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shepard-ram · 3 years

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Hello I'm light anon and i bring you the first chapter of an au i started awhile ago with the help of Ender anon (hi love you/p) , the supernatural au named Abnormalities and its very long

Abnormalities

Chapter One - Phasmophobia 2.5k words

:readmore:

“Prove it then.”

Of course, Sap and Dream’s arguments always lead to some sort of challenge. Ever since you met them in middle school, it’s been like that. Sap would say something, Dream would fire back because Sap was clearly wrong in his eyes, and it would spiral from there. Today’s topic of debate: The existence of the paranormal. Specifically, ghosts.

What sparked it? A cheesy horror film you picked out for the monthly movie night. Your stereotypical ghost film with lazy jump scares with bad effects and acting.you only bought it so you four could laugh at it. You Guys laud sprawled on the couch while Sap took up the floor. All was well, Until Sap proclaimed that real ghosts wouldn’t be that shitty. Dream, heavily disagreed that ghosts even existed. George didn’t take a side but you backed Sap up. The world is to weird not to have ghosts in it.

”Oh absolutely.” Sap nodded, agreeing with your assessment.

Dream rolled his eyes “Sure, sure, just how are you going to prove me wrong? There isn’t a ‘haunted building’ anywhere in town.”

At that moment George decided to speak up “What about the old willbeck farm?, the one a couple miles out of town. I always heard it was haunted by a kid or something.”

“That stupid place? Those were just stories are parents told us to keep us from trespassing.”

You shrugged. “It’s a start.”

Next thing you know, you and sap blew your paychecks on ghost hunting equipment. You ordered the basics, an EMF meter, a good camera, a thermometer, you even bought a ‘Spirit box’ and some smudge sticks, all too spite Dream who complained that you were being scammed.

You both ended up begging George to use his car to load up your equipment as he was the only one to have a large enough car for your equipment. He relented after a day of relentless begging.

The Willbeck farm was a 40 minute drive from your home, which left a lot of room for discussion.

“You three are idiots.”

You leaned forward to poke your head over the passenger seat. “You didn’t have to come, you know. You could have stayed back and do boring things like dressing up patches or something.”

He turned his head with narrowed eyes. “And make sure you guys didn’t fake your ‘proof?’ Not a chance.”

You laugh. “You’ll be the first one we feed to the ghosts.”

You bickered back and forth until George announced that they had finally made it. Not even seconds after he pulled into the clearing in front of the property, you and Sap practically kept out of the car and rushed to the trunk to get your gear. After distributing equipment amounts your group you took your first look at the house

The Farmhouse was much larger than you remembered reading about. It was a huge two story red building with a faded white trim. The word around it looked like it had been rotting for years and it definitely smelt like rot. AMany of the windows were broken in, and the glass was a gross brown color. The roof had some holes in it and the gutters had been ripped from the roof and laid scattered around the outside. A large barn was off to the side and had the same kind of wear to it. The entire property was surrounded by a torn up wire fencing, which had a lot of crows perched, eyeing you intensely. The Erie feeling the house gave off was intensified by the soft sound of the wind and the loud crow caws.

If houses had a criteria to be haunted, this one checked off all the boxes

Sap let out a low whistle before lightly nudging your arm “Dude, this place makes your home look tiny!”

You scoffed at that. Sure your rented home was small, but was cheap enough to pay for while you worked your way through community college. A one bedroom, one bath, a combined kitchen/living space, all on top of a double garage was all you needed.

It was a slow walk to the porch, all of you hesitant to actually set foot in the run down building. The steps creaked under you, and the wooden boards sunk slightly. You were at the head of the group, so you were the first one inside, taking a couple steps in the large foyer. It was full of outdated furniture, something you’d see out of the early 90’s. A large staircase sat to the left, hugging the wall as it pushed into the upstairs. There was a door to your right, leading into what you believe was the kitchen.

You held the camera up and you got a good shot of the room, if there were no ghosts you’d at least have some cool photos.

The four of you spread out into the room observing every corner of it. Sapnap was the one armed with the EMF reader. He waved the hand held device trying to get something, anything to read. He did manage to get one, honing onto a stuffed cow that was nestled into the couch.

It was dusty, like everything else in the room. Otherwise it was in semi good condition. It was... cute. Too cute to just be sitting in this old farmhouse for the rest of time. Dream had other opinions.

“That means nothing. It’s just a cow.”

To be fair, it was the first time either of you had used this kind of equipment. You decided to put it in your bag, hoping to study it later. It could be a fluke, but you guys couldn’t bow down now! The hunt has only just begun.

Every room on the first floor was subject to an EMF and Temperature checks. Dream and George fucked around while you and Sap scanned for anything that could be more than a fluke, the only thing that could be found was in the kitchen. A small carved statue of a crow.

