Nearly 30 years ago, a seventh grader at the East Midwood Hebrew Day School in Brooklyn needed to complete a social studies assignment, something along the lines of what was it like in the olden days. She set down a cassette tape recorder in front of her saba, her grandfather, and pressed a button.

The grandfather, Philip Jacobs, who was 73, summoned stories from bygone New York, of Lower East Side toil, business success and the Orthodox Jewish customs of his youth. His days as a landlord prompted one memory in particular.

It seemed that someone with a BB gun had been shooting at an apartment building he owned in the Bronx, pinging the dark brick, piercing the windows, even targeting the elderly women who sat and gossiped in front of the building, on the sunny side. A minor nuisance in the overall context of early 1950s New York, but it had to be dealt with.

He questioned tenants in the building across the street, figuring that the shots were coming from that direction. A boy piped up to say that the shooter was one of Mr. Jacobs’s own tenants: a young teenager who had just received a BB gun as a present.