(The title has nothing to do with anything, except for the fact that I’ve had “Seasons of Love” in my head for two days straight. Why? You know as much as I do.)
East Lake’s decline wasn’t a quick one. We didn’t wake up one day to find all our neighbours moved out, run-down buildings, and drastically different storefronts (most of which are empty). Leigh and Sharon moved because of her grandmother or aunt or something leaving her a house in Clay-Chalkville, Erlene moved because she was aging and went to live with her granddaughter, and Dot Quinn moved because she was going blind and couldn’t see to get out anymore. The latter two were women my dad grew up around, as they were his mother’s (whose name was also Dot) friends. I have only seen Erlene once since she moved, at my aunt’s service. I called her the day Dad died to tell her, and Mom and I are planning on seeing her over spring break. I haven’t seen or talked to Dot since she moved, save for once when Dad was picking me up from IB and had to run by for something-or-the-other.
W.J. Christian, as Lindsey (Price, as I knew her) Hull can tell you, was a good school back in the day. We were known for the advanced ‘alternative’ middle school aspect, that is, a wonderful gifted program. Mrs. Putman, Jane-Ann’s mother of course, taught there for forever and can attest to it being good…at one time. It slowly began starting in fourth grade—white parents were taking their kids out and moving to Clay-Chalkville like everybody else—and those of us who were zoned for W.J.C. and couldn’t go anywhere else were left to be the minority. And that’s all fine and good—I’m no racial supremacist by far, and I don’t believe the Anglo-Saxon race should prevail above all others—but it was a strange sensation, slowly being outnumbered and reduced to something at which the kids would jibe, as kids tend to do in middle school anyway but was added ammunition.
The good teachers began leaving for better jobs, leaving in their wake unqualified, apathetic ‘teachers,’ with of course a few exceptions. In seventh grade, the school didn’t have enough money to make yearbooks. In eighth grade, they got rid of the gifted program altogether, and our classes (C-side was the gifted-students side) got mixed up as they hadn’t been before. 6C, 7C, 8A…it just sounded weird and felt foreign. Here we were all taught the same things. The majority of my class went to Ramsay. I, of course, went to IB, along with Alen Haric, and Reuben and Robert Cox, although they left in, I think, sophomore year. But I still lived in East Lake.
I remember going to the Old America store with Dad on Saturdays, usually followed by a trip to K-Mart, usually for him to buy seeds for his garden(s). Gardens I helped grow with my tiny hoe and rake. I attended the Hawkins Recreation Center’s summer camp until I was around seven or eight, and my mother and I would go walking around East Lake Park after school to get our daily exercise in the nice weather (…and, yeah, for me to play on the playground[s]).
I was about eight or nine when I used to ride my bike up Eighth Avenue. I loved the little alleyway just across the avenue from the end of my street (the end where my house sits). It’s a tiny barely-road, hardly large enough for cars, that serves as a nice shortcut to the upper end of 85th Street. And almost right across the end of that alley on 85th is a house with octagon windows, and I loved it. (There’s also a little blue-and-white house on 8th that I would love to live in, but that’s far beside the point.)
I used to carry my composition notebook with me and sit in people’s yards (obviously I had limited sense of trespassing back in the day—I figured front yards were fine, so how wrong I was!) or little alleys and write pages upon pages of stories of the people who lived in the houses. They were obviously imaginary stories, as I only knew three people in the neighbourhood. I remember an old man coming out of the house at the corner of 85th and 8th (not the blue house, but the one across from that one) and staring at me as I was borrowing his yard. I pedalled off, terrified. That was the closest I came to being discovered or admonished.
Once I pedalled over to 82nd Street, where I knew one of my classmates lived, but I have no idea how I got there—I was just blindly taking my bike wherever I felt it. I once ended up at the lower end of 85th Street, by 4th Avenue, and couldn’t figure out where I was. Being lost in a time before cell phones was terrifying. But I ended up back on my street somehow, and even more ‘somehow’ was that my mother never even knew I’d been gone. Now THAT is sneakiness.
Can a child bike freely around the neighbourhood now?
Well, he or she can, but good luck not getting picked up or attacked by one of the many, and I do mean many, sex offenders who live in the area. Or maybe they would prefer to avoid not getting run over by those who use 84th Street and 8th Avenue as their personal racetracks. Usually these vehicles consist of dinky motorcycles (“crotch rockets,” if you will—come on, if you’re gonna get a motorcycle, man up!), or cars jacked up on spinners that glimmer in the sunlight, a PayDay logo plastered on the side, no muffler, and a booming bass so loud the windows of the 1910-era houses rattle with every beat.
The quiet of the neighbourhood only broken by the sounds of kids playing in their front yards is now replaced by aforementioned loud cars, or a metal folding chair being thrown at a vehicle accompanied by shouts of strings of obscenities screeched like a guest on Maury. Gone are the days when playing basketball in the yard didn’t have to be interrupted by a series of gunshots nearby. Gone are the days when the sounds of my dad’s band-saw or lathe running would fill the Saturday spring day, replaced by angry shouts and mufflers and stereos. When I drive down my own street, I get stared at by the kids who walk down the middle of the road—always a smart choice, let me add, in an area where the speed limit of 30 means 50 or above).
But there are still some positives. We do still have the man in the house next to Erlene’s old house—two over from the crackhouse—whose worst noise offense is his leafblower which runs for the duration of the day. There is the family in the house next to his (three from South Crack Central), the older matriarch of which tells my mother how beautiful and grown-up I am if they run into each other, and how she remembers when I was high as her knee. We have Rose next door, who is as sweet as a woman could get, who is in favour of trying to remove the dealers, and loves us—especially loved my dad for the kindness, and probably for all the times he adventured under her house to retrieve kittens. Her three daughters, one who’s my age, one who’s just two years younger, and one I don’t know well, are all sweet. They look out for us, we look out for them.
The people on the other side of us, on the corner of the street, aren’t remarkable (that is a good thing). They’re polite and almost always say hi, and are rarely noisy—so rarely that when they are, we don’t care. There’s Stacy, next to those people, who Dad used to talk on the phone for hours with, who (illegally) borrowed some of our electricity when his went out and offered anytime to return the favour, who helped Mom and me turn our water meter back on when we couldn’t figure out how to do it.
Sadly enough—and I think I speak for most of East Lake—the negatives outweigh the positives. Businesses are dead, the buildings shells of what used to be a thriving cultural center. With the closing of the Starbucks (no real loss to me as a potential employee, but a harsh blow to the attempts at reviving the East Lake of lore), you can add another dead business-front to Parkway East. Paint some more graffiti on Banks’ abandoned walls, or better yet, go to a shady area of East Lake Park and sell drugs—I hear that’s all the rage these days.
I would love to see East Lake turn around. I grew up in the days of it being a safer (nowhere is truly safe, after all) area, with Winn-Dixie, Hancock Fabrics, Old America, Wal-Mart Non-Supercenter, Springville Road Library reading summer days, not being intimidated at East Lake Park, quieter cars, the absence of gunfire. It seems like with the death of my father went the final breath of the old East Lake.
East Lake, please come back. We miss you.
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