Stoopball required one rubber ball and one stoop and nothing else. You threw the ball against the edge of the step and if it flew past the parked cars on the fly it was a home run. That was the whole game. No equipment. No field. No umpire. No coach. Just you and a Spaldeen and the geometry of a concrete step. The stoop was a stadium for one.

The Spaldeen was a pink rubber ball made by Spalding and it cost a quarter and it was the most important piece of sporting equipment in New York City. You could play stoopball with it. Stickball. Handball. Box ball. Hit the penny. A quarter bought you six different sports. You bounced it on the way to school and you bounced it on the way home and when you lost it down the sewer grate you stood there and stared into the darkness like you had lost a friend. You had.

The best stoopball player on East Seventh Street was a kid named Mikey who could hit the point of the step so clean the ball would fly three stories straight up and come down in the middle of the street. Nobody could catch a Mikey pop-up because you could not see it against the sky. He played after school every day until his mother called him in and his mother had a voice that carried four blocks. The whole street knew when Mikey's game was over.

Stoopball had rules that changed with every block. On our block a ball that hit a car was a do-over. On the next block it was an out. The argument about which rules applied when you played kids from another block lasted longer than the game. Every block was its own country with its own laws and the border was the crosswalk and you respected the border or you went home. Geography was law.

You cannot play stoopball on the new buildings. The new buildings do not have stoops. They have lobbies with glass doors and a doorman who tells you to move along. The stoop was public. The lobby is private. The stoop invited you to sit. The lobby invites you to leave. Stoopball died when the stoops died and the stoops died when the brownstones became condos and the condos did not need a front step because the residents did not need the street. The street needed them. But nobody asked the street.

See also: Stickball Bat, Stickball