Of course everyone knew that Sid Luckman was from Brooklyn and that he had attended Erasmus Hall High School and Columbia University before becoming one of the first superstars of the National Football League. To football fans, he was as renowned a home-town boy as Sandy Koufax was to followers of baseball. But until I read R.D. Rosen's new biography of Sid, called Tough Luck, I didn't know that football's first T-formation quarterback was a neighborhood guy, and that his modest childhood home was just four blocks off the route that Stephen Lewin and I took every morning for four years to EHHS. And that his house was just around the corner from the Sears department store where I spent the summer of 1957 pulling down $1.25 large an hour.
The above is a modern picture, drawn from googlemaps. I suspect that the house is not much changed from the way it appeared in the 1930s but that the bars on the windows and front door are later additions. According to Zillow, the House of Sid is 1664 sq. ft. and is now priced at c. $750,000. I'd bet $2500 was the number in the 1930s, when the Luckman family was in residence.
Shouldn't there be a bronze plaque on the property?
It's a measure of the chanciness of the old neighborhood that Sid's father was convicted and imprisoned for a gangland murder and that he died in Sing Sing.
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