It gave off the same readings as the cow plush, so perhaps it wasn’t a fluke. You found it sitting on the open windowsill, it was so life-like you almost mistake it for a living crow. Something was telling you that it was probably the oldest thing in the house. You gently placed it in your bag with the cow, another piece to your growing collection.

You took a moment to glance out the window. There were way too many crows sitting on the wire fence to be normal. It was the beginning of summer, so crows even migrate?

With the first floor cleared, you lead the charge upstairs. The floor boards only got louder with every step. You quietly asked whatever prime deity was watching that neither of your group would fall through the floor. The whole house felt unstable.

The top of the stairs lead you to a Hallway. It was small and only had two doors and at the end of it stood a large magnificent bookshelf.

You took the first door on the left accompanied by George while Sap and Dream opted to poke around in the hallway, formally splitting the group for the first time.

The room wasn’t very Large, nor could you tell what it was supposed to be used for as pretty much everything was covered with sheets of some kind. There were a couple of uncovered boxes laying on top of things, so it wasn’t completely boring. A couple of minutes of scavenging later, George called for your attention.

“Look at this” George presented you a beautiful lute from one of the few uncovered boxes. It was crafted out of a dark wood and had what you thought was engravings of fish along the sides. How old was this thing? Was it even usable?

“Let me see!” You asked, setting down the camera before making a grabby motion towards the lute, which was met with a questioning look from the Brit. “I want to see if it’s in tune.”

He decided that it was a good enough answer before handing over the old thing. You strummed the strings, and it sounded surprisingly good, despite the cloud of dust that came off it. You paused for a brief moment before playing a quick melody, just a song you played back in middle school for a recital. You hummed along until yelps from outside and many thumps.

You quickly set the Lute down and follow George out the door, fearing that something had gotten your two friends. However, instead of a gory mess, you saw Dream standing holding a book, while a whole pile of them at his feet, a few inches away from the bookshelf.

“The shelves just collapsed on themselves.” He quietly said. The look on his face was puzzled, like he was still trying to figure out what had happened.

“Or maybe,” Sap started. “The ghost doesn’t like you touching his stuff.”

“I’m keeping it then, the ghost doesn’t need it.”

“What’s the title of it?” You asked as you fake over to view the damage. Dream opened the book and flipped through it.

“It’s old, There isn’t a title nor is it in English, old English I think.”

What was such an old book doing in a relatively modern house? You shake the thought away and motioned for Dream to give it to you. “I’ll hold onto it, I want to see if I can get it translated.” Another treasure for your growing collection.

You turned back to check on George, he wasn’t next to you, instead he was messing with the final door, seeming to unjam the lock and push into the room. You decided to grab the lute and take it as a keepsake.

Picking it up again made your head feel... loud. You couldn’t tell which thoughts were yours and which were intruding. A pair of eyes were watching you somehow but the room was empty. Panic rose in your chest, your heart was beating so so loud. A cold hand touched your shoulders, yet you couldn’t tell if it meant you harm or not.

“Hey... are you okay?”

And it stopped. Everything was clear again. You turned your head to look back seeing Sap poke his head through the door. “You’ve been standing here for a while.”

You nod, “Yeah yeah... we should- we should stop splitting up.”

You’d only find out later that the Lute has the same effects that the other two objects did.

The house search was a bit of a bust. The only ‘Supernatural’ experience you had was the EMF meter going off and the strange experience with the lute which you opted not to tell your friends about, writing off as the Erie nature of the house getting to you.

Finding nothing else interesting, you took one last look at the entrance room before stepping out. You feel a weird sense of longing, something pulling at you not to go. You tried to shake off the feeling and you walked back to the car, just to put all your goodies away in the trunk.

All that was left on your to-do list was to check the outside area and the barn. Being the person that you are, you went straight to the barn. They boys could handle the rest of the property alone. alone The building had no doors you waltzed right though the entryway. Despite never actually being in a barn, it looked right to you.

It was devoid of any livestock, but there was Hay everywhere. Light shined through the holes in the ceiling, making the room clear enough. The soft blue liquid that was spread across the hay-

Wait. What?

Doing a second take revealed that the whole barn has some weird blue goo smeared everywhere. It looked too Fresh to be painted, it looked wet. There didn’t seem to be a set trail, just pools of it. You found most of it by a ladder that led up to a new section of the barn.

The blue substance was dripping from the loft of the barn.

It had to be.

And you were right! Sort of. Finally dragging yourself up the old latter not really minding the blue that now stained your clothes, you found the source.

