It's always good to see a brick street still hanging in there.
This little park is named for Anthony Mondello, who worked as an auto mechanic at the repair shop across the street and was killed in action during his WWII service in the Air Force.
I took a Track Safety Training class here once, back in my engineering days. The instructor looked not unlike Christopher Walken, and spoke exactly like him. He showed us horrible photos of people who touched the third rail. It was a fun day.
These three picnic tables, plus three others, were packed with Chinese-, Russian-, and Italian-speaking men playing chess, dominoes, cards, and some checker-like game I couldn't identify.
As the NYPD's first Italian-American detective, he was a prominent leader in the fight against organized crime around the turn of the 20th century, a role which eventually cost him his life in 1909 at the hands of the Sicilian Mafia. While his name has largely been forgotten in the years since, he was beloved by the New Yorkers of his time: upwards of 200,000 people turned out to watch his funeral procession make its way through the streets of Manhattan and Queens!
