The Old Neighborhood

 

Our Strathmoor House

There is an old saying, that begins with “You can’t go back…”  Both C. S. Lewis and Ernest Hemingway used this beginning to deliver the same message.  Lewis said, ““You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” Hemingway’s version is “You can't go back, but you can move forward.”  Both are telling us that we cannot change the past, but we have the freedom to start from where we are now and live moving forward in a manner that can change the ending presumably in some positive way.  The Lewis and Hemingway quotes are the subject for another blog.  This one is simply about the “You can’t go back.”

You can’t go back to the places you used to live and expect it to be the same especially if you haven’t been back in ten or twenty years.  You can’t go back to a place you worked and expect to see everyone you worked with.  You can’t go back to an old school and… well, you get the idea.  People change jobs.  Old neighbors move away.  Businesses close locations or refurb their offices beyond recognition.  Houses are painted different colors sometimes remodeled.  Some are even torn down and rebuilt.  Old haunts, restaurants and stores relocate, redecorate, or go out of business and replaced with another business.

This is all normal stuff.  But it is different in my old neighborhood where I grew up in Detroit.  The changes there are dramatic.  I don’t even know what to call it.  The socio-economic changes in the city are well documented and resulted in the city declaring bankruptcy in 2013.  From that time, the city has experienced a revitalization.  I was there for the recent Armenian Youth Federation Olympics and actually stayed downtown at the RenCen.  The city was alive with people, with new restaurants attracting people from the city and suburbs alike.  This was so different in such a positive way from the Detroit I left in 1990.  Back then I only went downtown when I absolutely had to like for school at Wayne State University.  It was a pleasure to see the city that I grew up in come back to life.

Cadillac Jr. High being demolshed

 

That transformation has yet to reach the neighborhood I grew up:  Zone 27 as we called it then and 48227 in Zip Code parlance.  I loved that neighborhood growing up there.  Burns Elementary School, Cadillac Junior High, and Cooley High School were all walking distance from our house first on Freeland and then two blocks over on Strathmoor.  This summer Cadillac was torn down.  Cooley has been closed since 2010 and has been vandalized.  I hope they can repurpose this architectural gem rather than tear it down as well.  I have posted on my beloved library, the Monnier Branch of the Detroit Public and I believe it has also been torn down.  The Great Lakes movie theater opened in 1927 and had like 1,800 seats.  As we lived a frugal lower middle-class lifestyle, we were not frequent patrons of the Great Lakes but it was the theater we went to.  I was sorry when it ceased to be a movie theater in the late 1960s and sadder, today, to learn it was abandoned in the 1980s and torn down in 1999.

The shopping district in our neighborhood was at the corner of Grand River and Greenfield.  There were two major department stores across Grand River from each other.  One was Montgomery Ward, a now defunct national chain, and Federal’s, a now defunct local chain.  There were other stores around the same intersection such as Saunders, Cunninghams Pharmacy, Crowley's, Winkleman's, SS Kresge's, Woolworth's, and Harry Suffrin’s menswear.  There were a few other shops on Fenkell we would also frequent.  There was a Tastee-Freeze at the corner of Strathmoor and Fenkell.  A block to the west was the Red Devil Pizzeria which we may have gone to once or twice.  We got our school supplies and prescriptions from Sam’s Drug’s a few blocks to the east.  Morris Hardware, across from Sam’s, is where we when we were doing household repairs.  Next to Morris Hardware was a humble Chinese restaurant owned by my classmate Mary Look’s parents.  We never went to that restaurant.

Our Old House now

All of that is gone.  Only Burns Elementary is still operational.  Our house on Strathmoor is abandoned and boarded up.  The homes on either side of our house are gone… torn down.  Our old house looks so small and so lonely.  While all of this is true, I have fond, warm, and full memories of the place, our little slice of Detroit.  In my mind, our house was warm, spacious, full of life. 

You cannot go back, but you can certainly remember.