He was standing- floating?- there, as if waiting for someone. The man was tall, taller than you or any of their friends, absolutely towering over you. His entire pallet was muted, his skin was fucking Grey. His attire was strange too. Something out of a renaissance fair. What was the strangest was that he was translucent and bleeding? Out of a cut on his chest. That blue substance oozing out of his stomach onto the floor boards.

He smiled.

“You found me, little songbird.”

The temperature drop had you shivering, but that also could have been from the absolute terror of seeing a real ghost.

That loud feeling returned in full force, directing your attention onto him.. You had to go. But it was like you were frozen place. He moved to cup your face, cooing as he looked you over.

“It’s not polite to touch things that aren’t yours, yet you handle them with so much care... I don’t mind.”

He wasn’t acting out of malice, thank prime, but It didn’t make it any less uncomfortable. He was too close.

“.... pretty songbird. My pretty songbird.”

A beat past before you could hear your friends calling for you. Your head cleared for a moment so you took it and ran. Practically flying down the ladder and hurting yourself in the fall. Ignoring the pain you booked it to the car right past Dream and Sap, who were standing by the entrance to the barn.

“We- We have to go. Now. Please we need to... to...” you couldn’t really tell what you were saying, everything was moving too fast. Great Prime, that was a real ghost. You- You were talking to a ghost. A Ghost called you a Song bird.

A Ghost.

That ended your hunt right there and then. You weren’t in a fit state to keep going. Especially not when you’re covered in... whatever this blue stuff is. You’d come to find later that you had a blue hand print on your face, right where the man had cradled your face.

You’re so out of it, you don’t realize when your friends are guiding you up the stairs to your home. One of them says something about leaving the loot in your garage, but you don’t really care. This is a future problem. You give a small thank you and a swift goodbye before passing out the second you feel your pillow under you.

So deep in sleep you don’t realize that your tiny home has a few new residents wandering about.

Or the fact that one of them watched over you as you slept

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I AM SIMPLY ASHAMED OF HOW LONG IVE BEEN PUTTING THIS OFF IT WAS A CRINE TO NOT LET Y'ALL SEE THIS EARLIER. LIGHT YOU'VE DONE A FANTASTIC JOB AAUAUGGG

#submission #tw. yandere #c: dream #c: george #c: sapnap #c: wilbur #💡 anon

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sasukyss · 3 years

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Here we go

List of all my animals (dead and alive)

Ok, in gonna divide this into sections depending on the species of the animals, cause I had a fuckton of them.

CATS

1. Marie (dead): she was ginger and white and I think she might of been our first cat? Idk I don't really remember but I do know that we picked her up off the street lol.

2. Beauty (alive): she's our oldest animal! She's white and we've had her for around 10 years and we got her from our plumbers.

3. Milly (dead): she was Beauties daughter, she was a tabby cat. Milly only died a few years ago, she was also one of our longest living animals. Fun fact about her, she got shot and lost feeling in her tail but she lived! She died of feline leukemia lol

4. Molly (dead): Milly's sister, she was also tabby but with darker colouring, I think she got poisoned by one of our neighbours. She was sweet

5. Spider (???): one of Milly's litter of kittens, he was a dark tabby colour and he hated my entire family and he ran away the moment he could

6. Tiger (???): another one of Milly's, he was like Spider but lighter in colouring. He also hated us and ran away.

7. Ariel (???): part of Milly's litter, I named her Ariel cause she had a ginger bit on her head lmao. She hated my entire family and also ran away

8. Lucky (dead): he was my trans cat!! He wasn't really part of Milly's litter cause we found him when he was a newborn in the rubbish, but Milly happened to be feeding the kittens and she took him. He was ginger and white.

9. Angel Milk (???): she was black and white and we only had for a bit and then we dropped her off at this house cause we couldn't look after her and then we never saw her again.

10. Hope (dead): we found her in another village when she was a kitten, sadly she was a carrier of feline leukemia so she died of it and also gave it to my other cat who died a few years later. Hope was white with random patches of tabby fur everywhere

11. Buttercup (dead): A SWEETHEART. She was tabby with super long fur and she was sweet and she had two kittens and I loved her a lot

12. Guppy (dead): one of Buttercups litter, he was super long and he had long dark tabby fur.

13. Kevin (dead): Guppy's brother, he was my neighbours cat and I think he only died a few years ago. He had the same fur and colour as his brother.

14. Biscuit (???): He was ginger and one of my favourite cats, super sweet and I loved him a whole lot

15. Mopsy (dead): we got him along with his sister from our school when he was a kitten. He was super big and had dark tabby fur.

