Stoop Stories

Street games, horseplay, sunning stray cats and sneaking up on grandma: a lifelong Brooklynite recalls summertime moments as seen from her family’s front porch.

Photos by Gabrielle Sierra

It was a hot August day during the summer of 1993 and we were bored. My brother Joshua and my cousin Jonathan were five years old and I was nine.

“Let’s sneak up on grandma,” I suggested. My younger family members agreed, as they did with whatever I suggested. So goes the power of being the oldest.

I guess I really should have known better. A nine-year-old should know that scaring an old lady is not the most constructive way to pass a summer day. But I didn’t. Or if I did I didn’t care. In fact I wouldn’t come to that conclusion for another handful of years.

Sneaking up on grandma was a game we played a lot because it was so easy. My grandparents lived on the upper floor of our two-family home in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, and during the summer everyone left their doors open. It made sneaking up and down the outside steps and into their house an obvious choice for entertainment. Plus we got to feel like spies. Or burglars. And who wouldn’t want to feel like they…