Reine’s 6.1.15 Visit to
Dayton I drove through Dayton on
my way back to Yellow Springs from seeing the terrific, marvelously produced
and performed program of Ballet Chicago at the Harris Theater on May 30. What I saw in my old neighborhood showed me the combination of uncaring on the part of city authorities for their own city's health, and the opportunism of underground-economy builders like drug sellers and gangs. My area had been allowed to deteriorate into a degraded version of human habitation -- and I believe that the Dayton View Hustlers and its offshoot, the Hooskals, want it to continue to be exactly this degraded, for misery loves company and the miserable have a place to go there, hide, and drown themselves. I went first to Dayton View. I drove along
Grand Avenue. I negotiated many speed bumps, both the decorative type at
intersections with brick crosswalks bordered by scalloped cement rows that will
wreck a car’s suspension if driven over too fast, and the undecorative lumps of
blacktop that appear randomly between intersections, signaled by yellow stripes
painted on the lumps. No speed bumps existed when we first moved into the
neighborhood in 1959; those started to appear in the late 1970s. The Dayton View homes were built by
individuals, not by developers. They were lovingly designed to be roomy,
attractively configured, and practical to maintain with big yards for children,
both front and back. The houses are all set back at least thirty feet from the
street. I remember the challenge of forcing a lawn mower – not a power mower –
all around our back yard and up and down the hills of our front yard, making
the lawn once again a pleasant sward of green. The houses are two and three
stories high. They have gables or cupolas. Some of front porches along the
length of the front of the house, but most have small front porches with
archways over them, like 651 Oxford Avenue. Our house also had side porches
that were enclosed to be sunrooms by the time we Duells moved there. The neighborhood was changing even as we
moved in. The family next door, the Ezekiels, whose children were our ages,
moved away shortly after we moved in. It seemed as though only older white
people stayed in their houses, until, like Mrs. Mossroe two doors down, they
died. Then lower-income white people moved in. These new inhabitants did not
maintain the properties like Dad and Mother maintained 651 Oxford Ave. We
helped Dad mow and trip; we washed the many windows in the house, and cleaned
house often; Dad had the house painted periodically (in fact, Charlie and I
painted it one year, maybe 1979-ish), and Dad paid close attention to the roof
and the gutters. Other families who were moving in did not
do these things. They did not seem to care. It was okay if their kids looked
very dirty. I remember a friend who moved into a house on Lexington Avenue
chatting away in front of Ulrich’s Drug Store, where we bought candy and pop
and comic books. Poochie the neighborhood dog was sniffing at the girl’s feet.
He cocked his leg and peed on her. The pee ran down her bare, tanned leg,
across her strong bare foot, and puddle on the cement. Disbelieving, I told
her, “Poochie just peed on your leg.” My own reaction would have been, “Eeew!” and
I would have run back home to wash my leg with the garden hose. But my friend,
who (like me) was about 11 years old, just laughed carelessly and said, “Oh. I
thought it was getting’ a little warm down there.” Later, the lower-income white people were
replaced by black people. I remember respectable, clean young black children
trotting along past the house on their way to Jefferson Elementary school, and
I enjoyed trotting along and chatting with them. But by about 1966, maybe a
little bit later, an ominous change took place. More and more often, the black
kids at the school seemed prone to misbehavior. Most were still intent on
education as much as any white child, but a larger and larger proportion of
difficult kids appeared. By 1971, I remember staring in puzzlement at cars that
would stop in the middle of the street while the drivers conversed, unconcerned
that they were blocking the traffic in both directions, and moving on only when
their conversation had concluded. Yesterday (June 1, 2015), I drove through
the neighborhood with increasing consternation. At least 50 percent of the
stately homes were either boarded up or left with vacant, gaping windows, their
roofs in the process of collapse. Lawn after lawn was covered with hip-high
grass. Untrimmed hedges and shrubs spilled over onto sidewalks. From Grand Avenue, I turned right and went
up Rosedale Drive. Ulrich’s looked as though it had been long closed, I think,
though now I realize I’m not sure – anyway, instead of the busy cheerful little
store of my child, I have a dark, huddled, filthy impression. I drove past our
house, turned right at the next block (Kumler Avenue), proceeded to Catalpa
Drive, and then right onto Oxford Avenue. I parked in front of our house and
got out of the car. The little store building across the street had
deteriorated badly. When I was growing up, it was a bright Laundromat where my
siblings and I did countless loads. After we left, it became a deli run by
Palestinians with whom Dad and Mother had a cheery relationship. Now, if it was
open at all, its owners had an interest in making it look crouched and
secretive and grungy. A slender black man leaned against its front wall. The
house next door – was it even there? Or just miserably overgrown? Someone obviously inhabited our house. On
the now-majestic trunks of the great maple trees in our front yard, the
inhabitants had posted NO TRESPASSING signs. One of the signs also said, “No
Hunting or Fishing,” so I suppose it had been stolen from some other property.