16. Roberta (alive): HOMOPHOBIC BITCH. She's so grumpy and I hate her, I actually have photos of her so here

17. Arya (alive): gay ass cat. We thought he was a girl at first cause he was so pretty but turns out he's a dude and hes super gay

18. Arnold (alive): my beloved, I love you sm. He's great and I'd die for him. He's also bisexy

19. Lucy (alive): BABY PLS COME HOME. She's not dead but she's in England with my brothers, I miss you 💔 here's a pic of her assaulting her child

20. Lucy's litter of kittens whose names I only remember two of so here's a photo of them (all alive minus 1):

DOGS

1. Rocket (dead): stupid and dumb. He was small and was light brown with darker colours on his snout and legs.

2. Daphne (dead): my beloved, you may have been dumb as shit but you cared and thats what counts. She was super scruffy and she was black with light brown on her snout and belly.

3. Daphnes first litter of puppies that was like 6 and idk what happened to any of them cause my mom gave them away at my school and these kids just took them home and I nev r saw any of them again.

4. Fred (alive): we called her Fred cause we thought she was a dude but suprise, she wasn't and she had 13 puppies cause my dad dumped her in this village in the mountains and we found her again cause my uncle bought a house there and we had to check on it. Oh yeah she was also coloured like a Dalmatian lol.

5. Marbles (dead): honestly I don't remember where we got him all I know is that we had him and his brother when they were puppies and one day we found him dead. He was white with brown patches.

6. Domino (alive): my neighbours took him in, he was Marbles brother and he grew up to be fucking huge. Hes white with brown patches.

7. Goldy (alive): part of Daphnes second litter of puppies, Daphne had like 7 but one got killed by Fred who had her puppies at the same time. Yes I was there and saw her with it in her mouth. It wasn't fun. She's called Goldy cause she had blonde fur lmao

8. Tinkerbell (dead): looked like a Yorky but longer and scruffier, she could jump super high and she got run over by my neighbour

9. May (dead): she didn't last long, she was white and was a puppy and she also got ran over by my neighbour

10. Annabelle (alive): she looks like a rat, she's from this litter of puppies we found near one of our neighbours houses, shes white with black patches.

11. Toby (dead): he was brown and big and he would always break out of the dog house. He got hit by a car and it broke his spine so they had to put him down.

HAMSTERS

We had two generations of them, the first batch had babies and thats how we figured out that if you touch baby hamsters their mother will eat them cause she doesn't recognize their scent. So in total 8 hamsters (gen. 1 and 2) and some like 6 babies.

FISH

We had a fucktonnn, and they'd die every few months so we'd got back to this festival where we got them. I think the ones we had the longest was one of mine (Aurora) and one of my brothers (Stitch).

CHICKENS

Ok so we had three gens of them

Gen 1: I don't remember a lot but ik the rooster was called Scooby-Doo (my younger brothers choice). Also they got killed by this thing called a genet that Fred ended up killing

Gen 2: again idkkk, ik they were black and they hated these other chickens we had. Also they ate baby mice

Gen 3: they were this single rooster and these two chickens, the rooster kept getting beat up by the ducks so we had to move him away. Just so you know chickens don't die pretty.

DUCKS

Yes we had fucking ducks, cause my brothers a dumbass and wanted some for a reason

Roberto (alive): idkk ik hes the one that actually lived and we need up giving him to one of my mom's friends.

Roberta (dead): idk what happened to this one I didn't really care tbh.

RABBITS

Snowy (dead): ok so we called Snowy sumo rabbit cause she was fucking huge and albino. Also funny story, but we thought Snowy was a dude so we would get her other rabbits but she ended up killing them all, so we eventually figured out Snowy was a girl so we got her a dude rabbit, and yeah she got pregnant but she also killed the dude rabbit, so yeah...

She had like two litters of them and they all died lol.

Carrots (dead): I miss you 💔 super great, even if she didn't like anyone. She also had kid rabbits and these ones actually lived. Also she was orange so that's why we called her carrots.

Thumper (dead):, he was a dwarf rabbit, he was black and white and he was the father of these other two rabbits we had.

Bruce (alive): idk why he's called Bruce, I thinks he's black and white but I don't remember

Jean (alive): again, idk about the name. This one's white and brown I think.

BIRDS

Ok so we had one budgie which we called Peanut and I don't remember what happened to him, and then we had two lovebirds and I'm pretty sure we named one after my uncle cause the bird was bald like him. Yes they are both dead.

