By C.J. Sullivan

Crossing Broad Channel
Outsiders beware.

A musician friend of mine, Dennis Bram, once told me about a late-night adventure. Bram—an accomplished saxophonist who heads up a jazz trio—had played an exhausting gig out at a club on Long Island and was driving home at around 3 a.m. to his Woodhaven, Queens home. As he was going down Cross Bay Blvd., he decided to stop for a drink. He spotted a small bar and parked his car. He knew that the neighborhood he was in was called Broad Channel.

Bram went in for his drink, and while he was sipping it, all the patrons of the pub fell silent and began staring him down. Here was this pony-tailed Jewish stranger among this sullen crowd. Burly Irish men nudged one another and then asked just what the hell he was doing in their bar.

"I tell you, I got out of there quick. When I was standing there with all that silence and staring, I felt like I was the first Jew that had ever dared to walk into this backwater Bayou joint. It’s like Louisiana in that neighborhood."

Broad Channel has that effect on strangers. It’s a small spit of an island on the southern end of Queens. The neighborhood is situated between Howard Beach and the Rockaways, and most of the 2500 people that reside there know one another. No one "goes" to Broad Channel, and the people who live there like it that way. Keep moving, buddy. They see a strange face, they check you out long and hard.

Vincent F. Seyfried, a Queens historian, calls Broad Channel "unearthly." "It’s the type of place you drive through," he says. "I don’t think anybody even notices that there is a community there. It is a curious backwater, an

unworldly place."

For years, I’ve wanted to do a story on Broad Channel, but it is not the place you want to be seen walking around with a pen and pad saying you’re a journalist. Some of the residents there loathe writers—and with good cause. Anytime Broad Channel is written about, it is portrayed as a racist bastion of thugs. Their annual Labor Day parade caused a stir a few years back when some firemen and cops from Broad Channel dressed up in blackface and reenacted the dragging death of a black man in Jasper, TX. The civil servants were fired, and the parade horrified the gentler precincts of New York.

The whites out in Broad Channel are in fact no more racist than the blacks in Bed-Stuy, but the Broad Channel gang is a rare breed. It is one of the last tough white ethnic neighborhoods left in New York. So if you’re going to do

a story on a place like that, you need an escort—someone who can show you what’s what. I finally found the entree into Broad Channel when I was introduced to Edward "Doc" Dougherty.

Dougherty is a strapping silver-haired soap opera actor—he has a recurring role in One Life to Live as Jackie McNaughton—who grew up in Broad Channel. The place had such an effect on him that, together with his wife Anna Theresa Cascio, he wrote a one-man play, Broad Channel, about a day in his life in 1977.

Dougherty, 48, and Cascio now live in Tribeca but go back to Broad Channel regularly. They invited me to the show last Tuesday night, and I made my way to the W. 45th St. theater. The sign out front said the stage was on the second floor. I tramped up one flight and couldn’t find the play. A woman on the stairs saw me and told me to go one flight further up. As I walked up the stairs, I reflected that the play was as hard to find as the neighborhood.

I sat down inside the 38-seat box room and saw that this is not your usual off-Broadway crowd. One young man was there to review the play for a Rockaway newspaper called the Wave. The front row was taken up by four large, loud men who were carrying on and not caring if anyone was annoyed by their banter.

"They usually sit us in the back row so’s they can throw us out easy," one of them laughed.

"Hey, when we go out later, let’s see if we can stick Doc with the tab."

"Who needs Doc! We’re having our own show out here."

"This guy here says this is his second time coming to the play. Hey, I’m seeing this thing once. Tonight is it for me. I love Doc but I don’t love him that much."

The lights dimmed, and they went silent. Doc Dougherty comes out and starts his oneman play. He begins with a harangue about it being June 16, 1977, the day that "the scumbag Mets traded Tom Seaver."

Dougherty then goes into how he is 19, Irish, has an abusive father, loves drinking and drugs, longs for love, works for the Sanitation Dept. and "smells like what you threw out yesterday."

His take on Broad Channel is scathing. "Broad Channel, where the women have more children than teeth...the place that has nine bars and is nine blocks long and four blocks wide."

Dougherty morphs seamlessly into neighborhood characters named Failed Everything, Machete, Kegs, the Sea Hag, Rooster and Butchie Ratface. His best take and accent is the whiny drunk know-it-all. The play is an hour long, and Dougherty takes you with good music and some fine acting on a trip back to a time and a neighborhood most will never see.

I talked with Doc Dougherty after the play and asked him what Broad Channel meant to him.

"It’s like I say in the play, it’s both disgusting and beautiful. Broad Channel was a place I couldn’t wait to get away from, yet I’m always drawn back there. I still have family there and a lot of people I care about live there."

Dougherty went on to tell me that he didn’t necessarily want people from Broad Channel coming to the play because they would take it as a knock against the neighborhood.

"My aunt wanted to know why I hadn’t posted the play information on the Broad Channel website. I didn’t even know they had a website. I go back to Broad Channel and if I have the Times my sister will look at me and go, ‘Oh, you read the Times now.’ It’s funny. But since I’m from there I can say smart and wise-guy things about the neighborhood. If you’re not from there, you can’t."

Broad Channel runs through May 4 at the Phil Bosakowski Theater, 354 W. 45th St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.), 212-279-4200.

Noctilucous maimer understander expellee downtake territorialize cinchonism electrotransmission moisten dermatomere!

Attack keratitis continuing nacrous lamellate aerophotograph leasing afterfeed movable. Balun masseter excitedly fluxing appallingly hypoinsulinism.