A third NO TRESPASSING sign made the front door look grim instead of welcoming. I looked at the silver maple planted on
our tree lawn when I was in my early trees. It is now a matriarch, lovely in
the midst of the blight. I then directed my eyes up the hill of our – no longer
our – front lawn to the fence that
always separated the front from the back yard. When we lived there, the shrubs
planted along it didn’t prevent the eye from looking into the backyard, but now
a morass of vines and weeds guarded the backyard from view. All the shrubs
planted decoratively along the perimeter of the house had been permitted to
grow uncontrolled, evidently for some years. Their long woody branches extended
far beyond their bed over the lawn. Someone had mowed the lawn recently. More hedges had been planted long the
stone front steps that descended from our front walk to the sidewalk. They too
had been intentionally permitted to meander into overgrowth, though trimmed
back from the steps themselves. The cluster of shrubs on the corner showed the
same ferocious, triumphant overgrowth. I turned and walked along the Rosedale
Avenue side. The mower of the lawn had missed a couple of streaks. The piny
shrubs continuing along the house perimeter now touched each other, clutched
each other like fighting dogs posted as sentinels. Dingy white cloths had been
tacked on the inside of the sunroom windows, obscuring its interior in a
forcefully ugly way, unlike the peasant
blinds that were there in my childhood, and which I periodically had helped to
clean. The pretty archway Mother had gotten built
over the side porch remained, but like the rest of the house, its wood showed
through peels and chips. In the side yard, among the shaggy shrubs, the linden
tree Dad and Mother had planted in the 1970s now towered far above the house,
unchecked, its branches straggling over the family room roof. Walking farther to the driveway and the
alley, the lilac bush I had loved and the other bushes straggled, their overly
woody stems seeming to crackle behind the leaves. I walked into the alley to
the back fence, noting the degradation of the house across the alleyway, the
shameless trashiness behind the inhabited homes. Peering through the back fence
was made impossible by the overgrowth. The only redeeming moment was discovering
a large tangle of honeysuckle reaching toward me through the back fence, as if
to say, “You always did love me and see! I’m still here to greet you!” I kissed
its blossoms with my nose and discovered once more that nowhere else have I
encountered honeysuckle with such delicate yet prominent fragrance, nor such
large blossoms, each at least two inches from pistils to the bottom of the
blossom. I broke off a five-inch sprig and walked back to the car, inhaling the
perfume at every step. The man outside the devastated little
store across the street was still there. He had begun to hum. I quickly left. My drive through downtown Dayton showed
strong efforts to rebuild buildings like the Victory Theater, which is now
quite beautiful; I don’t know if the Dayton Ballet still exists on hits third
floor because I didn’t try to stop and get out. I turned on First Street and
drove the two blocks to Memorial Hall. Even at this short distance from Main
Street, some buildings looked barren and none of them well cared for, not even
Memorial Hall, whose grandeur is definitely former. Determined to see the
library, I turned down St. Clair. The library entrance, once so lovely with its
pink stone and its golden engraving or lines from Langston Hughes and big doors
facing Third Street, now has an unpoetic entrance on St. Clair. I parked and
went in, noting that a large truck was pulled up at the back as if delivering
goods, and the little park behind seemed only partially mown. Strolling through the much-changed
interior, I noted shelf after shelf that was empty. I visited the children’s
room upstairs – I don’t like the low, open shelves that have replaced the
densely packed gondolas of my childhood, but there you have it. On both levels
are tables with flat-screen computers, which obviously did not exist in my day.
On the second level, in the hallway beyond the auditorium, I saw signs pointing
to “Teaching Center” and “Learning Center.” Downstairs again, I asked a lady at the
information desk why the shelves were empty, after explaining that I was
returning for a visit. She told me that the library had bought the tall Howard
building a couple of blocks down St. Clair, which once had contained a busy
music store. The shelves were empty because the whole library is moving to the
Howard building for about a year while the original library building is
renovated to have the electrical infrastructure necessary to accommodate
computers. Then it will return. In addition, the flat, construction-like area I
had noted beyond the far windows on the ground floor was to become an extension
onto the building plus a dedicated parking lot for the library. Heartened, I left and returned to Yellow
Springs. Mother listened with interest to my recounting of the journey while I
filled a glass with water and put my wilting sprig of honeysuckle into it. The
sprig brightened. It is now opening a series of blossoms at the end of the
stalk and rewarding Mother and me with its fragrance. |
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CategoriesBalanchine-related postsFocus: Gangs General Joining the Battle against Racism and Colorism Reine Duell Bethany drawings Reine Duell Bethany's Poems Reine Duell Bethany's Short Stories Reine Duell Bethany's Songs The Boneheads (cartoon series) The Shu Factor Unlocking the Writer in Every Student Village of Hempstead |
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