#long post #god this took fucking ages #tw animal death #i dont go into detail but yeah theres mentions of dead puppies and kittens and dogs being run over lol #never doing this again

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lalunangel · 5 years

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So our mom used to cheat on our dad around ab the times we were conceived. THOT! anyway. So my “dad” is this tall crack head guy.. and my sister is my full on blood sister but her “dad” is a black dude my mom fooled around with to piss our dad off and her parents off (racist) and ever since our mom told us this at first we were p sad and we ended up going and getting dna tests bc i NEEDED to know i was my dads daughter and if i wasn’t i planned on paying him back for every ounce of kindness he’d shown me.. but i was his and i cried and i was excited BOI! same with my sister it was... great relief. my dad told us before we got our results though “Even if you aren’t my daughters you love me so much and chose to be with me always. not for my money cause i have none. not for the food i cook because i’m broke and cant buy anything. you love me for me. for the family i’ve shown you. even if you aren’t my daughters i know you will still chose me to be your father and how could i let go of two perfect girls like you” and ever since then i’ve never doubted his undying love for me even when we argued. also, i remember a lot of the talks we had with our dad.. i even remember his last words.. sometimes i want to write them down so i won’t ever forget but the context of his love and emotion shows up when i do things i used to do with him. like fishing? i remember him telling me my knot was really good and then getting frustrated bc he couldn’t mimick the actions. reading a book? “Your nose is so far in that book i thought you were brown nosing it” then letting him borrow that same book “I see why you brown nosed it so hard. it’s good” sharing music “IM A THUG ANGEL! A STRAIGHT THUG! THESE GUYS DONT KNOW!” and i know it sounds all odd coming from the same man but my dad had a different outlook on life every day and he could change who he was to fit the mood. he could make everyone laugh (out of discomfort who tf was that guy) and i remembered having to explain a lot that he was just weird like that and to pay him no real mind. Meeting my friends he was really sweet but i HATED introducing people to him bc he’d mean mug them and then me size them up and then slouch and say “cool” and walk away and i’d be so paranoid because “cool” meant he found something he doesn’t like about you :))))) and later that day my dad would come sit down on my bed or in the kitchen lean over the counter and go “so he was nice but ...” and SO MANY ROASTING SESSIONS FOR THE REST OF EVER! if i ever got mad at someone i’d show him a picture of them to get his honest opinion and 100% of the time even if i wasn’t upset with them hed roast them he might have liked that boy i was in love with but tbh one kiss and one hug isn’t enough to erase all the messed up things he used to say. he also used to tell my sister and i that we couldn’t go back to not eating like we did when we lived with mom.. because “your heads are too big and you’ll look like bobble heads and i can’t have bobbbbyyyyy daughters that’s weird”

i know this was meant to be mostly funny but this lowkey made me think of everything that my sister and i share and how none of it or us belongs to her... everything we are to this day belongs to him. We both play violin because of his support. Ukulele because he encouraged it. We both took three years of choir.. because he went to our concerts to cheer us on. We participate in fine arts because it’s a passion we had and our dad instead of saying “ew gross get into something that’ll give you a future” he would say “Awesome we can make a future out of this together.” i told my dad i loved to write and he encouraged my book even though it wasn’t the best at the time. now it’s pretty good and i’m on chapter two (mostly brainstorming how i want it to play out) and i go read to him because i want to know... i want him to know that just because i don’t paint doesn’t mean i’ve stopped that creative flow. I PROMISED TO WRITE YOU A BOOK! And i don’t ever break my promises. except that one where i said i’d eat an oyster. over my dead body some sea food is good but you got me 50 shades of fucked up old man if you think i’m going to eat that. Also i hen it came to Architecture my dad supported it and bought me small model scales of buildings to make and he tried to encourage me to make my own but ;-; i made a theme park ;-; and i hated it so i was like SCRATCH THAT! but he’d learn about buildings and he’d take me on drives around town to tell me about it. who built it. who designed it. when. why. has it been remodeled. EVERYTHING. my dad would find my likes and he’d immediately work to understand. a parent that nurtured my sisters and my own growth. my sister promised to learn how to play piano so we could play music together for my dad but when he died the idea of furthering our growth on anything was hard and i feel like all of the encouraging words he said left our brains and we act like... it’s never been said sometimes. i can still sight read music sheets for violin but when my sister brings hers home and offers to let me play so i can get rid of the rust in my fingers... i tell her no and i watch her. i feel like if i touch a violin or a ukulele or even a guitar i’ll cry... i wanted to learn so badly how to play and do these things bc of him but when you died i just wanted to work and stop enjoying life. i stopped looking for new music for a good long while and now that i’m on the prowl again i’ve found some amazing ones you’d love to hear. time stands still for no man but i think it stood still when you died.

we still carry on all our old jokes. i still call her a frump when she’s mad and we laugh. i still clean the outside of your car bc :) the inside smells like you and i just DONT WANNA OPEN IT! i pulled the weeds from your garden and put tomatoes and bell peppers and they were REALLY good btw so thank you. i plan on moving even closer to home and i have everything ready to start growing more stuff in your garden. i hope you don’t mind. i want mom to feel like you’re still alive and well. so i picked up a bunch of your hobbies and habits to kill my useless not able to paint hate reading some sad books time. i love you sm. you still live in everything we do. even if you don’t.

