, it’s almost always a case of one degree of separation. Pretty soon, it becomes clear the questioner knows a brother, cousin, uncle or close friend.
Occasionally, Donnelly said, he’ll encounter someone he hasn’t heard from in 30 or 40 years.
“It’s a lot of fun,” said Christine McCabe, who was raised in Washington Heights and now lives in Point Pleasant, N.J.
“I got turned onto it when someone wrote about the man who dressed up as King Kong. He walked out of the Moose Head Bar and we all followed. Then he’d climb the el,” she said, laughing. “He was my uncle.”
McCabe’s childhood was later than most visitors; she graduated from George Washington High School in 1980. “I’m 42, but I see younger people than me on the Manhattan Board,” she said.
However, a remarkable feature of her uncles and aunts’ generation, she said, was how networks of close friends have stayed close over the decades, even as they went onto better things.
“It’s about your roots, about not forgetting where you came from,” she said.
The appeal of the Manhattan Board, and smaller neighborhood sites, can also be put down to old-fashioned nostalgia about childhood.
Murphy Kory recalled reading a series of messages, known as a “thread,” about the Papaya King, the famous store still located at 86th Street and Third Avenue. “It sure brought back fond memories of going there when I lived in Yorkville,” she said.
“Does anyone remember the boat yard at the end of Dyckman Street?” a posting asked. A 14-message thread entitled “Harlem River Boat Yard” ended up as a discussion about Inwood’s small rowing clubs: the Val-Ray, the Nonpareil and the Union. Donnelly remembered the Nonpareil as a “focal point.”
One message said: “Do you recall the small horse stable there also? Forty-six years ago or so, my friends and I would catch killie fish in the puddles left at low tide between the boatyards and the old Con Ed Plant . . . then on the way home stop and play on the coal bins of Con Edison.”
Said Donnelly: “There’s always a spinoff.”
Someone mentioned the Sputnik flight over the Western hemisphere in 1959, adding: “And remember we always carried at least a dime in our pockets when we were kids to call home in case of an emergency?”
Even the weather conditions in recent weeks in Florida have been evocative. “I remember the hurricanes, back in the ’50s, in the Heights, watching the TV antennas flying off the rooftops. Then in the ’70s, on Long Island,” said one posting.
A recent message drew attention to the death of an 84-year-old nun whom Catholic New York said was a teacher at a local school from 1957-68. One posting replied that the latter date was likely a misprint, as she’d been gone by 1965. Others agreed. The sister, who was referred to often on the board down through the years, was not fondly remembered by anyone in the thread. “She was definitely in need of some anger management training,” according to one posting.
Donnelly has learned of deaths through the site and has offered condolences there. He said that many families with roots in Inwood suffered bereavement as a result of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
“Twelve or thirteen kids from Cantor Fitzgerald died,” he said. “And I knew many police and firemen also [who were killed].”
But, more happily, the board is a place where he can transport back half a century to childhood. In an extended posting, he wrote of the carnival that came to the neighborhood just after Labor Day, and that marked “summer’s final hour.”
He remembered the children’s yells, the circling horses, the music, the smells, the crushing of the crowd, the wheel clicking down to the winning number and the lights of various colors. But then the carnies dismantled it just as quickly as they’d erected it.
“I remember always feeling empty and hurt as if somehow deserted,” he wrote. “Why does the carnival have to end and when it goes, will it ever come back again?”
In another posting, about waking up before his parents and older brothers early one Saturday morning in summertime, Donnelly recalled “the breeze from the Hudson or the Harlem rivers mixed with the scent of the flowers and trees from Inwood Hill Park.”
He added: “Slowly life came into view. Charlie Fritsch, the super across the street, came from his apartment and set up a hose to clean the steps and the sidewalk.”
Bermel, who described the gratitude expressed to him by email as “one of the most rewarding aspects of this endeavor,” can understand the intense identification with place, having spent 24 formative years in the Bronx.
Said McCabe, who visits her mother in Washington Heights every week: “I only have to see a sign for the George Washington Bridge to think of home.”
Donnelly said of Inwood: “It was like Camelot to us.”
He wouldn’t swap his childhood for anything or any place in the world.