Tag Archives: neighborhood

Chicago’s Uptown

Posted on by under Guest, Sound & Place

A fire engine shrieked through the stoplight, casting a light show in my room and spraying the bare white walls with color. Even through closed windows, the sound was deafening. Within minutes, an ambulance from the hospital in the other direction bayed and bounded through the intersection. I rubbed my eyes. The city had assaulted me through the night, pushing away any hope of restful sleep. The thought of coffee propelled me out of bed.  

As new college graduates, my two roommates and I were fresh from the sweetly singing suburbs. Having recently secured jobs in Chicago, we moved into a two bedroom apartment above a tuxedo shop doubling as a dry cleaner in Uptown, at the corner of Clark and Wilson. Our landlords owned the block. The father, an Arab from Palestine who worked tirelessly at the dry cleaner, was a large silver-haired man with bushy eyebrows and kind black eyes. He gave us a 10 percent discount for being his tenants. His burly son lived across the hall from us and owned the cell phone shop next door, which sold a variety of wares during our four years living there. The uncles worked across the street at the liquor store where we dropped off our rent.

My first Saturday morning, robed and ready for the sacred morning space I was used to, I cradled my mug and stared out the window. “Rayan’s Liquor” spread out in faded white letters and wrapped along the maroon awning across the street. A homeless man, gesturing and shouting expletives to the air, stood under a golden tree that had gingerly begun dropping its leaves. Car brakes squealed as they screeched to a stop at the light. Every other car speeding through the green would hit the edge of a loose manhole cover and send a loud pop ricocheting off the two-story buildings.

My father called from my childhood home in Florida later in the day. “What!?” I shouted into the phone, a chorus of sirens parading through our living room. “Hold on!” I said. When the noise subsided, I could hear him chuckling on the other end.

“That was the third one since we started talking ten minutes ago!” he said. “How is everything really?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said. “I love it here.”

WilsonctaredlineAnd I did. Everything about our situation was different from the life I had known. The city challenged my five senses to reinvent themselves as they began to adapt to a world of constant stimulation.

I went for a jog in the afternoon, heading down Wilson Street’s gum-stained sidewalk towards Lake Michigan, less than a mile down the road. Passing people of every color, shape, size and design, I weaved between trudging homeless, clean-cut men in skinny jeans and Hispanic mamas pushing strollers. The L train roared overhead as I ducked under the tracks, the dark urine-saturated street littered with trash and pigeon droppings. Pigeons scattered as I ran through, my blond ponytail wagging in rhythm with my steps. I would come to learn that this particular L station was known for crime, and that pedestrians saw the stoplights as arbitrary suggestions rather than accepted rules.

As I jogged in place at the intersection, a woman catty-corner from me was in a full-body leotard with her pink panties and bra on the outside of her clothes. Holding a juke box, she twisted, jived and swayed without reservation. A grimy MacDonald’s was across from mini-castle-like Uptown Baptist church, the sign “Christ Died for Our Sins” punctuating the sky. Next to it was a fried chicken shop, an African hair braiding salon, a wig shop and the Friendly Towers, home to a Christian commune called JPUSA. After passing a run-down middle school and more bundled homeless under the Lakeshore Drive underpass, I finally glimpsed gem-like Lake Michigan.

1024px-Chicago_skyline_from_Montrose_HarborArriving at the lake, I halted and took a breath. The vast open space and comparative silence were an abrupt change after the city chatter. The lake was a glassy emerald, swaying and shimmering. The cars on Lakeshore Drive were a soothing hum behind me. I couldn’t see the other side of the lake, which was a comforting reminder of the mighty ocean that had raised me as a child.

In my nine years living in Chicago, this water would become my serenity in the noise. It would be my Sabbath rest after the six previous days of rush and motion. Coming here would provide the margins I needed to stand aside and make sense of the jumbled words on the page—the scribblings, run-on sentences, and scratched out thoughts of my 20s. Here, my senses would reconvene. I paused a moment more before turning back to the throbbing metropolis.

(Photo of the Wilson L station by Graham Garfield; Lake Michigan view from Montrose Harbor by John Picken.)

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Leslie Verner“Chicago’s Uptown” is by Leslie Verner, a goer who is learning how to stay. She has her BA in elementary education and MA in intercultural studies. She has traveled all over the world and lived in northwest China for five years before an unexpected U-turn brought her back to the U.S. to get married. Leslie currently resides at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado with her husband (an audio book narrator) and two devious yet delightful children. She writes regularly about faith, family and cross-cultural issues at www.scrapingraisins.blogspot.com. Follow her on Twitter at Scraping Raisins@leslie_verner and on Facebook as Leslie Verner.

