Events conspired in an interesting way this morning to all but force me to tour my old school, Northwestern. Granted, I had decided to take my laptop to downtown Evanston, to a Starbucks about where I remember the old movie theater once stood on Sherman Avenue. But I didn’t plan on my laptop not being charged. So I stowed it in the trunk of the rental car and took a quick walk.
Downtown Evanston has almost no stores or restaurants I remember, save the Burger King. And many buildings have been added to the campus since I graduated; some of these “new” ones are now ivy-covered. But my dorm, Shephard, looked the same, and the two classroom buildings central to my life are the same, too, although Fiske Hall is now the McCormick Journalism Center. It was also in Fiske that I first took a course with Stuart Kaminsky and read one of his Toby Peters mysteries.
At Fiske, I tried to visit the classroom where I had been tortured through various journalism courses, but it was locked. Ah, the memories. The professor who commented on my weight every time he saw me, the professors who told us that we’d never find jobs, even if everyone in journalism died overnight, the broken-down old man whose claim to fame was that he had presided over the closing of one of Chicago’s great newspapers . . . good times. I had exactly ONE journalism professor that I really liked, Sallie Gaines, who taught the lab section of the copy-editing class and actually invited her students to her home. Years later, the lecture instructor for the copy-editing class, a class so cruel that the midterm grades were curved up even though no one got higher than an 80, met one of my bosses at a convention. According to my boss, the guy said: “I remember Laura because she was very smart and girls who looked like that usually weren’t.” Hmmm. I think he must have been thinking of someone else because my performance in that class was not distinguished and I was just a plumpish 20-year-old who lived my life at the intersection of bad hair and worse clothes.
I left Fiske and walked over to University Hall, where I was often happiest. It was here that I studied with J. Lyndon Shanley, who taught me poetry and Chaucer and treated me like a daughter. It was here that I found real encouragement for my writing in the short story courses taught by Meredith Steinbach.
Back in the car, I headed past the apartment that five of us shared, in various configurations, for two years. Of all the things that I expected to stand the test of time, Hanan’s Fine Foods was the real surprise, the one I didn’t expect to find. Hoos Drugstore is gone, the old diner is gone, but Hanan’s, a tiny grocery, remains on Maple Avenue. We bought pita bread there and toasted it, filling it with a concoction of mozzarella, ricotta and pepperoni.
In going back to a beloved place, much changed by time, what were the surprising survivors and what seeming stalwarts had disappeared?
I have never gone back to a place I have left. Owatonna, Princeton,Shelbyville, and now St Pete will always be the way I left them … I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
I think that St Pete is the only place I would want to go back to.
while I’ve lived many places, I would call few of them beloved in any way. I’m sure my hometown, neighborhood, school, etc. in Hartford is all vastly different but I don’t care; the only place whose changes affect me is Berkeley and I’ve been back only maybe 2 times in the (wow) 20 years since I left; yikes 20. And the Ave has changed – most people in college towns remark on how the student shopping districts change, I think. The last trip there hallelujah The Homemade still existed and looked exactly as it had when I left, but the Brick Hut is long gone and that hurts. I wasn’t a Berkeley hippie, but I still bough macrame watchbands and drawstring pants from vendors on Telegraph, and shopped for great clothesin little stores and then of course, there’s the horrid HORRID news that Cody’s is closing. When I left Berkeley in ’86, they were truly yuppifying my neighborhood (I lived on 6th, right near the 4th Street thing) and still find it unacceptable that in a low income neighborhood you can’t find a reasonable number of reasonable stores but you can eat in upscale pretend diners. On one trip years back, I did have a friend drive me by my old house – memories thick and fast. And then there’s the restaurant which I lived close to (never ate there) where in a surprise conversation with Stephen White, I learned he’d been the maitre d’ while attending UC.
I think the Berkeley Co-op was already dying when I left, but People’s Park still struggles on.
