At one point in, “On The Waterfront” Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) says;
“I could have been somebody, I could have been a contender. Instead, I got a oneway ticket to Palookaville”
Where or what is Palookaville. My best guess is ‘middle of nowhere’ but there has to be a better explanation.
I would assume that Palookaville would have been inhabited by someone like Joe Palooka, a film character who was a country boy turned into a boxer.
The term “palooka” predates “Joe Palooka” by a few years (it was coined some time before 1928, when the strip first appeared). Ham Fisher, Joe Palooka’s creator, probably took the term to name his character (Fisher was a fascinating, and ultimately tragic character himself*).
The original term mean an incompetent boxer. “Palookaville” was probably coined by the scriptwriter in On the Waterfront, though it’s meaning would have been obvious at the time.
*Fisher farmed out Joe Palooka, hiring young artists to write the strip and paying them nothing. One was Al Capp, who, when he became successful with L’il Abner (and one continuity in Joe Palooka was Capp experiementing with the type of characters he put into L’il Abner), told the truth about the way he was treated (and portrayed fictional cartoonists behaving like Fisher). Eventually, Fisher doctored a bunch of L’il Abner strips and had a court go after Capp on the grounds of obscenity. Capp merely showed the original strips, and Fisher died soon after, some say due in part to the humiliation in court.