 

Waking Up

Posted on by under Sound & Place

I am three, and I’m waking up from my afternoon nap in the right way: Slowly. Contentedly. In my own time and space.

I’m in no hurry to open my eyes. The bedroom is dim from the pulled curtains, anyway, and I’ve memorized every sight I would see from my place on the bottom bunk.

6259167128_a64b881939_bAn airplane flies overhead. In our house, below a well-traveled flight path to the airport, it’s a sound as common as a truck roaring by on our busy inner-city street. Whenever the house is quiet and I’m quiet, it seems there’s the sound of a plane somewhere in the sky.

The window is open in the bedroom I share with my brother, who, at almost-six, is too old for naps. I can hear the neighborhood kids playing outside. Laughter and shrieking, then protests, complaints.

Now the sound of a hose as more water is added to the plastic wading pool in the yard next door. I can picture the blue pool, the grass clippings floating on the glistening water.

There’s the voice of the bossiest girl, who is not the oldest but is the most sure of what she wants and how to get it. Just the tone of her voice conjures a snapshot of her hands on her hips, one hip jutted out to the side.  

My eyes are awake now, primed by scenes my ears have fashioned. I get up, my pigtails lopsided from their time on the pillow, and leave my bottom bunk to follow the sound of humming to my mother.

*    *    *    *    *

We lived on the ground floor of the house on Walnut Street until I was five. It was my first home. There are photographs to inform my visual sense of that place, but I can’t really claim them as memories. What I truly remember, from deep in some audio file my mind, are sounds.

Like the sound of my mom humming.

Our living space was small, making it easy for sounds to travel from one room to the next. My mom loves silence, but sometimes I think she loves it because it’s like a blank canvas—an open space for her to hum or whistle into as she folds laundry or chops vegetables. In the house on Walnut Street, her humming was my homing beacon as I navigated the waters between independence and security.

Sometimes upon waking from a nap I could hear my grandmother’s musical voice coming from the kitchen—a one-way, joyful conversation that meant an “audio letter” had arrived in that day’s mail. With my grandparents far away in California and long distance phone rates too costly for either household’s budget, my mom and grandma regularly recorded newsy updates on small, table-top cassette players. The tapes were mailed back and forth in padded manila envelopes.

If Mom was recording a letter to Grandma rather than listening to one, she would announce my appearance into the small microphone, inviting me to talk. “Oh, here’s Krissy! She just woke up from her nap. Krissy, say hi to Grandma and Grandpa! Tell them what kind of cookies we baked this morning.”

My dad’s arrival home each evening was inevitably announced through the stereo speakers: the pop-and-crackle of the needle touching an album. When Dad was home, there was always music playing. Aaron Copeland, Miles Davis, Stephen Sondheim, Bela Bartok, the Beatles, Peter, Paul & Mary—their electrifying, silky, surprising, earthy, and complex notes were the soundtrack of my childhood (the volume always a bit too high for my mom’s taste).

During warmer months, the sounds in our home mingled with the sounds of the world outside. In 1970s Michigan, no one had air conditioning—certainly not those of us renting old houses divided into duplexes in the city’s core. We opened windows, turned on noisy box fans, and spent as much time as possible playing outside with water, or sitting on shady stoops. Private lives were aired to the neighborhood: Everyone’s music and arguments, their clattering pots and pans and crying babies, were heard alongside the passing boom of car stereos, loud mufflers, and barking dogs.

After being tucked into my bottom bunk each night, the sounds of Walnut Street played on, each sound telling me a story. Some were as comforting and present as the hum of my mom’s sewing machine on the kitchen table; others were as mysterious and distant as another plane in the night sky, its seats filled with strangers traveling who knows where. 

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Kristin bio YAH

That’s Where I Lived

Posted on by under Guest, Memory & Place

“It’s that one, right there,” I tell my husband Ian as the car slows down and we peer out the window. “That’s where I lived.” I moved back to my old town nearly ten years ago, so I’ve seen my childhood house as an adult. But every time it’s still jarring. It feels like when I run into someone I used to babysit and they’re now in high school and my brain sort of cramps up like it can’t begin to process that they’re no longer five-years-old and just learning to read. It’s the same with my old neighborhood; it’s aged, too.

