2 Cleveland Court
January 31, 2004
Today would have been my grandmother's 99th birthday. She died 14 years ago this month. A first generation American, Grandma was born on Elizabeth Street in New York City. She married young - 15 - to my grandfather. She had five children, the oldest died at birth. My mother was the second born, the second daughter. Two boys followed, both lawyers, one a judge.
She's been on my mind all month, my grandmother. This weekend especially, her spirit was very intense. I had to resist going past the house, it's a big house on the end of a small dead-end and it's difficult to gape without being seen. Besides, the family sold it last year and it's been devastatingly remuddled into three families, sheathed in spare, ugly grey siding, and the grounds level and chained off with a wrought iron fence.
The house was a big Victorian rambling ship of a house. It stood at the end of a street, with a leafy backdrop of woods separating it from the next street. In the mid-50's Eisenhower's plan to link every state in the Union resulted in Interstate 95 slicing through our city. And specifically, through the back half of my grandparents' house.
It had taken Grandma 25 years to get up the nerve to leave her own mother's house in the Italian section of the city. She raised her family in the flat on the second floor, her parents' below, her younger sister and her family above. The grocery store was across the street, the bakery up the hill, and the butcher on the next block. A big stone bridge that held up the train tracks separated the enclave from the rolling hills of the two cemeteries a block away.
When my own parents married after the war, Grandma had the reason to move to the other side of the tracks - literally - and leave her parents' house. Post-war housing was scarce, and she bought the big Victorian for her family, and my parents to live in on the second floor. For 13 years they all lived together, grandparents, two uncles, aunt, my parents, and eventually three of us girls. All of us sharing three floors - but one bathroom.
I wonder how my grandmother felt when the letter came to tell them that the property had been condemned by eminent domain. She must have been devastated, afraid and panicky. I understand that my uncle took the lead in negotiating the terms with the government, the family agreeing to take the money and have the house moved across the lot. We have photos of the move, the house denuded of its two-story wooden front porch and wide front steps, jacked up onto rolling beams and dragged across the lot like a Lincoln Log house.
And with the windfall, my grandparents modernized the old girl. A bath and half was put in. The kitchen received knotty pine cabinets, pink countertops, and a pink and maroon linoleum floor. Very fifties. The floor-to-ceiling 15 foot glass-fronted pantry doors were painted green so they could be used more efficiently for storage. The sliding oak pocket doors were sealed into the walls and the several of the nine foot windows were enclosed so as to provide needed wall space. The chimney closet in the kitchen was retrofitted with a cupboard and a separate entrance for my parents apartment was added on. The basement was finished with beige and maroon tiles and my uncle practiced with his college band down there on summer nights. The soft, aged cedar shingles were covered with grey asbestos ones and the windows sported pink shutters to match the front door.
My own family moved out of the house in 1959, a few years later. We moved to yet the other side of the city, into a pretty center hall colonial in a neighborhood of older, quiet families. We must have been the noisiest people on the street with the five of us girls running around. But it was too quiet and sterile after the noise and hum of Grandma’s house, the smell of cooking always in the air, the rooms full of adults with plenty of time and laps in which to hold a middle child. I went back often, spending days and summer vacations sleeping over, exploring the attic rooms, the cool basement, the mysterious closet under the stairs with its porthole window and shelves stuffed with ladies' hatboxes and furs.
As a teenager, we scolded our grandmother for the 1950's modernization and the stripping away of the beautiful antique oak and features of the lovely old house. But there were still plenty there, like the two story oak staircase graced with a landing and stained glass window and oak balustrade, and the mysterious passageway between the attic room walls and storage areas. We played hours on the player piano, pulling out the large lower drawer that contained hundreds of buttons, now our spaceship. We drank soda in the screened in patio, and poked our noses into the old detached garage, now used for storage since the house sat on a new two-car garage.
The house began to fall apart after my grandfather died when I was in college. The upkeep was formidable and my grandmother didn't have the patience or energy. And she suffered from depression and couldn't stand the upheaval of painters or workmen around the house. Yet, even after she died 15 years later, my aunt lived in it another ten years, and squirrels had had the run of the attic, we all assumed that somehow it would stay in the family.
Of course, it couldn't. It's value had risen a thousand fold since its purchase in the 40's, but the neighborhood had declined at the same rate. None of us would take on the decades long project of restoring it because the Thruway was so noisy and the neighborhood so cramped.
Yet, none of us were prepared for the house to be completely stripped and gutted in the six months following its sale. The family were contractors, we knew, but somehow we hoped they were going to restore it and live there. Instead they ripped everything out, even the great staircase, installing stairs that were flipped and gave better access for apartments on each of the floors. they leveled the sloping yard, ringed it with a wrought iron fence and installed a large lamppost with three glass balls. We all wonder where the oak banisters went, what they did with the marble sink, and if we could have salvaged any of it. We each had a different opinion about going there on Halloween on the guise of trick or treating with the kids, but the consensus was that none of us wanted to see it. I'll spend my life regretting not hiring an electrician to remove the green cut-glass chandelier from the entry way before it was sold.
It hurts to go past and see it so stark and remuddled. Yet, it's just another phase of the modernization that began with my grandparents in the 50's. The older generation doesn't talk about it, or shrug their shoulders in their pragmatic, Italian way. What could you do? It was time to sell. Grandma would have been the first to say it. And I know she was happy that she didn't have to clean out those 9-foot pantry cupboards.
I do have one thing. After my aunt died, and we were cleaning out the senior citizen apartment she had moved into in her last year, I took down the little sign she had kept from the house and hung on the wall. It was four small pieces of wood, about 5" by 5" on which someone had tacked glittering reflective dots that made up the numeral "2", for 2 Cleveland Court. The little sign used to hang on the lamppost by the driveway where the cars' headlights would catch its reflective glints at night. When I first visited my aunt in the apartment and saw it tacked to the hall wall, my breath caught in my throat and I could not trust myself to speak for several minutes and busied myself in the kitchen helping her take out mugs for cups of tea. I have the sign now. I've hung it on my art room wall, over my computer. Sometimes when the cars go by on the street, the headlights just catch it at the right angle and it sparkles for a second.
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