I ran around a few of those places back then--Connecting, conduit, Francis Lewis & the World's Fair Marina. I had a '71lime green Pinto that today you'd call it a "proStreet" car. It was caged, tubbed,etc. with a mild smallblock Chevy. Got it from a guy who worked at Corvette City in Elmont. I knew John D'Andrea pretty well back then. He lived off of 150th in his parent's basement. At the time he was a Housing Authority cop and it always amazed me no one seemed to know that. Like alot of others he'd work on the Gremlin in the street in front of his house.One day a guy goes by his house smoking the tires & John threw a wrench through the guy's back window! The guy comes around & John Badges him & tells him to get the **** outta there--end of discussion!!! He was the first guy I knew that had an automatic for racing, from Vitar Engineering as I recall. He knew a guy that had an original S/S AMX and wound up using its top-end for a little while. He eventually bought the car from the guy and kept it in a garage near RP. I saw him years ago, he was working for Scott Schafiroff and still working on cars in front of his parent's house. It's been a long time since I spoke to him but I'm guessing not much has changed. He said he'd never get rid of the AMX (don't blame him!
) . I have my own "war stories" about those places & miss the whole scene but I never was one of the "big dogs" and generally ran against my own "locals" that lived in Flushing....