Several of the small two-story houses on the block, originally built by the railway, have been painted and none of the neighbors standing in their yards are the same. Some have moved but the elderly woman who lived to the right of my childhood house passed away about 15 years ago. Looking at her house flashes me back to her funeral service. But I quickly yank my train of thought in the direction of happier recollections: her short white hair and friendly smile, and how her house always smelled like old person soap — the kind that sits in a fancy dish in the bathroom and is shaped like shells and starfish. I find myself wishing we hadn’t run through her garden so much. And I wonder if whoever lives there now loves her forest of rhododendrons as much as she did.

That's Where I LivedMy old house is a small, white two-story home shaped like a square with its front door smack-dab in the middle and a pane window on each side that gives the impression of eyes, and a triangle roof perched on top. This is what all the houses on the block look like, although they come in a variety of colors. This is how children often draw houses, and I felt proud because it was how my house actually looked. It was as if this meant my house had achieved some high level of aesthetic perfection.

My mom’s green bird feeder is no longer hanging from the tree and the yard feels incomplete without it. I remember how the bird feeder would routinely spill seed all over the yard, which I’d incorporate into games with my toys. Usually it was food for stuffed animals, but one time I tried to eat a piece, myself; I discovered it wasn’t nearly as tasty as a bag of sunflower seeds. A pig my neighbors were babysitting, however, felt differently about the uncooked seeds. They brought the potbellied pig down so that we could take turns walking it on its leash. And the pig, to our delight and amusement, sucked up those pieces of bird seed just like a vacuum.

The front is no longer a lively brick red and is instead sporting a new coat of boring old grownup-grey paint. For anyone else driving by it’d be just a small porch, just like any other small front porch on the street. But I know that in a past life it was a clubhouse, a detective agency, a shelter during extreme — and extremely unrealistic — natural disasters, and a queen’s throne when my bossy best friend got to pick the game and wanted to spend the afternoon sitting smugly on the steps of my house as she ordered us around. It was also where I’d stand as I screamed at my best friend when we fought: “We’re not friends anymore! I’m never going to play with you again! Never ever!” After melodramatically slamming the front door behind me, I’d be greeted by my mother with that you-just-disturbed-the-entire-neighborhood-and-I’m-not-happy-about-it look that I was a little too familiar with.

The patch of grass in the front yard looks so tiny now, but I had the biggest front yard out of all my neighborhood friends. This meant all the good games took place in my front yard. During the summer we’d sometimes flip our bicycles upside down and place them in a circle and pretend it was a fort. During the winter, when it finally snowed, we’d attempt making the snow equivalency of our bicycle fort. But because we were in the Seattle area our winters weren’t very snowy, so by the time we’d built a snow-wall we would’ve used up all the snow in my front yard. We’d have half a fort, a wall we were proud of, but the snow would be gone, the grass would be showing. And there was nothing left to have a snowball fight with. There was never enough snow, I think.

“Well, this is where I grew up,” I tell Ian with a shrug as the car stops for just a moment so we can look. I can’t explain how much it’s changed, and I don’t try. It feels smaller now, duller. It’s as if that wild, vibrant childhood magic faded and left an ordinary, run-of-the-mill neighborhood standing in its place. “It’s changed a lot since when I was a kid,” I say. It’s no longer the same neighborhood or the same house. But perhaps the biggest change is that I’m not the same little girl running barefoot in my front yard. That little girl, like the neighborhood she once loved, now only exists in memories.

*****

Kelsey Munger“That’s Where I Lived” was written by Kelsey L. Munger. Kelsey is a sixth generation Pacific Northwest native. Aside from three and a half months spent living in a very tiny town in Hungary among the sunflower fields, she has always lived in or just outside beautiful, rainy (sometimes a little moldy) Seattle, WA. Kelsey blogs at KelseyMunger.com and can be found on Twitter at @KelseyLMunger.

Gentrification Conversation: Part Two

Posted on by under Together in Place

I didn’t notice any trouble until he called the police–I was too distracted by the sunlight. Our kitchen windows are six feet tall, and on sunny afternoons like this one, the yellow walls gleamed, the dirty dishes on the counter shone. Thump, thud.  It was still early spring, and the windows were closed, muffling the clanging, banging and thumping coming from across the street.

