This is funny.Now, looking over all your posts above, it is a bit of a small world.
Often in the summer, several of us from our West Eighties neighborhood in Manhattan would take the Pelham Bay subway/el to the end, then grab a bus to City Island where one of our crowd had a summer bungalow. We'd canoe out to Rat Island and sit amid the bird droppings and drink our two tall cans of Rheingold and smoke Hit Parade cigarettes and think we were beyond 'cool.'
Bringing the canoe back up the ramp later was often very 'un-cool' but enough.
My dad worked for years in Con Edison in the manhole gangs around the city. When he approached retirement, in the mid 1970's, the company, as it did with many of the old guys, put him in a dispatch job in Van Nest yard. Light duty til retirement. Good company back then.
We lived on Long Island before moving here, and as another Bronx connection, we got our beagle in 2009 from a girl who bred AKC beagles at her home in Morris Park, the clean, tight knit and heavily Italian-American neighborhood right across Pelham Parkway from St Catharine HS. Her mother was one of my old students unbeknownst to any of us until we met!
I remember happily Jahn's on Fordham Road, Donaghy's Steak House on 231st in Kingsbridge, Stella Dora's restaurant with its aromas wafting up to the commuters on the 238th St Station on Broadway, and S&S Chessecake also on 238th. In college, we hung out a lot on Fridays in Forde's Bar across from the Kingsbridge Armory.
I loved the Bronx back in the sixties and early seventies.