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| Other Writings | ||||
| RHODA'S MEMOIR, RHODA: HER FIRST NINETY YEARS IS NOW AVAILABLE AT: www.Amazon.com | ||||
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| Chicago Revisited 2003 | ||
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The memory of "home" exerts a strong pull, and Thomas Wolfe in You Can't Go Home
Again says it's not possible, but I decided to try anyway. I had left the Chicago
area in the summer of 1939, and I decided to go back in the summer of 2003 for a
week to see if the old neighborhoods I had grown up in had survived gentrification.
I was born on Millard Avenue on the West Side of Chicago in 1918, where I lived until the age of twelve. Then we moved to Van Buren Street near Garfield Park so that I could walk to Marshall High School. Our third move was to Winnemac on the North Side in 1936, when I went to Northwestern University in Evanston. I wanted to see what had happened to those neighborhoods. When I lived on Millard Avenue, the far West Side was inhabited by Jews from Romania, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and Russia, as well as Catholics from Poland. There may have been Catholics from other parts of Europe, but on our block on Millard, the immigrants were mainly from Poland. Van Buren Street was populated by both Catholics and Protestants, mostly from Ireland, and our family was the only Jewish family on the block. The same was true of Winnemac on the North Side, near the lake. I wondered if what I remembered of Chicago matched reality in any way. I wondered if that house on Millard really had a sloping roof down which it was possible to slide. Did I imagine that story? Could it have happened? I was driven, not so much by nostalgia, but by a need to validate my memory. I found a relatively inexpensive hotel on Michigan Avenue, but when I arrived from the airport, I discovered that this hotel was the last holdout in a strike by hotel workers, and pickets marched up and down in front of the entrance. No wonder the rates were so low! Gritting my teeth and keeping my head low, I walked into the hotel. I hated walking through picket lines, even to reside in an old hotel which had hosted the Democratic Party nomination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. After settling in, I started out on my journey back through time. My first stop was the Art Institute, two long blocks north. As I walked out of the hotel, a heavy south wind assailed me and pushed me north. I remembered being swept around the corner of Madison Avenue and Michigan on my way to ballet school at the age of eleven. I remember being lifted up by the wind and flung against a building. Yes! I remembered that wind! However, even in the hot humid air of a Chicago summer, I felt my arthritic hips complaining. Two blocks in humid ninety-five degree Chicago weather feels like ten blocks in Berkeley's temperate climate. Staggering up the steps to the entrance of the Art Institute, past the beautiful recumbent bronze lions, I leaned against the door and asked the guard if there were any self-propelled wheel chairs available. She smiled at me, her braided, bead entwined locks twirling around her face, and advised me to wait a minute. She disappeared and returned with a chair, announcing with an air of triumph that today, Tuesday, was a free day, and that I could stay until seven forty-five if I wanted to. I had never manipulated a wheel chair by myself before, and found that this mode of transportation had many advantages while viewing paintings. For one thing, it was possible to sit comfortably in front of any painting I wanted to contemplate while impatient gallery gawkers moved around me. It was a thrilling way to spend an hour or two, and it was definitely easy on my aching hips. I looked across Michigan Avenue and there was Orchestra Hall, looking exactly as I had remembered it, feeling relieved that nobody had tried to spruce up its grimy exterior. I was able to get discount tickets for that evening's performance and got a main floor seat for fifteen dollars. The audience on the main floor of Orchestra Hall consisted of a mix of twenty-year-olds to eighty-year-olds, dressed variously in blue jeans with back packs to elegant long dresses. There were a few people with walkers and canes. Men were in shirt sleeves and slacks; few with jackets, and most of the women wore sleeveless dresses or blouses with trousers. I had a seat right in the middle, toward the back of the main floor. It was the first time in my life that I sat on the main floor of Orchestra Hall. Imagine! Me on the main floor of Orchestra Hall! I could hardly believe it. I wriggled with pleasure in my soft, velour padded seat. I remembered sitting in the upper, upper balcony for twenty-five cents a ticket, when I attended concerts with my sister Fay during my high school years. On Wednesday, early in the morning, I went to the Public Library on State Street, named for Harold Washington, the first (and only) black mayor of Chicago, walking under the familiar El structure, with the El trains thundering overhead. State Street seemed grubbier than I remembered, crowded with cheap fast-food places, papers swirling around in the warm hot wind. The Public Library looked familiar on the outside, but it had been gutted and remodeled and the interior was spacious, well lit, with free computer access. I hired a car and driver to take me around on Friday to find the old neighborhoods. I had had a dream about a long narrow street, Cicero, that cut at an angle across Chicago's West Side but I wasn't sure if it was a real street or a dream. When I told the driver I wanted to go to Millard Avenue, I found myself on just such a street as in my dream. I sat forward on the comfortable seat in the car, feeling excitement and anticipation in my throat. "Yes!" I cried as we approached the intersection of Cicero and Millard. "Yes! I remember that corner. But there used to be grass there and several trees. That patch of dirt is full of trash." We turned into Millard, and the stately elms I remembered were gone. But there were new trees, and the neighborhood was still full of the two story red brick houses with porches that I remembered. Millard had not yet been gentrified. We drove slowly up and down the street while I looked for 1647 Millard. Suddenly I found it. I found the house in which I had been born. It now had a fence around it, but there was the second story window and the sloping tiled roof down which I had slid to play with friends under the lamp post. My scalp and spine tingled with the memory. The street was quiet. It was a residential neighborhood, and the few people on the street were black women, chatting on their front porches, looking at me curiously. I'm sure they were trying to figure out who I was, an elderly white woman taking pictures of different houses. Maybe they thought I was a buyer or a developer. Twelfth Street, at the end of the block, was also different. Instead of Jewish butcher shops, grocery stores and a synagogue, there were grocery stores, liquor stores and several store front churches. The old synagogue on the corner was now a Baptist church. Other streets parallel to Millard had been gentrified; the old redbrick duplexes torn down and upscale condominiums built instead; no trees, just concrete. I wondered where all the old residents had gone... would they be able to afford those fancy new buildings? Those other streets seemed impersonal and dead to me. We crossed Twelfth Street and made our way to Van Buren Street, near Garfield Park, where I had lived while going to high school. My driver said Garfield Park had been upgraded, and most of the neighborhood looked gentrified. The old red brick duplexes were gone and in their place were familiar looking condominiums, some with carefully manicured front lawns. The elevated train tracks I remembered had disappeared, and in their place were broad boulevards. It was getting late, and we didn't make it to Winnemac on the North Side. I fell into bed that night satisfied that I had revisited my past, and found that part of it was still there. The infrastructure of Millard Avenue was intact. Although the old elms had succumbed to elm disease in the forties, people there had replanted the trees. The houses were still well cared for; the lawns were neat; the people were different, but the street looked as if it was still populated with working class families, and that was reassuring. I had "gone home" and was reassured that enough was left to reinforce part of my remembered childhood. |
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DOORS I used to like closing doors behind me, and never looking back. I never went to class reunions... who were all those people? Now I am writing stories of everything that happened behind closed doors. Can I really open all those doors? They keep cracking open revealing secrets I thought forever locked away. The past is always with me, and I cannot run away. |
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www.Amazon.com, www.Booksmith.com, Black Oak Books, Berkeley, Book Passage, Marin, and Capitola Book Cafe, CA |
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