I looked out. Two men were loading our former neighbor’s belongings into a pickup truck. Her house had sat vacant for a year after she moved into a senior building, now her appliances were heading out the door. “I tried to talk to them,” my housemate said, “and they blew me off. The cops are on their way.”

“Oh,” I said, “oh, I see.” He walked out to the porch to see what would happen, and I sank down on the kitchen stool, staring at the floor. Calling the police was complicated. We couldn’t just sit by and watch while our neighbor’s house was emptied, but they would know who called–the white people, again–and what if the men were rude to the officers too? “No one get shot, no one get shot,” I prayed as I peeked out the window.

No one got shot. The police arrived, they talked, the next door neighbor came out, and soon everyone was laughing amiably. As the cops drove away, embarrassment settled in, hard. “I hate this,” I thought, “Why are we always the ones to overreact? It’s the middle of the day, of course they weren’t doing anything wrong.” My housemate came back in and noticed my discomfort.

“I’ll take care of it,” he said, and disappeared into the basement, returning a moment later with two bottles of beer. Clink, clank, he marched out the door. Peeking out the window again, I watched him approach the men, somewhat in awe at his nerve. He was talking, they were talking, he handed them the beer, and he walked back to our house. “Whew,” he shut the door, “Turned out they were family of a neighbor, everything’s alright. Glad I apologized.”

“They took the beer,” I said, still a little surprised. “Yeah,” he shrugged, grinning, “Sometimes a beer can turn an enemy into a friend. They’re good guys, just a little surly at first.”

And that was that. Two beers–the solution for all your cross-cultural tensions.

*****

With a big word like gentrification, it’s tempting to just talk about it at a macro-level. Government, development, public policy–all of this matters. But there is also the everyday reality of living in close quarters with people who are not ‘like me,’ and trying to get along.

This can be exhausting, and, like deciding whether to call the cops, more complicated than I ever imagined. But I suspect that mixed-income communities (or any communities) succeed or fail, ultimately, at the micro-level. In other words, can the people who live next door to one another learn to be neighbors?

On our block are middle-class working families–healthcare workers, retired city bus drivers, preschool teachers–and families who subsist on minimum wage jobs, food stamps and medicaid. The black folks (about three-quarters of our block) have generally lived in our neighborhood their whole lives and have family scattered about the community; the white folks are relative newcomers and have family scattered about the country.

And there are times when living together can be stressful and bumpy. There are misunderstandings and mistakes; there are awkward moments. Soon after I moved in, a well-meaning man said to me, “Don’t you worry, dear, my mother and I are glad that you’re here. We’re not like everyone else.”

And I thought, “It’s a good thing that ‘everyone else’ is too polite to say!”

However, there are also moments when I think that living where I live, and learning to get along with people who are not ‘like me’, is perhaps one of the richest experiences of my life.

One of my favorite neighbors is a grandmother who is working toward her GED while raising her grandkids. We go to church together, and her youngest loves to chase our chickens around the backyard. One day I gave her a ride to the bus stop, and as we were chatting about kids, weather, and leaking chimneys, I suddenly realized how much I needed this woman to be my neighbor.

There is a lot of talk, a lot of research, about how mixed-income communities benefit the poor–there can be increased employment opportunities, for example, and their kids tend to have higher social mobility–but what struck me in that moment, and has stayed with me since, is the sense of how much the rich (or at least the relatively rich) benefit from living near the poor.

I give my neighbor a ride, but she gives me insight I could get no other way. I watch her sacrifice for her grandkids while taking one GED class at a time, I watch her struggle, and I watch her pray. I watch her maintain faith and a sense of humor in the midst of situations that might just do me in.

She (and others) also give me financial perspective. When asked why they moved to our neighborhood, one family said, “We didn’t want our kids to think that it was normal to have a Rolex.” Having neighbors who work full time and yet struggle to buy fresh vegetables tempers my materialism. It also reminds me to be grateful at the farmer’s market. It’s not a guilt trip; it’s a reality adjustment.

Finally, speaking of reality, there is just something about living with people who freely admit they don’t have it all together. My neighbors have kids in jail, various addictions, and teenage pregnancies. While we’re all messed up in one way or another, the poor tend to wear their wounds on the outside. When I see this, and then see these same people embraced in spite of their (sometimes still oozing) wounds, something inside of me is also set free.