#<3 #i miss my dad #my dad #my sister #my family #funny shit #inside jokes #im ready ti be with you but also #im getting better #so #SO LONG #FAREWELL #I HATE TO SAY GOODNIGHT #but im going back to sleep bc its raining #also #i make hella hotchocolate mow #bc it makes me #think ab you

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chiseler · 7 years

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AL SMITH’S LOG CABIN

The lowest East Side, between the Brooklyn Bridge (completed in 1883) and the Manhattan Bridge (1909), was once a maze of narrow streets lined with row houses, corner saloons and groceries, warehouses, pickle factories, stables. The heart of it was an Irish and Italian working class neighborhood of large families who attended the venerable St. James church and school. It was not a slum or a ghetto, and the residents would have been highly insulted to hear it called that. With the construction of the bridges, followed by high-rises and the FDR Drive in the twentieth century, many of the old streets, and the buildings on them, disappeared.

There’s not much of Oliver Street left, just a couple of run-down blocks in Chinatown between Chatham Square and Madison Street, where it dead-ends. It preserves a row of humble, three-story brick houses, currently looking rather forlorn and exhausted, showing every day of their more than a century’s existence. A brass plaque on the wall of 25 Oliver identifies it as the Alfred E. Smith House, listed on the National Historic Register. Al didn’t grown up there, as is sometimes averred. But he lived there a long time and raised his own kids there as a young politician. Had he succeeded in his bid to become the first Irish Catholic President of the United States, 25 Oliver Street could have become a site of American mythology to rival Abe Lincoln’s log cabin. But Al didn’t make it, 25 Oliver is in bad need of a paint job, and today’s mostly Chinese neighbors pass it without a glance.

His father, also named Al Smith, grew up on a block of Oliver Street closer to the river that no longer exists. Al Sr. was a brawny, handsome, wide-mustached working man, a cartman, or hauler of goods, with a horse-drawn truck. After his first wife died he married a girl who’d grown up near the stables at Dover and Water Streets where he kept his horses. (Her parents had come from Ireland on a clipper ship of the famous Black Ball Line that pioneered the Liverpool to New York run. They found rooms to let three blocks from where they stepped ashore and never ventured farther into America.) Al Jr. was born at 174 South Street on December 30 1873, above a little grocery store. He grew up as the Brooklyn Bridge was built. In old photographs it vaults right over the rooftop of the small, narrow house. That whole block has long since disappeared.

As Al remembered it later the waterfront was the neighborhood kids’ playground – there weren’t any others. The rigging of the ships at the docks was their jungle gym. They dove for green bananas that dropped over the side, and bought their pets from sailors who’d carried them up from South America and the Caribbean. At one point Al kept a goat, four dogs, a parrot and a monkey in the South Street attic. He never lost his classic New Yawk accent, salting his speech with dese, dem and youse like a true Bowery Boy.

In 1886 Al Sr. worked himself to death at the age of forty-six, when Al Jr. was twelve. His mother took a job at an umbrella factory and brought home piece-work. Al worked after school delivering newspapers and helping his sister run their landlady’s candy store in the basement where they now lived on Dover Street. He left the St. James school at the end of the seventh grade, when he was fourteen, and never went back. As a teen he worked a number of jobs, including twelve-hour days, six days a week, at the Fulton Fish Market. One of his tasks was to stand in a lookout and watch for the fishing fleet pulling into the harbor. You could tell how much of a haul they were carrying by how low they rode in the water. Later, when fellow politicians, who were mostly lawyers, bragged to him about matriculating from the U of This or That, he’d reply that he graduated from FFM. He grew up quick. By fifteen he was frequenting the neighborhood’s saloons, drinking beer, smoking cigars with the other men.

He was still too young to vote when he started hanging out at the Downtown Tammany Club, around the corner from Oliver Street at 59-61 Madison. It had something of the look of a volunteer fire hall. Men from throughout the neighborhood streamed up the wide stairs and under the double-arched entry into the meeting hall where politics was discussed, elections fixed, jobs and favors dispensed. It was later knocked down for the playground of P.S. 1, also known as the Alfred E. Smith School. Tammany was starting to purge itself of its most corrupt scoundrels, and young Al Smith fell in with the reformist wing. This led to his first patronage job as a process-server, tracking people down to hand them summonses and subpoenas.

