Read Online Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jeff Chang
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from the rest of the yard, only one way in and one way out. The court sits in the dark cast by the five-story school building. Behind it, two stories above, the sidewalks along the intersection of 176th Street and Morris Avenue offer a prime seat for the gladiator activities belowâwhether handball contests or gang initiations.
âBack in the seventies, this was the Apache line for the Javelins,â Lucky says. âI used to come down here and watch.â
Painted on the middle of the wall was a graffitied genie, the symbol of passage, the end of the Apache line. Two rows of twenty guys stood in the way. If a kid could make it past the swinging fists and boots and chains and baseball bats to touch the genie, they could don the Javelinsâ colors: a denim jacket with a hand-painting of the green genie on the back, ready to be customized with letters and patches, iron crosses and swastikas, emblems of war. They earned their stripes up to the crowning piece on the back: a large hand-painting of a bronze-skinned warrior wielding a spear. âThey were put to the test to see if they more or less had the heart to do it,â he says. âMost of the time they would get hurt.â Some never passed the test.
Lucky could still picture himself, a sullen teen slung against the fence, watching the Javelin initiates run the line below. He was an outlaw in combat boots and Lee jeans and a decorated denim jacket with cutoff sleeves. At his nape, a black hoodie hung over his own colors: a grinning white skull under a steel German war helmet.
Born a Savage, To Die a Skull One Day
Other gangs kept Third Avenue hotâthe Chingalings and the Savage Nomads to the west, the Black Falcons to the north. Below Crotona Park, in the heart ofthe burnt-out South Bronx, were the turfs of the Ghetto Brothers, the Turbans, the Peacemakers, the Mongols, the Roman Kings, the Seven Immortals and the Dirty Dozens. Most of these gangs were predominantly Puerto Rican. East of the Bronx River, the Black Spades consolidated the youths of the mostly African-American communities. Further east and north across Fordham Road, in the last white communities in the Bronx, gangs like the Arthur Avenue Boys, Golden Guineas, War Pigs and the Grateful Dead were foot soldiers for angry wiseguys who spent their days cursing the imminent loss of their neighborhood.
But the Savage Skulls were one of the most feared gangs in the Bronx. They were brazen and reckless. The First Division of the Skulls, the original set, had moved their base on Leggett Avenue and Kelly Street in the Longwood section to an abandoned apartment building just a block away from the infamous Forty-first police precinctâthe one called Fort Apache, a âfort in hostile territory.â If you were looking for protection or trouble, you quit your clique and joined the Skulls.
The gangs of the Bronx, 1970â1973.
Map layout by Sharon Mizota
By the time Lucky joined the Sixteenth Division, the Skulls were second in size only to the Black Spades. As many as fifty divisions of the Savage Skulls were flung across the borough and into Queens, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Alongside the western edge of Crotona Park, on Third Avenue at the Cross-Bronx Expressway, at the very beginning of the mile that the women of East Tremont had fought and lost to Robert Moses in 1952, the Skullsâ Sixteenth Division had taken over four blocks of abandoned buildings and transformed them into their clubhouses. Lucky was not the kind of kid that looked for trouble, but the Skulls ruled his neighborhood.
To Luckyâs Puerto Rican father and Cuban motherâwho arrived from Miami during the mid-1960s as part of a Latino wave that filled former Jewish communities along the Grand Concourseâhe was simply Michael, a boy who loved birds. He cut school to be with his birds, dashing across the street past truancy officers and climbing several flights to a pigeon coop he had built on the
âBack in the seventies, this was the Apache line for the Javelins,â Lucky says. âI used to come down here and watch.â
Painted on the middle of the wall was a graffitied genie, the symbol of passage, the end of the Apache line. Two rows of twenty guys stood in the way. If a kid could make it past the swinging fists and boots and chains and baseball bats to touch the genie, they could don the Javelinsâ colors: a denim jacket with a hand-painting of the green genie on the back, ready to be customized with letters and patches, iron crosses and swastikas, emblems of war. They earned their stripes up to the crowning piece on the back: a large hand-painting of a bronze-skinned warrior wielding a spear. âThey were put to the test to see if they more or less had the heart to do it,â he says. âMost of the time they would get hurt.â Some never passed the test.
Lucky could still picture himself, a sullen teen slung against the fence, watching the Javelin initiates run the line below. He was an outlaw in combat boots and Lee jeans and a decorated denim jacket with cutoff sleeves. At his nape, a black hoodie hung over his own colors: a grinning white skull under a steel German war helmet.
Born a Savage, To Die a Skull One Day
Other gangs kept Third Avenue hotâthe Chingalings and the Savage Nomads to the west, the Black Falcons to the north. Below Crotona Park, in the heart ofthe burnt-out South Bronx, were the turfs of the Ghetto Brothers, the Turbans, the Peacemakers, the Mongols, the Roman Kings, the Seven Immortals and the Dirty Dozens. Most of these gangs were predominantly Puerto Rican. East of the Bronx River, the Black Spades consolidated the youths of the mostly African-American communities. Further east and north across Fordham Road, in the last white communities in the Bronx, gangs like the Arthur Avenue Boys, Golden Guineas, War Pigs and the Grateful Dead were foot soldiers for angry wiseguys who spent their days cursing the imminent loss of their neighborhood.
But the Savage Skulls were one of the most feared gangs in the Bronx. They were brazen and reckless. The First Division of the Skulls, the original set, had moved their base on Leggett Avenue and Kelly Street in the Longwood section to an abandoned apartment building just a block away from the infamous Forty-first police precinctâthe one called Fort Apache, a âfort in hostile territory.â If you were looking for protection or trouble, you quit your clique and joined the Skulls.
The gangs of the Bronx, 1970â1973.
Map layout by Sharon Mizota
By the time Lucky joined the Sixteenth Division, the Skulls were second in size only to the Black Spades. As many as fifty divisions of the Savage Skulls were flung across the borough and into Queens, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Alongside the western edge of Crotona Park, on Third Avenue at the Cross-Bronx Expressway, at the very beginning of the mile that the women of East Tremont had fought and lost to Robert Moses in 1952, the Skullsâ Sixteenth Division had taken over four blocks of abandoned buildings and transformed them into their clubhouses. Lucky was not the kind of kid that looked for trouble, but the Skulls ruled his neighborhood.
To Luckyâs Puerto Rican father and Cuban motherâwho arrived from Miami during the mid-1960s as part of a Latino wave that filled former Jewish communities along the Grand Concourseâhe was simply Michael, a boy who loved birds. He cut school to be with his birds, dashing across the street past truancy officers and climbing several flights to a pigeon coop he had built on the
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