I previously wrote about spending my first nine years or so in a housing project in Queens, NY called Pomonok (back when housing projects—at least ours—offered, at best, a chance for upward mobility and at worst, a stable, safe, clean place to live.)
Our apartment building faced another, and in between were the sad, scratchy lawns we were forbidden to play on (probably because doing so, and we did, made them sad and scratchy), as well as benches, and painted hopscotch and skelly game diagrams. In the hot, humid New York summer evenings, adults who normally didn’t socialize beyond neighborliness would sit on the benches until the sky turned slowly dark while we kids ran around, oblivious, as kids are, to the heat, only to have our attention diverted with the arrival of the ice cream truck.
As we got too old for hopscotch we graduated to skelly. Skelly, a New York phenomenon, is a game that requires players to navigate to different points on the board flicking “caps” from square to square.
These caps were lovingly crafted by melting crayons (yes, on the stove) inside soda bottle caps. Sometimes we added a penny under the melted wax, in order to get the right weight. Occasionally they emerged fancy, with multiple swirled colors, and often intended to be unique to its owner. There was at one point a short-lived wave of embellishing with plastic gemstones.
It took some skill to learn how to flick ones cap properly so that it would glide fast enough to reach its target, but not so fast to zoom past or tumble clumsily and go off-course. And yes, this was played on the ground, hands on asphalt, turning hands and knees sooty, black and gritty.
Skelly was urban, a bit tough, with many players demonstrating their own style with customized caps, flicking style, and a bit of aggressive swagger while playing. This, of course, was part of the attraction. Getting old enough to be a skelly player was almost a rite of passage.
A sense of what it was like to live in the neighborhood where I spent my first 10 years is well illustrated in this wonderful trailer about Pomonok. I may have to rent this.