The NY Times writes up Joe Maloney:
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.
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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.