HOUSTON — The stories that still echo are clearly from another time, another place, another era. But the more you think about it, they almost seem like they had to have been out of another city, too. New York always has been a hard place, an unforgiving place, a show-me-now-or-be-gone place.
Sinatra and Bing Crosby weren’t immediate hits here, in the ’20s and the ’30s, a time when gangster wars and Prohibition and Depression turned what was already a town paved with mean streets even angrier, even more short-tempered. Babe Ruth was booed. Joe DiMaggio was booed.
Yet the Brooklyn Dodgers were beloved.