Tuesday, October 19, 2010

THE LAST GUN BATTLE OF STAB ALLEY NEEDS A PLAQUE


The street where I still live had a different moniker when my husband and I first moved there in 1969. While our block was officially named Corcoran Street, it was then part of the inner city, and the scene of a considerable variety of unsavory criminal activities. It was known to the local felonious set unofficially, if not in the eyes of the Post Office, as Stab Alley. Enough lawless actions were going on for it to have earned its nickname. Luckily, I was not afraid of Stab Alley. I loved its vibrancy, its gaminess and most especially, its nickname.

One early summer morning, I was minding my children – ­a toddler boy and a baby girl – when I heard sharp, popping noises. I went to investigate their source and character, carefully clutching the baby to my chest. In this still dangerous neighborhood, such a sound could mean almost anything, but my urban experience suggested a gun fight, possibly a battle of significant proportions!

My excitement mixed with a smidge of fear as I looked out my back window to check out what was happening. The action quickly became clear; the MPD was mounting a significant gun battle against The Man Who Lived Next Door and Who Was Running an Illegal Numbers Racket out of his garbage lid. Quickly, I called my husband at work and stuck my phone out the window so he could share in the full flavor of whatever was going to happen.

Until the week before the incident, I had not known why there was so much activity at that garbage can. I had just found out that this garbage lid was the recipient of a striking amount of passerby attention because it was the deposit and collection point for a large numbers operation, a pastime common to the Inner City at that time. Many of the shabby men who slipped through our alley daily, and who occasionally appeared at our back door to beg a sandwich or a glass of something cold to drink were steady customers of the Numbers Man. The police, too, had just found out.

The recipient of the police action was indignant, and clearly not of an inclination to surrender peacefully or quietly. He pulled out his own shotgun, and began to accentuate his indignation with lively shotgun bursts though his front door. And then his back door. The police responded in kind, but were apparently no better marksmen than he.

In this best of all possible worlds, no one was killed or even wounded, but when it was over, the neighborhood changed forever. The number games racket ceased to exist here, soon to be replaced by high stakes speculation in real estate. Yuppies found Corcoran and began to buy on the block. Gentrification set in inexorably and wiped Corcoran clean of its lively history.

My husband and I have now lived here longer than anyone else, and we think it is a shame for our street to have lost its former infamous nickname. The house that once lodged the numbers racket in its garbage can lid is now a quiet residence for out-of-town actors playing at the Source Theatre. To our knowledge, I am now the only person still alive who actually knows where the bullet holes of the Last Gun Battle of Stab Alley are lodged. This history deserves a plaque.