John Jay Pool ~ A Yorkville Gift & "City Boy" ~ This Thurs, July 21 @ Cornelia St. Cafe @ 6pm

City Boy

Cornelia Street Cafe

This Thursday, July 21 @ 6pm

John Jay Park was part of the original location for the Queensboro Bridge. They moved the bridge to 59th St giving Yorkville the freedom to use the city land to build PS 158, John Jay Park, Cherokee Place and The City & Suburban Housing project. Otherwise the neighborhood's single park would be CARL SCHURZ PARK nyc.

When James Cagney and my great-uncle Joe Cuccia played on the Yorkville Nut Baseball Club, their chief rivals were the John Jays. See photo below anid find Public Enemy Number One.

If you come to City Boy ~ my solo show @ Cornelia Street Cafe @ Thursday @ July 21st @ 6pm, you'll understand why I was lucky growing up in the old Yorkville neighborhood with my favorite stoops, stops and crazy cuckoo nuts. My old photos, the people in them and the scenes they present, are tied to the street life double feature in my head where I watch old Yorkville movies from my seat in the first row of RKO 86th Street's mezzanine.

City Boy ~ built into me over a lifetime, stories flew into my ears straight to my memory palace.
These events shook the area
1880 ~ Second & Third Ave Els reach Yorkville\Upper East Side
1918 ~ IRT comes to Yorkville
1955 ~ demolition of the Third Ave El,
2016 ~ Second Avenue Subway

Cornelia Street Cafe
Thurs, July 21 @ 6pm.
$10 admission includes a free drink

"City Boy" 

my first solo play

Thursday, July 21 at 6 PM - 7:45 PM

Cornelia Street Cafe

29 Cornelia St, New York, New York 10014

Thomas Pryor's "City Boy" is a love letter to street life in the 1960s working class Manhattan neighborhood, Yorkville. Devil Dogs were a nickel, Spaldeens flew, and the capture game, Ringalario, let boys put their arms around girls for the first time. Nuns slugged you for humming baseball’s beer jingles in class. And, like other fathers, Tommy’s took him to saloons, all day, and no one thought it was strange. In this funny and bittersweet portrait of family and life, Pryor echoes TV’s “The Wonder Years” - just add in taverns, subways and Checker cabs.

***********************************************************

If you like my work check out my memoir, "I Hate the Dallas Cowboys - tales of a scrappy New York boyhood." Available at Logos Book Store or online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. The book has 120 Amazon five star reviews out of 120 total reviews posted. We're pitching a perfect game. My old world echoes TV's "The Wonder Years" ~ just add taverns, subways and Checker cabs.