“They’re tearing the Buick City Complex down/I think we’re the only people left in town. ~ “Buick City Complex”, Old 97’s

I attended Harry F. Abate Elementary School in the North End of Niagara Falls, New York. In September 1976, my mom Louise walked me into the four-year-old school with its brick interiors and moveable classroom walls. As my mom and I both recall, I was a mess. I did not attend pre-school, so the leap from a three-person audience at home to a 1970s public school classroom was jolting, for sure. I’m told I cried the entire first week of school, but even back then I had more self-respect than that.

Our school and the adjoining Brutalist public library were built as part of a late-stage Urban Renewal plan undertaken by our shrinking Rust Belt city. In 1960, the population of Niagara Falls peaked at 102,394. By 1980, the population dropped to 71,384. In 2020, the city’s population stood at 48,671, below the threshold of 50,000 required for “city” status in New York State.

The thirty percent population freefall over 20 years apparently alarmed local officials, and plans were made in the late 1970s to bring in federal Urban Renewal programs and tools to staunch the bleeding. Urban Renewal efforts, implemented after World War II by the federal government to battle urban “slum and blight”, often involved wide-scale demolition and the construction of monolithic housing complexes and other public building and spaces that were far out of scale with day-to-day human activity of the time.

By the time Niagara Falls got around to implementing Urban Renewal, municipalities already were recognizing the community damage caused by previous generations of the program. But Niagara Falls forged ahead, demolishing whole neighborhoods both in its South End (for a convention center and hotel situated on a pedestrian mall) and in its North End (for a public library and my elementary school). In the North End, where we lived, the public library, designed by renown Brutalist architect, Paul Rudolph, replaced a footprint of shops, apartments, and homes, and our school was built on former rail and lumber yards (rumored to have contained radioactive materials).

We lived less than a mile from the Abate school, which followed a kindergarten-to-sixth grade format. By fifth grade, I was walking my little brother to and from school. After school, we would head either to the library, or the nearby YMCA, to wait for my dad to fetch us after work. On YMCA days, we spent our afternoons playing basketball and ping pong, and shooting pool. Sometimes the older kids would bring in a boom box and blast 97Rock, one of our local classic rock radio stations. That’s where my twelve-year-old self first heard The Doors’ LA Woman, puzzled (to this day) by Jim Morrison’s eerie chant: “Mr. Mojo Risin’!” 

By the early 1980s, a new corner store called Sue’s Mart popped up on our commute to school. For all the hours I spent in that shop, I never knew who Sue was. But I did learn a lot of other stuff. Despite looking like your typical 1980s Upstate bodega, with oak cigarette and candy cases and an ancient “pop” machine in the corner that still dispensed glass bottles, Sue’s Mart was a front. It took us a little bit to figure it out, but the thin perishable inventory, impossibly cheap candy and smokes, and the largely older male clientele left a trail of crumbs even our fairly Polly Anna family could not ignore.

My dad knew something was going on there, he just didn’t know what, so he forbid us from visiting Sue’s Mart, other than allowing brief Saturday trips to exchange our allowance for candy. That went on for about a year and, before long, my friends and I were spending a lot of time at Sue’s Mart, where we came to know and love Streak.

If you were directing a Hollywood gangster movie and called down to central casting for an Italian bookie who doesn’t know that he has lung cancer, they would send someone that looked like Streak. Every morning except Sunday he unlocked the shop at 7 AM and filled the newspaper rack by the door, skinny as a rail, shirt sleeves rolled up, hair slicked back, smoldering Lucky Strike dangling from his grey lips. Soon after, men would begin to filter in, often with racing sheets tucked under their arms. They would place bets on the horses, buy cigarettes or a newspaper, and, most importantly, settle-up with Streak. 

By the time of thirteen, I was smoking every day, and Sue’s Mart was a warm, friendly place to do that during the cold Niagara Falls winters. One afternoon after school, I ditched my cigarette just as I locked eyes with my Papa Joe, my mother’s father. He was inside the shop at the counter as I was reaching for the front door handle. He probably saw me smoking, but it was too late to turn around, so I continued into the shop, prepared for a stern lecture. 

Instead, Papa greeted me nervously, pressed a few dollars into my hand, and scurried from the shop. It was years later before I understood that Papa placed his horse racing bets with Streak (a fellow Italian), rather than with the state-owned Off Track Betting up the street. I kept Papa’s secret for many years, and as far as I know he took mine to his grave.

Eventually, Streak trusted me to run the shop (other than bet-taking) when he needed to step out for something. This most frequently occurred when we heard a knock on the side wall that the shop shared with Weezie’s Antiques. This was the era of Mob prosecutions, and Streak would not allow a phone to be installed in the shop. So, he made a deal with Miss Weezie to allow his customers to call-in bets to her shop. When they phoned, she would pound her broom handle against that wall, and Streak would run over to her shop for a few minutes, before returning with a handful of betting slips. One time, Streak’s call must have been a good one because, upon his return, he tussled my Yankee cap and threw me ten dollars and a pack of my favorite Marlboro Reds. Not bad, for ten minutes work in 1984 (minimum wage = $3.35/hour).

Streak’s days were full. Upon returning from Weezie’s, he needed to log all the bets into a bound ledger he kept behind a false panel in the candy cabinet. He then had to remain glued to his AM radio for the sounded of the race bugle, which “played” hourly to signal that horse race results were coming in (if you were within arm’s length, talking after the bugle blast earned you a smack with a racing form). 

Once, as Streak was returning from Weezie’s, a patrol car parked across the street. As the policeman began crossing the street in front of the store, Streak calmly re-entered the shop, walked behind me to the large glass ashtray on the candy case, and instantly eviscerated all the betting slips in his hand. No smoke, just the click of a Zippo, a brief flash, and some fluffy grey ashes in the tray. As the policeman pivoted in front of the store to continue to his actual destination, Streak groaned “Fuuuuuck!”, realizing he had ignited his flash-paper betting slips for no reason, costing him hundreds in bets for races that would soon go off. I recall muttering something hopefully reassuring like “Better safe than sorry, Streak”, but his day was clearly ruined. 

I never knew Streak’s real name, and I lost track of him when I left town for college. I did see him one more time before Sue’s Mart closed. I think I was in law school. We shared a few laughs about the old days, and he seemed genuinely pleased that I was doing OK. I learned a years later that Streak died in a local nursing home, and I like picture him running numbers for his fellow patients, Junior Soprano-style, tossing tissue betting slips into the toilet when things felt too hot.