He came under the wing of Big Tom Foley, for whom nearby Foley Square was named. Foley operated a very popular saloon at Oliver and Water Streets. In her 1956 memoir of her father, The Happy Warrior, Al’s daughter Emily remembered Foley as “a genial, smooth-shaven, moonfaced man” who was very well liked and highly respected in the neighborhood – a dude in the ward, as Ned Harrigan would have said. Although he lived uptown at Thirty-Fourth Street Foley spent most of his time in and around the saloon and was active in local politics and the St. James parish. As he thrived financially and politically he spread his good fortune around the neighborhood, the way a successful Tammany man was supposed to. When Smith was a boy he and other kids would flock around Foley on the street, and he’d hand each a nickel, which seemed like a fortune to them. (Years later, Al would frequent a popular barbershop in the ward, run by an immigrant from Salerno who played Caruso on the Victrola. Bartolomeo’s runty, homely son lathered the customers before his dad shaved them. Al once tipped the kid a nickel. Instead of spending it on a lemon ice or a Charlotte Russe, the boy, Jimmy Durante, saved it as a souvenir.)

In 1903 Foley anointed the twenty-nine-year-old Smith to be the Democrats’ nominee for what was then the Second District of the State Assembly. Smith appeared before a crowd of cheering neighbors and Tammany stalwarts in a suit he’d just ironed in the kitchen of his Peck Slip apartment. His other suit was in mothballs. As the Tammany Democrat candidate he was a shoo-in, handily beating a Republican, a Socialist, and a Prohibition candidate, who got five votes.

Smith spent the next twelve winters as an assemblyman, shuttling from the Lower East Side to Albany, where he’d live during the weeks while the legislature was in session, returning home on weekends. His re-elections were always sure things. The affable guy with the honking voice and the taste for suds and stogies was liked and admired by all his constituents, not just his fellow Micks. Besides Durante, another of his fans was a Jewish teenager from up on Henry Street, Izzy Iskowitz, who volunteered to make sidewalk stump speeches for him at re-election time. They were in effect the first public appearances by the performer later known as Eddie Cantor.

In 1907 Smith moved his family, which would grow to five kids, to 25 Oliver Street, which he rented from the parish; the rectory was next door at 23. Emily recalled that they couldn’t afford many luxuries on her father’s salary of a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, but they weren’t poor. They took summer vacations on the beach at Far Rockaway in Queens, and enjoyed an occasional family dinner at the then-new Knickerbocker Hotel in Times Square, followed by a trip to the nearby Palace Theatre, the flagship of vaudeville houses from the 1910s until vaudeville’s end. On Sunday mornings after church they’d often walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to visit family on Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights. Sunday evenings the Smiths would have friends over, including another young assemblyman, Jimmy Walker, and his (soon to be beleaguered) wife. Jimmy, who’d started out an aspiring Tin Pan Alley songwriter before his father pushed him into politics, would sit at the Smiths’ piano and play songs like his one bona-fide hit, “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?”

Along the way Al Smith began to sport the brown derby that, along with the cigars, became a familiar feature of his public image. He was elected governor in 1918. Emily remembered the children’s wonderment when the family moved from the little house on Oliver Street to the executive mansion in Albany, with its reception room, music room, library, breakfast room, a dinner table that could seat thirty, and nine bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. Plus a small army of servants who magically appeared at the press of a bell. When Smith lost his reelection bid in 1920 and the family returned to Oliver Street, the kids glumly went back to sharing bedrooms and fighting over the two bathrooms.

Smith was briefly convinced his political career was over. Yet that same year, at the Democrats’ national convention in San Francisco, his name was put up for the first time as a possible presidential candidate. As the band struck up “The Sidewalks of New York” (rather than the Ned Harrigan song Smith wanted), the entire convention began to sing along, then waltz in the aisles, and partied for the next hour as the band played one popular tune after another, finally getting to Harrigan’s “Maggie Murphy’s Home.” Ever the skeptic, H. L. Mencken thought it was the free-flowing bootleg bourbon – Prohibition had gone into effect six months earlier – rather than political conviction that got them all going, and in fact Smith was not yet a serious contender. The Democrats nominated Ohio governor James Cox, with Franklin D. Roosevelt as his running mate. Warren G. Harding trounced them.

New Yorkers gave Smith the governor’s mansion back in 1922, and the Smiths moved out of Oliver Street for the last time. In June 1924, the Democrats held their convention at Madison Square Garden. Roosevelt delivered the speech throwing Governor Smith’s brown derby in the ring. Smith and Roosevelt were the most unlikely bedfellows. Smith liked to tell a bitterly humorous story about the first time he’d called on Roosevelt in his mansion back in 1911, and the butler didn’t want to let him in the door. A vast gulf of class and breeding separated the former fishmonger from the upstate aristocrat born with silver spoons in every orifice. Roosevelt had grown up in a household where he was surrounded by German and Scandinavian servants, because his father refused to hire the Irish or Negroes. And he had the upstater’s severe mistrust of anyone associated with Tammany. Yet the two had gotten over their differences and become allies, if not quite friends, working together for reform in the state.