All this doesn’t happen in one trip to the bus stop, but over a decade or so, it begins to sink in: I need my neighbor because in the moments when I am her chauffeur, she is my teacher. This is a small step, but isn’t this the way that neighborhoods are built?

One ride,

one conversation,

one adjustment of perspective,

one mistake and one apology,

two beers at a time.

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Photo by Wagner T. Cassimoro

Hunting

Posted on by under Home & Place

We were armed, of course—with a very rational checklist, like all house-hunters are.

It looked something like this:

– Four bedrooms (we have three daughters and lots of house guests)

– At least two full bathrooms, including one of the main floor (did I mention three daughters?)

– A spacious kitchen with lots of counter space (Jason and I usually cook together—there’s often a daughter and a dog in the mix, too)

– A dedicated space for me to work (I work from home, which had always meant carving out a cramped corner of the living room)

– Closets! (Closets, closets, closets! Our current house had not a single closet or pantry on the entire first floor—and did I mention three daughters? And backpacks, soccer shin guards, volleyballs, a cello, and more pairs of shoes, boots, and muddy cleats than I could count?)

– A hang-out space of some sort (as our daughters grew into teenagers, we wanted to be sure they regularly invited friends)

– A fireplace (for those cozy, picturesque evenings together as a family)

– A front porch (I have always considered this a must for a house)

– A location in our current neighborhood (walking distance to the girls’ schools, cafes, the library, the farmers’ market, etc.)

Oh, and there was one must-not-have: NO black walnut tree. We’d had enough of the squirrel colony that congregated in the backyard of our current house, and enough of the curses we uttered each time our current tree dropped its ample harvest on our roof, cars, and patio furniture.

In general, we thought our checklist was perfectly reasonable. And we weren’t in a huge hurry to find something—we had already survived two years as a newly-formed family of five in the house I had purchased for three (as a single mom, just months before I met Jason). We were just “keeping our eyes out.”

Each year, for about three years, we went to see a handful of houses. Some met the requirements on our checklist, but were just too expensive. Others had a significant flaw (or two)—a visible bulging in the foundation; a tiny, unworkable living room (but lots of space everywhere else); terrible kitchens (without any hope for feasible remodel plans); a shared driveway or no garage.

There were also a couple of houses that could have worked, but were somehow just “off.” I began to differentiate “house-hunting,” which requires being armed with a list and a realtor, from “home-hunting,” which calls for a fully-loaded gut (and a refusal to buy into the optimism gushing from the realtor’s mouth).

With each visit to a new listing, the hope that buoyed us as the realtor unlocked the front door, quickly deflated. And with each disappointment, we returned to our cozy home determined to find ways to make it work. Trips to IKEA resulted in more storage, and a remodel of the basement added a second bathroom and a fourth bedroom, so two of our girls no longer had to share. After three years of “keeping an eye out” for houses, we simply stopped.

house4saleAnd then, one February day in 2013, I was walking the dog and saw a new For Sale sign. Even from the sidewalk, something about the house spoke to me—to my gut, as cheesy as that sounds.

As it turns out, it was The One—even though it didn’t meet all of the requirements on our ever-so-rational checklist. There were two full bathrooms, but no bathroom of any sort of the first floor (this is apparently a cost of loving 100-year-old houses). There was a beautiful sunroom with built-in bookshelves and three walls of windows, which has become my dream office, but no front porch. The kitchen was workable, but not nearly as spacious as we had hoped for during our house hunting. And there was a wood-burning fireplace, as advertised in the listing, but during the inspection we discovered that it wasn’t a working fireplace and couldn’t actually be fixed to become one, short of completely rebuilding the chimney.

homecomingdinner2013Yes, there are four bedrooms and plenty of beautiful closets, and the location is perfect. Even more importantly, much of what we envisioned for our new home has become a reality—less clutter, more space for family and friends to be together, the ability to host big meals (that first fall we did a Homecoming dinner for our daughter and 22 of her friends and a chili cook-off for 50+). And as a family, we’ve enjoyed two cozy winters of together time, gathered by the fire—the people we bought the house from installed a gas fireplace (not our original ideal, but it sure has made it easy to light a fire every evening rather than just every-so-often).

In short, this is our home and it has been just right from the beginning, regardless what our list said. Even that first summer, when we realized that big tree in the backyard was—you guessed it—a black walnut (this is a danger of buying a house in February and not being an expert in tree bark identification), we had to laugh as we grumbled. After all, we had been home-hunting, not house-hunting.