I’ve written a lot, here, about my time growing up in and around Yorkville on the eastern end of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, over the years, notably here and most recently here. But when I dedicated a couple of posts – especially this one – about my fleeting run-ins with a group of some specific neighborhood youths – technically the 84th Street Bombers, but more colloquially referred to, in certain circles, as the 84th Street Gang – I started to get a pointed uptick in reader engagment. I had quite a few folks write in to say that they, too, had encountered these guys, and shared their own experiences with them. At the risk of sugar-coating this, these stories frequently recounted instances of petty crime and -- wait for it -- violence.
Now, this many decades later, details get hazy, and legend frequently looms larger than actual fact. Were the guys that, say, mugged and summarily roughed-up my friend Spike and I in Carl Schurz Park in the Spring of 1984 the same thugs who put my friend Danny in Lenox Hill Hospital with a broken nose following a confrontaion at Mimi’s Pizza on 84th and Third? Were the guys who hung out, antogonizing passers-by, on the stoop between the Mansion Diner and the Polymorphos candy store on East 86th, just east of York Avenue (worrying steps from my front door) from this same tribe? Was the horde of amped-up, bedenimed nogoodnicks that roamed around East 86th Street on weekend evenings looking for trouble part of this same bunch of fellas? Were the infamous “Red Twins” affiliated with this group? Were any of them bona fide members of the 84th Street Bombers or just a gaggle of ancilary wannabes (like, say, what the Webelows are to the Boy Scouts)? Was there actually a formal structure to this infamous aggregation of disgruntled tough guys?
Around the time I was finishing my junior year in high school, I’m not sure that level of pedantic minutia really mattered to me. All I knew – or thought I knew – was that the neighborhood my mother and I had just moved into, following my mother and step-father’s freshly minted divorce, came with a bonus side-dish of potential trouble. I’d always considered this area of Yorkville, where my grandparents had lived, prior to their inevitable decamping to Florida, as a quaint, sleepy neighborhood. But, as the gormless high-school twerp that I was, in my Catholic school blazer and tie, I was essentially very easily identifiable prey to this gaggle of old-school Yorkvillians, and they, I guess, acted accordingly.
In a nutshell, I suppose myself and certain friends of mine handily embodied the very factors that were argaubly disenfranchising their neighborhood, to their minds. Marked by the mandatory sartorial trappings of our comparatively privileged schools, maybe we personified the gentrification that was squeezing out the working-class families that had otherwise called Yorkville home for generations. Or maybe we just came across as sniveling, hapless nerds ripe for victimizing. It may not be this simple.
I do vividly remember, as recounted here before, petitioning my more street-savvy classmate Bill (immortalized on earlier posts as “Willy”), who allegedly knew and/or actually hung-out with possibly these very same dudes, to help get them off my back. In retrospect, that seems like the stupidest possible course of action. I mean, think about it – if you were a self-styled street hooligan and someone asked you to “lay off” a certain kid, odds are that, if anything, you’d double-down on hassling him, right? Well, mercifully, that didn’t come to pass.
For whatever reason, I stopped worrying about these guys, and they, in turn, seemed to stop bothering to mess with me, although I have no idea why. I graduated from high school and that was pretty much that. Even when I moved back into Yorkville after college (when I started to pursue a career in the not-at-all lucrative field of journalism, I moved back home, for a while, to save money), my sightings of any of these likely gentlemen from just a few years earlier became fewer and further between. They moved on, and I moved on.
Cut to 2008, when, three years after launching this stupid blog, I first invoked that Yorkville “gang” – even then, wrongly branding them initially as the “86th Street Gang,” before my friend Danny corrected me in the comments. I brought them up a few more times after that. And that’s when folks from various circles started to weigh in. Around 2019, a gentleman named Travis wrote to me directly, claiming to have been a former member of the group which he duly informed me was officially named the 84th Street Bombers. We exchanged a few emails, and I’d always meant to post something larger and pester mysterious Travis (who later became a cop and then a novellist) for further information, but I didn’t necessarily want to put him on the spot. Since our initial exchanges had been solely over email and not via the comments section of the blog, I wasn’t quite sure how game he would have been to delve into it all in a more public forum.
My sisters-from-another-mister over at Desperately Seeking the `80s, however, had no such qualms when Travis similarly reached out to them, and they just snagged a robust interview with Travis for their latest “Field Trip” episode (find it here).
As you’ll hear, Travis is a very forthcoming subject, and has great amounts to share about his days with the `Bombers, although – I have to say – Travis’ effusive, good-natured demeanor is somewhat completely at odds with how I’d have characterized the boys in the `hood whose reign of (relative) terror made large swathes of the Upper East Side quietly ill at ease through much of the early-to-mid 1980’s. I mean, put bluntly, the kids who smacked my friend Spike around in Carl Schurz Park were decidely not nice guys. The kids who jumped my friend Danny in front of Mimi’s and broke his nose for – in his own words, “just being there” – weren’t either. I mean, yeah, people change and grow up and settle down, but there’s definitely something of a discrepancy I’m trying to wrap my head around, here.
Travis promises to be back for a Part Two of his chat with Meg and Jessica, and it’s going to be required listening.
Do YOU remember the 84th Street Bombers?
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