July 11, 2026

Our visit to Polish Hill was momentous for several reasons.

For starters, this was the first 90 Cones visit ever without Pippa, breaking her 33-neighborhood streak. (We miss her, and hope we’re doing our chief blogger credit with this post.) Second, it was our first time being invited to share ice cream in a neighborhood that has none of the usual ways to acquire it. Third, it was the first (and probably will be the only) time that we actually made a profit on a 90 Cones visit.

With Pippa studying abroad in Edinburgh, it was Liddy and Edmund who visited Polish Hill at the invitation of Kim Topczynski of Immaculate Heart of Mary Church. After learning about our blog during a Lenten fish fry visit, she reached out to us and let us know that the church would be serving frozen treats at its Great American Bingo summer celebration. We’re so grateful for the invitation and for the ice cream; thank you, Kim!

Neither of us had ever played Bingo seriously before, and at first we were a little intimidated by the Bingo lingo (“magic number,” “double postage stamp,” “super T”), the many cards to manage, and the changing rules in each round. Before long, though, we were in the spirit and daubing like champs.

Then, in the fourth (Special Super-L) round, Edmund suddenly whispered, “I only need B15 to win. C’mon, B15, B15 …” “B15!” said the caller, and Edmund shouted, “Bingo!” He brought home a sweet $100. “They’re trying to get me hooked on the thrill of gambling,” he concluded.

At the intermission, we had Häagen-Dazs vanilla almond ice cream bars and sang a rousing chorus of “God Bless America.” While we did not win any additional games, we thoroughly enjoyed our experience. Before leaving Polish Hill, we took a walk, noticing how the oxidized copper domes of Immaculate Heart of Mary dominate the neighborhood, and appreciating the mix of older and contemporary homes.

Fun Fact:
Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, which can seat as many as 1,800 worshipers, is modeled after Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and contains a relic of Saint John Paul II: a piece of his blood-stained cassock from the 1981 assassination attempt. The saint visited the church in 1969, a decade before his election as pope.