My teen years were in West Hartford til I went to college and neither WH nor New London nor Albany hold ANY “beloved” place for me. I spent 5 years in the Boston area and it’s people but not places I miss. Excempt Mary Chung. I miss Mary Chung’s restaurant on Mass Ave in Cambridge. Weekly. And I left the east coast in 1990.
Hmm. My memories seem to be food centered. Now I’m wondering, does Ledo’s pizza still exist? Ledo’s was closer to U of MD College Park than Northeast DC where I went to college but it’s where we all went for pizza anyway. The pizza was retangular and the crust was irreplacable and indescribable.
My first neighborhood as an adult living on my own was Hamilton in Northeast Baltimore. Not a lot of memorable food but I did live on Valentino’s Ceasar salad for several years (dinner, take-out, at least 4 times a week) and I’m craving one now.
And, of course, I’ll never have Haussner’s stawberry pie again.
I lived a lot of my childhood with my grand parents in Concord, California on Willow Pass Rd. My grand mother was a piano teacher and when she had sutdents she would send me out to the store or on some other errand. I’d skip down to Graham’s Grocery store along a dirt sidewalk lined by a hedge. Of course the Graham Brothers knew me by name and always had nice things to say and messages to give my grandmother. Then I’d skip on home with the hot fresh bread and freash real butter that my grandmother so loved and taught me to love as well.
Across the street was the creamery, (don’t remember it’s name) with one outer wall made of glass bricks that did wonderful thins when the sun hit it just right. I loved that building and the last time I was in Concord, a couple of years before I moved to Alaska, Gramham’s Grocery was completely gone and the building that the creamery was in was a car dealership with lines of cars in the parking lot with signs in their windows. Shudder, I choose to remember things as they were not as they have become which works because I don’t have to go back there to see the phfffff progress.
Sly
I agree with Marika. There was a 50th anniversary celebration of the establishment of my high school, Taipei American School, in Taiwan, and I decided my memories were so precious to me of the school and the city that I did not want them to be disrupted by the newness of both the school and the city. Many of my classmates enjoyed going back (they found our old house on “Grass Mountain”) but I believe I made the right decision for myself.
I too have trouble deciding if any places I have been fit the “beloved” category. I went to the “other” school in Chicago… on the South Side in Hyde Park. Probably the most significant place for me. Intensive academic atmosphere; learned to how to think; learned how to read, but only after leaning how to watch movies; met my wife; decided on my life’s course; a few other minor things… but, maybe not still a beloved place.
Diane, yes Ledo’s still exists. I know there are a couple of them. I go to one in Baltimore so there probably is one in College Park. And they still have rectangular pizza.
Bilbo’s Pizza in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It was absolutely the best when I was going to school there in the late 1970′s and is still wonderful. Sometimes I’ll arrange to fly into Chicago and drive across to the Ann Arbor area just so that I can stop and have a “salad and a slice” at Bilbo’s.
I’m at Columbia now, but went to grad school at Purdue in West Lafayette. Haven’t been back there for years, but our current grad student is heading there for a short course. I’ve told her all the places I want her to check out to see if they are still around and still good – Harry’s Chocolate Shop (actually a bar, but it retained the name it had to adopt during Prohibition), Quincy’s, Pete’s, and Garcia’s Pizza. I’ve heard that in the 90s Garcia’s changed their recipe for pizza. That would be a shame, because I really liked their pizza.
I already know that my favorite bar, the Stabilizer, is no more. It closed shortly after I left. It reopened as a frat bar (yuck), but thankfully I heard that didn’t last long.
Last year when I was out in San Diego, I drove by the house that I grew up in for the first time since my dad sold it in 1992 and moved out of the state. For my eleventh birthday, my parents had a basketball hoop put in at the end of the driveway and it may have been the worst bball hoop ever created. The guy who put it in set it at 11 feet high, then broke the mechanism that allowed you to lower it – so I was stuck with a hoop that was a foot higher than it should’ve been. The backboard was made of some horrific thick plastic that faded in the first five minutes it was up. And the metal pole that supported it and was cemented into the ground was turned just slightly to the left so you could never get a straight on shot. At first my friends and I hated it, but as we got older, it became a rite of passage to win a game on this screwed up hoop because of all the odd angles and weird caroms that we’d get. Our high school coach tried to ban us from playing on it, thinking it would ruin our shots, so during the season we had to keep quiet about the sunday morning games we played despite his decree.
