Growing Up and Old in the Same Little Neighborhood

  When John Maloney was a teenager growing up in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, his friends started calling him Moe. It was short for Maloney. He liked the nickname. His mother had a different opinion. “People called my house and asked, ‘Is Moe there?’ ” Mr. Maloney recalled. “My mother would say, ‘There’s no Moe that lives here,’ and hang up.”

At 70, Mr. Maloney is still known as Moe on the streets of Windsor Terrace. He lives on Windsor Place, a short walk from where he was raised on 17th Street. He has spent his life in a neighborhood no bigger than roughly nine blocks from end to end, except for that brief, unfortunate period years ago when he and his wife moved to Lakewood, N.J. He remembers when the wine shop was an ice cream parlor, when the shoe store was a girdle shop. Row houses across and down the street have recently sold for upward of $1 million. Nearly 30 years ago, Mr. Maloney bought his for $26,000.

Mr. Maloney is not so much the mayor of Windsor Terrace — though his neighbors call him that, too — but rather its marshal. Every night, he opens the door and stands on the stoop and looks up and down the block. He kept a baseball bat in the hall until his daughter urged him to get rid of it. He has more than a dozen keys on rings hanging on a wall — the neighbors on his block give him their spare keys in case they get locked out. Years ago, Mr. Maloney attended a wedding. The bride was related to him not by blood, but by neighborhood: her family owns the corner grocery store.

After the recent blizzard, he said, he wanted to grab his shovel, but his daughter told him that her husband, Bob Clark, would do it. “So Bob says, ‘What do you do?’ ” Mr. Maloney said. “I said, ‘You’re going to do our house, you’re going to do Charlie’s house, you’re going to do Al’s house, you’re going to do Donald’s house, and you’re going to do what’s-his-name’s house who’s in the hospital, and the other house.” Just about every block in this city has two or three just like Mr. Maloney — elderly men and women who have known only one neighborhood most of their lives. They grew up on the same streets and stoops where they grew old. They are the antithesis of white flight, the exception to gentrification. New York is big enough to hold more than eight million people in hundreds of neighborhoods, yet small enough to sustain one obscure, marvelous life in the space of a few city blocks.

In East Harlem, for instance, Isabella Mazzia lived on one street in the neighborhood for all her 87 years. She moved just twice in her life, from 286 Pleasant Avenue to 297, then from 297 to 304. “In over 87 years, she moved 150 feet,” said a cousin, Carmine Izzi, 46. Ms. Mazzia stayed close to home in the city, but ventured far outside of it in her many travels around the world, including to Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Israel, India, Thailand, Japan and Tibet. She died on Dec. 6.

Windsor Terrace, long an Irish-American stronghold, is a blue-collar, gentrifying and diversifying neighborhood between Prospect Park and Green-Wood Cemetery, with low crime, an old bar (77-year-old Farrell’s Bar and Grill) and an even older church (132-year-old Holy Name of Jesus). Mr. Maloney is harder to define. He is an Army veteran and a retired Teamster. As a teenager, he was a member of a Brooklyn street gang called the Jokers. In his golden years, he plays Santa Claus for children in group homes and raises money every year so the neighborhood and the Knights of Columbus can serve hundreds of free Thanksgiving meals. His primary objective, besides staying active with the Knights of Columbus, is to spoil his five grandchildren.

Asking him to explain why he has stayed in Windsor Terrace so long is like asking him why he married his wife, Catherine: he’s no good talking about love.

They were married 36 years, until she died in 2000 at the age of 57. He promised her he would be buried face down in the coffin, so they would face each other. “I had a triple bypass,” he said. “I had cancer of the colon. I had cancer of the stomach. I’m still here. My wife doesn’t want me. I’m waiting to go. I go tomorrow I’m happy. Really. If God took me tomorrow, I’m happy. Why? Because I had a good life.”