Smith loyalists once again erupted in a prolonged celebration at the end of Roosevelt’s speech, but in fact Democrats at the convention were deeply divided between the urban progressives who backed Smith and the rural and Southern conservatives who were convinced that the nation would never elect an Irish Catholic from Jew Yawk. Smith’s background was in fact a serious drawback at a time when Republicans still characterized Democrats as the party of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.” Like many other New York politicians, Smith had been against Prohibition, which condemned him with its supporters around the country. He was only a mildly liberal Democrat, but any Democrat running in the Republican boom times of the Roaring Twenties was running up a very steep hill. And finally, there was the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had been reborn in the 1910s, riding new waves of xenophobia, racism and anti-communism, and was a much bigger and stronger presence in 1924 than it had ever been. The Klan issued a “Klarion Kall for a Krusade” against Smith should he be nominated.

The convention dragged on for two weeks and more than a hundred ballots. Chairman Cordell Hull passed out a few times from the summer heat – air conditioning was still a way off. Another Lower East Sider, Irving Berlin, was a celebrity observer. He dashed off a campaign song, “We’ll All Go Voting for Al.” It didn’t help. The more conservative John W. Davis got the nomination and went on to lose badly to Calvin Coolidge. (Berlin would soon write a more successful campaign song for Al’s friend, “It’s a Walk-In with Walker.”)

In 1928 the Democrats finally handed Smith their presidential nomination. There were some faint reasons for them to be hopeful. The Klan had peaked and was slipping back into being merely an ugly nuisance on the lunatic fringe. People were tiring of Prohibition and considered it a failed experiment. On the other hand, the nation was still enjoying unprecedented prosperity under the Republicans, except in the farm belt. Farming was a much bigger sector of the economy then than now, and farmers had effectively been in their own depression since the end of World War One. They weren’t likely to be convinced that a guy from New Yawk would do better for them than a Republican. And Smith’s opponent was not just any Republican. He was Herbert Hoover, one of the most popular figures in America at the time, an orphan from Iowa who by hard work and smarts had achieved the American dream of riches and power. He was also known as a great humanitarian, the American who had almost singlehandedly organized a massive food relief program for starving Belgians during the war.

As the campaigns rolled out, Hoover – who was coincidentally the first Quaker candidate – never played the religion card. But the Klan and other anti-Catholic fringe groups did, and so did more mainstream Protestant spokespeople, somberly questioning if a Catholic could be the leader of the country when he owed his allegiance to Rome first. In the end, though, it was probably the combination of Hoover’s popularity and the unprecedented boom times – the big crash wouldn’t come until October 1929 – that sank Smith. He ran as the friend of the little guy at a time when a lot of the little guys, except for those farmers, were doing all right. Hoover gave Smith a severe shellacking, carrying all but eight states. Most galling of all, even the state of New York went for him.

A private citizen again in 1929, Smith accepted a job as president of the corporation that would build the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Empire State Building. Construction proceeded even after the stock market crashed that October, and the building opened in May 1931, with Smith and Governor Roosevelt leading the ceremony. Listeners to the live radio broadcast heard Smith ballyhoo the edifice as “the tallest thing in the world today produced by the hand of man.” His Lower East Side roots still showed in the way he pronounced world woild. To the average New Yorker the building was a towering beacon of optimism in what had become very dark times, but as a business venture it was a bust. Unlike the successful Chrysler Building that had opened in 1930, the Empire State Building had so few tenants signed up that wags nicknamed it the Empty State Building. It would continue to bleed red ink for twenty years.

Despite the thrashing in 1928, Smith entertained hopes for the Democratic nomination again in 1932, which put him at odds with another contender, Roosevelt. Without officially declaring himself, Smith made it clear he’d accept the nomination if offered, and his supporters at the convention were as boisterous and loud as ever. But he’d had his shot. Roosevelt carried the convention, and the two patched up their differences in public so that the Democrats could beat Hoover that fall.

As Roosevelt’s New Deal policies grew more radical in extending federal power during his long presidency, Smith’s opinions grew more conservative and oppositional. He helped found the anti-New Deal, pro-business Liberty League, making him a pariah among Democrats. He even went completely off the reservation to back Republicans Alf Landon in 1936 and Wendell Willkie in 1940. Roosevelt trounced them both. Once America entered the war, however, Smith was one of the commander-in-chief’s most diligent boosters on the home front.

When his wife died in May 1944 Smith went into broken-hearted decline. He died of cirrhosis that October, a couple months shy of his seventy-first birthday. The whole city mourned his passing. Besides the little house on Oliver Street and P.S. 1, you still see his name all over his lowest East Side neighborhood, on a playground, a rec center, and a giant public housing complex.

by John Strausbaugh

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