When I drove by the house last year, it was gone. Crushed me. Went and knocked on the door, because I thought that thing would be there forever and I wanted to know where it had gone and why. (The obvious reasons – it was a crappy hoop – weren’t clear to me at that moment.) But no one answered the door.
I hate thinking that whoever lives in that house doesn’t get to play on that hoop.
Three years ago I made a stop at the small town in NC from which my family moved when I was 12. I remembered the house address lo these many years later and stumbled my way to the area, only because street names were the same although, except for a couple of churches,the landmarks of my memory were virtually gone.
First, I discovered that the area is now labeled historical. Boy, is that aging! Second, after several passes, I realized I couldn’t find the house because what was once one story is now two. That it is an addition was hard to tell because of the good job done to keep it faithful to the architecture. Also, a house on one side had been leveled and rebuilt. As much as I wanted to knock on the door, we had a time constraint and I moved on.
Memory also plays tricks. There is a house across the street which I recalled as being large and on terraced property. In reality, it is fair sized and the lawn is only a couple of steps up from the sidewalk. Even knowing this, my mind doesn’t let go of the picture in my distorted memory.
I grew up in Hamilton, Diane! I lived on Bayonne, off of Harford. Small world!
We lived there until I was 19, when we moved to Ocean City. The hardest part about leaving was the house. I LOVED that house. It was a really old, 3 story Victorian with a huge yard. My father had made a garden down one entire side of the house, complete with winding trail and pond. There were all types of fruit trees scattered around the rest of the yard – plum, peach, apple, and mulberries. There was a larges hedge that ran across the fron and down the sides of the yard, allowing for a good bit of privacy from the street.
My grandfather had built us a “treehouse” in the backyard. It wasn’t in the tree, but right next to it. It was made of two giant spools that large cable used to be wrapped around. He used an old Tom McCann (sp?) shoe store sign as a slide and an old army tent as the roof to the second story, until he had time to put on a real roof a few years later.
We also had a pool in the backyard that I spent every day of the summer in. I would wake up, put my suit on, get in the pool, get out for lunch and then back in until dinner. If it was really warm I’d go for a dip before I went to bed.
I have more wonderful memories in, of and around that house that I could begin to tell anyone. When we moved, I wanted to take the front door with us. It was a beautiful carved wood door with a large glass oval in the center. I still haven’t seen one that rivals it.
A few years ago, I happened to be in town and decided to drive past. I parked the car across the street and got out, just staring. A woman in the yard next door came over and asked if I needed anything (I probably looked like I was casing the joint!) and I started bawling! I explained that I grew up in the house and she proceeded to tell me she was the current owner and asked if I’d like to come in.
Would I? Um, yeah!!
She showed me around some of the things they had done (new kitchen, found an old pocket door between 2 of the rooms, and knocked down the hideous wall the first owners after us had erected.) They tried to stay true to the old architecture in the things they had changed. It was nice to see someone caring for the house as much as I did.
The best part of all was when she showed me the attic. At that time it was still unfinished. She asked if I happened to be the ‘B’ in ‘B & L Best Friends Forever’. I told her I was, then started to bawl all over again.
Alot of things outside of the house were different. The hedge was gone. So was the pool, the treehouse, the pond and most of the garden. The Japanese maples my father planted when they were seedings were huge. There was a white picket fence around most of the yard. And EVERYTHING seemed so much smaller than I remembered. I guess everyone says that though.
Letting me into her home was such a nice thing to do, and it really made me feel good to know someone was taking care of the place for me!