In Queens, Antonin Scalia Took Pride in Melting Pot and Confrontation (original) (raw)
New York|In Queens, Antonin Scalia Took Pride in Melting Pot and Confrontation
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The brick rowhouse on O’Connell Court in Elmhurst, Queens, where Antonin Scalia grew up.Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
- Feb. 14, 2016
Justice Antonin Scalia had a range that extended from in-your-face brash to an even-more-in-your-face pugnacious. He was self-aware, describing himself as “something of a shin kicker” and “something of a contrarian.” Sure, Justice Scalia was born in Trenton — predictably, New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, claimed him on Saturday, saying that the 79-year-old justice was “a native son of New Jersey.”
But in spirit and at heart, Justice Scalia, found dead Saturday at a resort in West Texas, was a Queens man.
He spent much of his childhood in a red brick home in Elmhurst, a neighborhood of Queens that is now largely Asian and Latino. Ask him where he was from — Queens. What was his team? The Yankees. “What else would I be?” he once asked, apparently temporarily forgetting about the Mets, something that much of Queens would probably yell at him for. (He of course would argue back.)
Unlike some other conservatives (for instance, Ted Cruz), Justice Scalia understood the things that made his hometown great, like that one time his high school band went to march in a parade in Washington.
“These people just stood there and looked at us,” he told the CBS News program “60 Minutes” in 2008. “You know, in New York, people say: ‘Hey, play something for us, you know? You bums, why don’t you play something?’ They were — they were alive, they were confrontational.”
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Antonin Scalia in 1986.Credit...Paul Hosefros/The New York Times
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