Best places to hang out in Levittown and vicinity during the 1950s

Crowd gathers at the Meadowbrook Theater, top photo; Mays shopping center below

Warren Zaretsky. 1960
1. Vice Principal Eugene Aiello's office
2. Wherever Anna Joy Herman was
3. Chris Wilkens' house
4. Anna-Marie DeNardi's kitchen
5. Officer DeMayo's squad car

Susan Weldon, 1960
1. Azalea Road pool
2. West Village Green
3. Chris Wilkens' house
4. Library
5. Bowlder Lounge

Karen Biro Hewson, 1960
1. Meadowbrook Theater
2. Wilfred's Coffee Shop
3. Caruso's
4. Bowlder Lounge/bowling alley
5. Mays shopping center

Michelle Fromm-Lewis, 1963
1. Woodcock Lane (On our street we were "one for all" regardless of age, sex, ethnicity, religion; there was always something going on.)
2. Azalea Road pool - All summer long, THE place to gather during the day
3. Levittown Community Church - Friday night dances during the summer for all neighborhood kids and where my Girl Scout troop met for a while
4. Meadowbrook Theater or the Roller Rink - mostly winter activities for me
5. Levittown Center (Mays Shopping Center) - Mostly in the later 1950s, when buying clothes and records (45's of course) was important

Cliff Fromm, 1960
1. North Village Green Bowling Alley
2. East Village Green
3. Azalea Road Pool
4. Meadowbrook Theater
5. Whelan's Drug Store

John Kinstrey, 1961
1. Baseball or football at Redwing Lane playground with Tommy Toscano, Richie Cianci, the Mitchko brothers, Mike Fitzgibbon, Russ Seymour, Barbu Alim, Dicky Yaw, Leo Grant, Henry Glazer, the Gateley brothers, David Reavis, Russ Cistaire, Butch Rand, David Rosenberg, and Mark Scope (he was wrongfully blamed for burning down the wooden handball court, we think.)
2. Azalea Road pool with same dudes.
3. In the winter time, sledding in the sump behind the Azalea Road pool (Toscano never went; wasn’t into the breaking and entering thing)
4. West Village Green playing stickball waiting for the truck to arrive with our bundles of Newsday.
5. After October 1958, 8 Meadow Lane.
Note: I never had the opportunity to get to Whelan’s on Hempstead Turnpike. By the time detention was over, everyone was usually gone.

Frank Barning, 1960
1. DAHS gym, playing basketball
2. North Village Green, playing baseball with the Natives and harassing girls
3. Azalea Road pool
4. Dances in the old gym at Division, music on 45-RMP records
5. Mal Karman's house

Jon Buller, 1961
1. My room
2. Long walks
3. Azalea Road pool
4. Caroline’s Restaurant (North Village Green)
5. Sid’s Deli (Hempstead Turnpike)

Ann Crescenzo Fazzino, 1961
1. North Village Green - Artie would make us chocolate egg creams and toasted corn muffins after school and the bowling Alley
2. Azalea pool - Every summer all day long we spent at the pool
3. Roller Skating Rink
4. Whelan's Drug store on Division
5. Our home at 203 Kingfisher Road. It actually was sort of a hang out. My brother Jim brought tons of different guys home every day. And I did the same.

Arnie Galeota, 1961
1. North Village Green bowling alley
2. Whalen's drug store on corner of Hempstead Tpke and Division Avenue
3. Caruso's
4. Diplomat Cafeteria on Hempstead Tpke. near St. Bernard's church
5. Jahn's

Pete Weiss, 1963
1. America on Wheels skating rink
2. Jahn's
3. The Meadowbrook Theater, the site of a couple of personal "firsts," which for now will remain undescribed
4. The "sump" next to Wisdom Lane Jr. High, which almost always had a section of chain link conventiently cut for easy (but forbidden) access.
5. Nunley's Happyland/Jolly Roger at Hicksville Road and Hempstead Tpke. (this seems a little weird in retrospect, but my friends and I used to ride our bikes from our neighborhood - Hunt Lane and Gardiners Avenue - down to the Jolly Roger and get plates of sauerkraut - it was free - for a quick lunch, because whatever change we had we spent on the arcade games. Many of these had to do with weapons - machine guns, rifles, bombers, submarines, etc. - which seemed perfectly normal at the time. There was even one called "Slap the Jap," and another that was a submarine that torpedoed ships with Japanese flags on them. These were leftovers from WW II days, but also didn't seem out of place in the mid to late 1950s, especially for guys who watched war movies.)