Acclaimed storyteller looks back on how the Bronx shaped him in new memoir 

For Peter Quinn, “Cross Bronx: A Writing Life” is much more than just a memoir. 

Certainly, Quinn’s personal and professional life provide plenty of fodder for a memoir, since he spent three decades as a speechwriter for two New York governors, Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo. 

He also worked as a Wall Street messenger, a court officer, a high school teacher, an ad man, a documentary scriptwriter, a Hollywood film consultant, a corporate writer, the editorial director of Time Warner and also published numerous articles, essays and four novels in more than a half-century as a professional writer.  

Growing up in Parkchester and attending St. Raymond Grammar School, Manhattan Prep High School, Manhattan College and Fordham University grad school, the 76-year-old Quinn views “Cross Bronx” as a hodgepodge of things, much like the borough itself.

“It’s a book about a specific time and place, and how that time and place along with family, education, and heritage helped shape me both as a person and as a writer,” Quinn explained. “Mixed in with that, it’s a bit of history of the Bronx, some history inside the politics of New York city and state, some reflections on what it meant to be raised Bronx Irish Catholic, and maybe it’s also a love letter to the Bronx, then and now.”

Sprinkled throughout the early pages of the memoir are Quinn’s remembrances of his parents and twin brother, attending all-boys parochial schools, Sunday Mass, priests and Christian brothers with various personalities and influences, hours spent at the palatial Loews Paradise and other movie theaters throughout the borough, visits to Yankee Stadium, bus and subway rides, playing with Spaldeens, the “bricks and more bricks” of tall, dense Parkchester, and even a favorite tree that against all odds shot out from the middle of the concrete, asphalt and thick car pollution of the Cross Bronx Expressway.

In its latter pages, Quinn’s book chronicles how from 1979 to…