In a 1999 article in a housing authority publication, Judge Sotomayor recalled celebrating the move by pedaling her tricycle around the “spacious, pristine, white” apartment — right into a wall, leaving an unmistakable black mark. Petrified, 3-year-old Sonia hid under the bed for two hours. “Marring that wall was the single most traumatic event of my childhood,” she was quoted as saying. LIZETTE ALVAREZ  IT was fewer than 100 blocks from their shared apartment in Harlem to the Dyckman Houses in Inwood, but for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and his mother and father, who made the move in 1950, it “was really considered a step up,” he recalled in an interview last week. “We had two bedrooms — for us. We didn’t have to share the kitchen or the bathroom.”  Mr. Abdul-Jabbar, 62, then known as Lew Alcindor, spent his childhood in Building 3 on the fifth floor, leaving the complex only after the University of California lured him west.  Home reverberated with the round-the-clock clatter of the El and the sounds of his father, a transit officer who had gone to Juilliard, playing trombone and piano. From their windows, the family could see the Cloisters rising in the distance.  Doors were kept unlocked as kids bounced from one apartment to the next on rainy Saturdays to watch Laurel and Hardy and Hopalong Cassidy on television. People did the right thing, or “they could force you to leave,” he said. “When kids played on the grass, their parents would get a warning. Friends of mine got spanked sitting on the grass.”  The real bonding took place in Dyckman Park, now called Monsignor Kett Playground, over stickball and stoopball, tag and ringolevio, handball and touch football — “every game imaginable,” Mr. Abdul-Jabbar recalled.  One afternoon, his father took him to the Dyckman courts for an introduction to basketball. “He abused me with his elbow and he said, ‘This is a rough game,’ ” Mr. Abdul-Jabbar said. “I wised up quick and didn’t go there with my dad anymore.”  It was on that slab of concrete that young Lew made his first dunk, in eighth grade, after two years of dogged practice, he said. Not even deep winter kept him and his friends from playing three-on-three, horse and 21. When the court was crusted with ice, they got the park attendant to lend them an “implement” to chop it up and clear it out.  The seven-building complex teemed with immigrants who mixed easily, but outside its walls there were different rules. “North of Dyckman Street was Irish, south of Dyckman was Jewish,” Mr. Abdul-Jabbar remembered. “From the sixth grade on, there was friction with the Irish kids and the kids in the project. The Irish kids looked down on us.”  His mother followed him along the sidewalk through Irish territory to school. When the project kids walked to Little League, “we would meet at a predetermined spot and go as a group,” he said. “That kind of kept the Irish kids at bay.”  It was only a few blocks to St. Jude, the parochial school where he refined his basketball skills. The school harbors some of his best memories. And one of his worst.  A commotion drew his attention out the window of his second-grade classroom. It was Willie Mays, playing stickball with young Lew’s friends. The teacher would not let him out.  “Baseball meant nothing to her,” he said, still incredulous. “By the time I got there, he was gone. I hate her to this day.”  Her name, he said without pause despite the half-century gone by, was Gertrude Doyle. LIZETTE ALVAREZ  “Tom Sawyer in Converse sneakers.”  That’s how Richard Price, 59, author of “Clockers” and “Lush Life,” described his years in the Parkside Houses in the Bronx, from age 1 — when his parents were finally able to move out of his mother’s childhood bedroom — to 18. The bleakness of the Baltimore projects depicted in the HBO series “The Wire,” for which Mr. Price wrote several episodes, is absent from his memories of cheery, chaotic play.  “It was a very functional, blue-collar world,” Mr. Price said. “It did not have the connotation of public housing that public housing has now. All the families were intact. All the fathers were employed.”  Every apartment seemed to have children. “Everybody would sit on a bench and sort of bellow up for people to come down,” he said. “I played handball mostly, one-wall handball. Basketball was more of a big-ticket thing to do. There was touch football on the basketball courts, sometimes at the same time there were basketball games going on.”  All the kids disappeared at the same time for dinner. At the Price apartment, the television was always on and the meal usually came out of a can or two.  “The drink of the evening was soda,” he said. “I don’t know anyone who ever had wine on the table. Everybody was watching ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show.’ The conversation consisted of my mother yelling at us and my father saying, ‘Leave the kids alone.’ ”  Tuesday was his mother’s night to entertain. “I’d go to sleep to the sound of mah-jongg tiles,” he said. “And smoking and coughing.”  Friday nights belonged to Dad, a cabdriver and window dresser. “All I heard was the riffle of a poker deck. It was the same, laughing and cigarette smoke.”  Mr. Price looks back in disbelief at the opportunities for early death by his own doing, starting on the roof.  “The big stupid thing was trying to stay on the outside of the guardrail and get to the next building; that could still wake me up in the middle of the night,” he said. “We also knew how to stop the elevators in between floors and get under the elevator in the elevator shaft. The point of which was, I have no idea. Danger for dummies.”  Rising to a Corporate Perch  It was not all hopscotch-and-shaved-ice idylls. The Baruch Houses on the Lower East Side, where the morning sun was striped by the Williamsburg Bridge and the cries of children lost beneath the roar of elevated trains, opened in 1953 amid dirty alleys and half-demolished buildings. Born in 1958, Ursula M. Burns, was not yet 3 when a group of five teenagers shot and killed a 76-year-old man in the project for $2.60.  “There were lots of Jewish immigrants, fewer Hispanics and African-Americans,” Ms. Burns said in a 2003 interview with The New York Times, “but the common denominator and great equalizer was poverty.”  Ms. Burns, who was named this month as the next chief executive of Xerox, 28 years after joining the company for a summer internship, was traveling overseas last week and unavailable for an interview. She has looked back fondly on growing up on Delancey Street, where her mother, Olga, raised three children alone, taking in laundry and other people’s children for day care.  At Cathedral High School, an all-girls Catholic school on East 56th Street, Ursula excelled in math and made friends.  “Not too many girls mentioned that they lived in projects, because it was on the lower scale,” said Vilma L. Aponte, who graduated with Ms. Burns in the class of 1976 and now lives in Fort Lauderdale. “When people got off the train at a certain spot, you sort of know where they’re going.”  Another classmate, Sonia Y. Devarie, who also grew up in public housing, said the girls spent their lunch breaks in homeroom escaping into the faraway world on “All My Children.”  “Where you are is not who you are,” Ms. Burns said in a 2004 interview with a Rochester newspaper. “We lived in a place where some people thought there was limited opportunity. We never thought that.” MICHAEL WILSON  Be polite. That was a cardinal rule in the 1950s and 1960s at the Elliott-Chelsea Houses in Manhattan. The tricky part was doing it in Ukrainian, Polish or Spanish, depending on which door you knocked on.  “People were from Latvia, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Africa., From everywhere,” said Whoopi Goldberg, 53, the actress and comedian who now is a co-host of the television talk show “The View.” “So you had to be able to say things like, ‘Hello, I’m so and so,’ and ‘May I use the bathroom?’ in every language.”  Before Caryn Elaine Johnson became Whoopi Goldberg, she spent 19 years on the sixth floor of the Chelsea Houses, as it was then known, with her mother, a practical nurse and Head Start teacher, and her older brother. Their two-bedroom place was immaculate — “in case the president came by,” Ms. Goldberg said her mother told her — with the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix competing for wall space with the era’s ubiquitous black velvet clown paintings.  The building bustled with working-class families. Elevators and hallways were clean. Fights were settled mostly with fists. People were proud, but not so proud they refused a hand when they needed it.  “You were never ashamed to bring people home,” Ms. Goldberg said. “We didn’t know we weren’t supposed to do well. We were being taught by our parents that we had it as good as we had it, and we could make it better. People who didn’t have it good were living in the streets, in squalor.”  Out front, children swarmed, clapping out “Miss Mary Mack,” dodging the Double Dutch rope, choosing sides to play ringolevio. Like today, sprinklers cut loose and hydrants poured out in summer. Mister Softee drew the biggest crowds.  Parents were never visible but always present.  “They had eyeballs in the building,” Ms. Goldberg said. “You would look up and see the curtains drawn. But on the stones up in the back there, the eyeballs were looking at you. Someone, somehow, was seeing you.”  The Chelsea Houses of her memory stand in direct contrast to the portrait of urban menace evoked by the word “project” today. “Whenever you look at television or movies, they have these projects there — where elevators don’t work and where things fall apart and where things are in the toilet,” Ms. Goldberg said. “That’s not how I grew up. There has always been great pride in being able to have a place of your own and take care of it. People I grew up with felt the same way.” LIZETTE ALVAREZ  An illustration on May 31 with an article about the many successful people who, like Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, grew up in New York’s public housing projects erroneously included a jazz musician, using information from the New York City Housing Authority. Thelonious Monk grew up in the Phipps Houses, a private housing complex  not the nearby public Amsterdam Houses.
Some of Sonia Sotomayor’s fellow alumni of New York’s housing projects recall growing up in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s in a fairly safe place where doors stayed unlocked.