By Jessica Mintz
There isn’t a time of day at the north end of Father Fagan Park that someone isn’t saying hello to Gertie Gomez. In the morning, it’s parents hustling their kids to school, crossing Prince St. at MacDougal. Gertie, who seems to be on a first-name basis with everyone in the neighborhood, takes a mother or a father by the arm, and uses her free hand to wave a stern “go slow” to oncoming cars. When it’s safe, they cross together.
In the afternoons, tourists ask directions, drawn to Gertie’s official-looking fluorescent yellow vest and crisp white-and-navy cap. Employees from the corner deli come out when business is slow, rearranging the flowers and chatting a little. Older women from the neighborhood, gossiping on park benches, toss the occasional comment Gertie’s way; sometimes she will sit for a few seconds and join in.
But after those seconds have passed, she’s up and moving again. Her eyes dart toward MacDougal St.; she paces between the park, the deli and the curb.
“My kids are coming soon,” Gertie says. “I make sure the children get over safely — that’s the reason I’m here.”
Gertie, who is in her early 70s, first stood sentry as a crossing guard on this corner 23 years ago, and has been here ever since. She took the job after the printing company she was working for in New Jersey phased out her position.
“I was 49, I didn’t just want to retire. My friend was a crossing guard, and she was going to a different job. She said, ‘Gertie, why don’t you apply?’ ”
The rest, of course, is history. She took a two-week crossing guard training program, and remembers watching a film about how to safely cross children, but really, she says, she just does what comes naturally.
“I raise my hand, and they stop.”
Gertie says things haven’t changed much in the years she’s spent on this corner — not the traffic, not the people. The way she tells it, the only things that have changed are the uniform (the bright fluorescent vest replaced a white crossing guard sash two years ago) and the pay (which has gone from $4.26 an hour when she first started to $10.65, plus health benefits, today). Her hat, which neatly covers her pinned-up gray-and-blond hair and fastens with elastic under her chin, is exactly the same, though she goes through at least two a year. “They get beat up,” says Gertie, sun glinting off her blue earrings.
On a typical day, Gertie works her morning shift, setting up orange safety cones at 7:30, which she stores in the corner deli.
“It’s not a problem,” says Mike Kim, one of the deli employees. “She’s a part of the community as well.” His face lights up when he confirms that she knows him by name. “She’s a well-known person around the neighborhood,” he says.
She works her shift until the kids start school a little after 8, and then darts home to Broome St. and Sixth Ave. for breakfast and a break before the kids come out again for recess at 11.
“They play in the street up there,” she says, gesturing to the cordoned-off block of MacDougal St. that serves as the playground for St. Anthony’s School. She stops home again for quick lunch, and then she’s back on duty in time for dismissal.
There have been no accidents on her watch, but Gomez does say there have been a few close calls. “Sometimes they speed here. I almost got clipped a few times” six or seven years ago, she says, but “most drivers are pretty good.”
About eight years ago, roadwork uprooted the crosswalk that used to run across her corner of Prince St., and it’s never been replaced. “It would be safer if the crosswalk were here,” she says.
Sometimes, though, it’s not drivers who pose the most danger. Once, a man with a large dog called ahead to Gertie that the animal wouldn’t bite, but seconds later she found herself with the dog’s jaws wrapped around her foot. “I like the little dogs,” Gertie says; for the first time, she doesn’t accompany her comment with a smile or a laugh.
But that’s a rare moment. Almost everyone gets a smile from Gertie. Diane Hoody, a mother of two with short blond hair and bright pink lipstick, says she doesn’t remember a school day without Gertie. “Every morning, every day, she greets me, by my first name,” says Hoody. “Rain, shine, cold, hot, she’s always there.
“There are not too many crossing guards Downtown any more,” Hoody says. “I don’t know another one.”
In fact, four crossing guards work in the First Police Precinct, according to police, and they’re hoping to fill a fifth slot soon. There’s another crossing guard for St. Anthony’s, posted at MacDougal and Houston Sts., and two on Chambers St. — one at West St. and one at Greenwich St. — near P.S. 234 and I.S. 89.
Kim, from the deli, says of Gertie, “She’s an icon of this area;” he certainly isn’t kidding. Yesterday morning, Cathy Zaletofsky stopped by the park with a pile of snapshots for Gertie to see — photos from her son’s wedding, a boy that Gertie once “crossed.”
“I know everybody,” says Gertie. “I’m very popular here.”
