East Side, West Side: Tales of New York Sporting Life
by Lawrence Ritter

Reviewed by J.G. Floto

One of the perks of editing a magazine is that writers and publishers send you books. When the writer is one of those who passed on the spark to you through his vision and he sends the book with an inscription, it's like Henry Aaron giving you a bat.

Nevertheless, I'll attempt objectivity. This book is great! Best known for his seminal collection of interviews with turn-of-the-century players like Smoky Joe Wood and Sam Crawford, Mr. Ritter has generated a steady stream of worthwhile baseball books, including The Babe (The Game That Ruth Built), with Mark Rucker, Lost Ballpark and Leagues Apart: The Men and Times of The Negro Leagues, a children's book whose artwork pulls in adults as well.

His latest effort is not just about baseball, as the subtitle alerts us. (The cover is embossed with boxing gloves, a baseball, football and basketball.) It is a book about sports venues in The Big Apple, ail the major stadiums, Madison Square Garden, the horse tracks and gyms, but also regarding the places the sports crowd hung out in the first half of the century, the places they ate, drank and otherwise "showed."

The rare old photos of Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds, plus smaller yet still impressive spots like the Fairmount Athletic Club, Rockland Palace, The Dykman Oval and Ohio Field alone would make this an interesting book. But not particularly unique. Toots Shors, Lindy's, The Copacabana, the big name hangouts are here. Yet the backbone of the book is places that oldtime New Yorkers will remember, like Gil Hodges Bowling Lines or Sugar Ray's (Robinson, kid, not Leonard), baseball clown Al Schact's restaurant, Dodger pitcher Hugh Casey's Chop and Steak House and boxer Tony Canzoneri's Paddock Bar and Grill.

Pretty soon, through Ritter's accurate, witty, ironic, and, yes, nostalgic text you begin to hear horns honking constantly, lights blaring all night, and visualize big men in fancy suits, with classy and brassy women holding their own.

There are massive places--lake Ruppert's Brewery, Hubert's Museum and Flea Circus (where a disconsolate Grover Alexander gave hourly monologues for walking around money) and the section of expressway known as the Edward Grant Memorial Highway (major leaguer Ed became Captain Grant in World War I, and the first ballplayer to lose his life in that horrifying conflict).

This is not just a recitation of fascinating places and addresses. Grant was a so-so major leaguer, and as a Harvard graduate was best known for changing the traditional ballhawk's call "I Got It" to the grammatically correct "I Have It," earning Bronx cheers from his teammates. Most of them are long forgotten, but Grant really "Has It" now, a six block section of heavily traveled freeway near Yankee Stadium.

Ruppert's Brewery (which survived Prohibition by bottling and selling near-beer) was perhaps best known for the annual salary battle between Babe Ruth and Yankee owner Ruppert. Located in Yorkville, then a heavily German neighborhood, it took up four blocks (East 90th to East 94th), between Second and Third Avenues, a complex consisting of 35 fortress-like brick buildings. Ruppert's Knickerbocker label was sold long his after death to Rheingold, in 1965. The complex, which survived 98 years, was bulldozed and replaced by enormous high-rises, one called Ruppert Towers. A sad employee, on the last day of the plant's operation, poured himself a cold one and groused, "This would never have happened if the Colonel were still alive."

Are you beginning to catch the flavor of this book? Lawrence Ritter is incapable of writing a book without filling it with intriguing anecdotes.

And if you fancy the esoteric, how about Tex's Rangers, The Last Stand of Battling Siki, and my favorite, Mickey Walker's Toy Bulldog Tavern. The first is about the early years of New York's hockey team, the Rangers, named after early owner Tex Rickard. Battling Siki was a Senegalese boxer who became the light heavyweight champ in 1922. After losing his title (to Mike McTigue, in Dublin, on St. Patrick's day), Battling Siki rapidly fell apart, not training or showing up for scheduled fights, instead fighting on the streets. The man who had been champ - and who played himself in a French film, about a man tormented by inner demons - was found face down on West 41st St., in a pool of blood in 1925, age 28.

Mickey Walker, another champion prizefighter (a middleweight) fared a little better. After a ferocious career, in which he refused to go down, no matter how badly beaten, Walker opened the Toy Bulldog Tavern at Avenue 8 and 49th St. in the twilight of his career. Drinking soon replaced boxing, and he was on his way down the tubes when in 1939 he announced to the crowd at his tavern that this would be his last drink. He was true to his word and sold the Toy Bulldog, even though the name was retained. Instead, Mickey took up painting and became a fashionable folk artist whose work was shown at many prestigious galleries. He later opened, with a friend, Mickey Walker's Glove and Palette, a strange pairing of worlds, even in cosmopolitan NYC.

Everything is here, from Runyon running with - and writing about - the second rate gangsters at Lindy's, to the Yankees hijinx at the Copa. If the world of sports, or life in New York City before 1960, is your mug of beer, get this one.