This is an excerpt from Mosaic: Past Time in Hell’s Kitchen, Michael Slattery’s memoir, oral history and love letter to Hell’s Kitchen, spotlighting the voices and memories that shaped the neighborhood’s past and continue to echo through it in the present. Today, Joe Libonati — better known to locals as Joe the Parkie — shares his memories of working in DeWitt Clinton Park from the 1950s to the 80s.
DeWitt Clinton Park is located in the northwestern corner of Hell’s Kitchen at W52-W54th Street between 11th and 12th Avenues. Photo: Phil O’Brien
I worked in DeWitt Clinton Park from 1956 to 1982 and everyone called me Joe the Parkie. That is how everyone in the neighborhood knew me, no one knew my last name — Libonati.
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Michael Slattery is a lifelong Hell’s Kitchen native whose memories of tenement life, street hockey, and the bustling West Side piers inspired his book Mosaic: Past Time in Hell’s Kitchen. Drawing on decades of interviews he recorded with neighbors, Slattery weaves together oral history and memoir to preserve the stories of a community in flux. Though retired, he continues to see his work as an act of love for the neighborhood he has always called home.