A few months ago during a Zoom meeting with some members of my family, one of my brothers told me that he had found video walking tours of old neighborhoods in Jersey City on YouTube.

I hadn’t been back to my old home in years, and even then I spent very little time there. I never got the chance to walk around all the old places I knew growing up.

Every so often I get homesick and get the urge to go back and see some of the places where I spent my childhood. So I started searching through some of the videos to see how detailed they were and exactly which streets the tour encompassed.

The first video was entitled “Walking Downtown Jersey City,” which was where I spent more than 25 years of my life. It was a nice walking tour, but it wasn’t what I was looking for.    

Since I moved away from Jersey City in 2000, there has been monumental growth in the city, especially along the waterfront in the Downtown area. That first video focused on all the new stuff - high-rise luxury condominiums, expensive restaurants, exclusive retail shops and shopping malls. None of that was there when I left, and it had little meaning to someone like me who spent so many years in the older historic neighborhood.  

I tried another video. It was pretty much the same thing. A lot of the video kept going back to views of the New York skyline. For some reason, whoever shot the first two videos was more interested in what a tourist might want to see while visiting the city for the first time.

Not me. I wanted to see the places I remembered.

The third video was better. It was a tour of Grove St. and Newark Ave. - an area that many people consider the heart of Downtown. It still had some of the stores I remembered, and the buildings were mostly the same - except for the absence of graffiti. Things were a lot cleaner since the area had gotten so popular with New Yorkers - thanks to the Path Station at the center of the intersection. That’s the location of the train that takes people from Jersey City to Manhattan.

But even that video was missing what I really wanted to see - my neighborhood around Third St., Jersey Ave. and Erie St. That’s about six blocks away from Grove St. and Newark Ave., and unfortunately for me, not many visitors would be interested in that block.

There were no major businesses or famous buildings there. No tourist attractions. It was just brick multi-story row houses, a couple of tall trees and my grammar school - St. Mary’s. It’s also the street where I lived from first grade until I was in my twenties.

That’s the place I remember best. The neighborhood kids would play touch football, stickball and a game called bottlecaps right in the street. Or we’d sit on someone’s stoop and play Stratego, checkers, rummy, poker or hearts for fun. Most of my closest friends lived on the same block or less than two blocks away.

I knew there was little chance that someone would walk down my old block and make a video.

But someone did.

The video started out showing some of the businesses on Newark Ave., but instead of heading towards the newer waterfront area, it turned onto Jersey Ave. and headed into the old residential neighborhoods.

It went past the old furniture store on the corner of First St., past the former Bosco’s Bar that my father frequented. A moment later it passed by what used to be a parking lot on Second Street where we played stickball against the kids in the next neighborhood. That lot was no longer empty. There were newer town houses in the same spot.

The video took a turn onto Second St. and headed east. It went past the schoolyard next to St. Boniface Church, the only place with basketball hoops in the neighborhood. Right after that it passed the house where the Mackey family lived. (Lots of kids grew up there.)

At the next corner was St. Mary’s Church where I went to church and was an altar boy for a few years. And across Erie St. was historic Grace Church. Next to that church was a little building that once housed Chow’s Candy Store. That was one of the places the kids would buy a soda or packs of baseball cards for a nickel.

There were lots of those types of stores in the neighborhood - Jim’s on Jersey Ave. and Third St., and the “Spanish Store,” on Erie St. near the former Public School #2. It was owned by a schoolmate’s father, and we used to buy chocolate-covered marshmallow cookies there, a rubber ball for stickball - and baseball cards.

There was Hermie’s on Grove St. He also sold baseball cards, but the neighborhood was a bit rougher, so I never went there alone.

The video continued down Erie St., then turned up Third St., the block where I grew up. Whoever was doing the video did the right thing. They kept stopping and turning the camera to take in both sides of the street.

All the buildings were the same. And as it passed each one, the names of the kids on the block who I grew up with came into memory: Paulie and Thomas Petruski, Hector Miranda, Ronald Karpowicz, Greg and Michael Kemelek, Walter Bauer and the three Muniz brothers - Nathan, Danny and David.

Then it went by our old house next to the big old brick church. I paused the video and looked at the place that still has the fondest memories for me. It’s where my parents, my four brothers and two sisters spent a big part of our lives.

It still looks the same.

I know chances are none of the people I grew up with are still in the neighborhood. But it felt wonderful to take that trip through the neighborhood.

And now with the whole thing on video, I know I can take a walk down Memory Lane anytime I feel like it.