We are all from the stoop. Each of us, a son or daughter of the borough of Brooklyn, home, it seems, to everyone from everywhere.  The most iconic image of Brooklyn, its magnificent and timeless Bridge, certainly makes a great postcard.  But a case can be made, at least by the natives, that the most representative image of Brooklyn and its people is also among its most simple and easily ignored: the stoop.

Technically speaking, the stoop is the landing at the top of a flight of steps, the last place your feet land before entering a building. In practice, all the steps, the sides, the railings, any part of the structure or its immediate adjacencies where a body could just hang out – that was the stoop.

Every building that I have called home has had some kind of a stoop. The two-family limestone that is my earliest memory of Borough Park had a great big one, twelve steps before the top. When our landlord’s daughter married and needed the space, we moved down the block and across the street into a huge seven-room apartment with an up-close and personal view of the West End line. Eight families spread over four floors had but three steps to call their stoop. But they used it well, the young lounging on the poured concrete while the old and not-so-young gathered around them in folding beach chairs that would never know the touch of a grain of sand.  When my parents had saved enough money to put a down payment on a $25,000.00 two-family house in Bensonhurst, I was off to the place where the remainder of my formative years would be spent.

It must have been a dream house for my parents. Two Italian immigrants who arrived in this promised land with little but their names now owned a piece of America. It was a fully attached house, with a basement that could be finished, and a backyard with more than enough room for some outdoor furniture, a barbecue and plenty of tomato and pepper plants. It also had a wide, spacious stoop. 

When I was a kid, the stoop marked the beginning and the end of virtually every summer day.  It was where we met to discuss the outcome of the previous day’s games before we embarked on another day filled with even more games.

There was stickball, wiffle ball, slap ball, box ball. There was off the wall. As September approached, there were epic games of two-hand touch football. Even our gathering place became a field of competition when we chose to have an intense game of stoop ball. (Nothing was more exhilarating than catching a screaming Spaldeen that came shooting back at you from the edge of a step.) There were games to play inside, but who would want to spend a precious summer day in the house? It didn’t matter how hot it was, or even if it was raining - it was summer, and nothing could keep city kids from the great outdoors of a city block in the summer. 

It was a place where our mothers, stood to call us in for dinner with voices that were a thousand times bolder than the bodies they inhibited. It was where they met their counterparts in domesticity to quietly share all the news of the block that wasn’t fit to print.

It was a place where our fathers sat after a hard days labor, bedecked in white A-shirts, a Lucky Strike, a Camel or a Tareyton dangling from their  lips. On a really hot night, there would be a cold Ballantine, Rheingold or Knickerbocker within their reach.

At nine o’clock, they would head to the corner to get the “night owl” edition of the Daily News, just so they could check that day’s number – the last three digits of that day’s receipts  at one of the local race tracks.

I remember summer evenings spent outdoors on the stoop. In the days before air conditioning became common, long extension cords ran out of windows to power small black-and-white televisions tuned to baseball games. Long before the arrival of cable and satellite, almost every game was televised locally by either Channel 9 (Mets) or Channel 11 (Yankees.)

When something “big” happened on the block, every door would swing open, and each stoop became the equivalent of the town square. Bodies that would start at one would gravitate toward another, and eventually arrive at yet another. Soon, most of the block had come together to share in another family’s joy or console them in their sorrow.

Ultimately, as a kid, it was where you went to catch a cool breeze before you grew up enough to try and be as cool as the breeze. And to do that, you had to stretch your boundaries. You had to leave the stoop.

At first, it was a figurative departure. You always came home to it.

Then the day came when you left it behind you for good.

For a better life, as your parents would say.

In front of my pseudo-suburban house are three steps that must be climbed before getting to my front door. That means I still have a stoop.

On a sun-splashed summer day, I decided to put it to use. My four-year old daughter joined me. She is a wonderful, curious child, and she often asks to hear about the time “when I was a little boy.”

And so I tell her of the my childhood in the land of row houses and shared driveways and four-story walkups, all while gesturing at homes whose front doors are a hundred feet apart and show no signs of life on this glorious day. I tell her of the little row house she was born in, in Bath Beach, a few hundred yards from Gravesend Bay. It was a significant upgrade for her mother and I. We left, just as countless others, to provide a better life for her, to give her a home with windows on all four sides.

She hears the wistfulness in my voice.

“But Daddy,” she observes, “we’ll always be from Brooklyn.”

As if on cue, a familiar, repetitive tone begins to fill the afternoon air. A part of the past that has survived in to the present.

She has earned herself carte blanche on the ice cream truck.

Lorenzo Mameli, ’79, welcomes your comments. He can be reached at