i’m still just treading water in this site – erasing important things and writing junk instead. i thank you all for sticking around while i learn how to do this. right now i’m trying to get a format of posts that i can just fill in every day, but you know who it’s from and where i’m coming from.
i’m afraid this format is making me banal. i know it is. i feel too public, even though no one has written me yet. so i’m going to talk about another city, one that disappeared in 1964. it might bring back my mojo…
i grew up in Rochester, New York. My family came there when i was 3 1/2 and even though my father couldn’t get his medical license as a chiropodist, and became a barber, it became something of a paradise, in large part because we lived off of Joseph Ave. When the accountant of the barber’s union ran off with all the money, and the downtown barber he was working for could no longer afford to keep him, he rented a shop on 329 Joseph Ave. I don’t know how they did it. My mother had been fitting corsets in people’s home, dragging me along for a while until the local Jewish organization helped to get me into a nursery, and working at Hickey-Freeman, but when the clientele started building up in my father’s shop, she also became a manicurist for the Jewish boxers and wrestlers in the neighborhood. Does anyone remember them? King Solomon, for one?
in any case the street became a sort of home for me. when we lived on Selinger Street, the corner of Joseph Ave was where Rabbi Kurtz lived, and my brother spent most of his free time there. But further on Selinger, past Joseph Ave, was the shochet, to whom we would bring the chickens we bought from the public market. he would slaughter the chickens and pass them on to the plucker, and then the finisher, who sat next to a bunsen burner and cleaned off the ends. then we’d take them back home for kashering.
My father’s shop then had a connecting door to the grocery store next door. next to the grocers was a butcher named Cook, and next to him was a fish store. Next to this group of shops was a red-brick church. i used to sit on the steps and wonder what was inside. It was Catholic then, and then Baptist, and i think it might still be there. the rest isn’t.
a few years later my father’s shop moved to 508 Joseph Ave, a larger shop, painted light blue. i don’t remember neighbors there, but i spent a lot of time sweeping floors in exchange for the pepsi from the machine. i loved doing it. i loved watching my father work, the leather strap he sharpened the scissors on, the disinfecting machine, and the rich library in the back where he escaped to put his feet up when there were no customers.
We managed somehow to buy a house on the corner of Clifford Avenue and Remington Street and another part of Joseph Avenue was discovered to me. I was a little older and could walk the street myself to Joseph Avenue, to the library. I went with my brother and he would go to the books for big children but i kept to the picture books, until one day the librarian suggested i look through the books on the other side of the room. that moment changed my life. for years i would take out 7 books a week during vacations.
a few doors north on Joseph Avenue was a soda shop, i think it was called Ida’s but i’m not sure. It took me a while to discover it, but once I did i was hooked on chocolate sodas. I learned about more popular places later, like the one on the corner of Clinton, but the little one on Joseph has always remained in my mind. i always passed it on my way to the Workmen’s Circle school twice a week and sunday morning. it was not an inviting place, and the owner wasn’t particularly friendly, so i wasn’t tempted often, and anyway i didn’t have money, but it was wonderful to watch the syrup, the milk, and the soda mix together at the fountains.
maybe because it was such a jewish neighborhood there were places we frequented and other places we avoided whenever possible. Across the street from the soda shop was a deli – not the one we spent a lot of time in – but with a pickle barrel outside and herring for sale inside. Orgel’s down the street was beyond our means most of the time, but it had vital jewish equipment, and i still remember Mr. Orgel’s haunted face.
we moved away in the late ’50’s but we used to go back for shopping and visits. Then in ’64 there were race riots and most of the stores were destroyed. the sense of transience of an entire neighborhood and way of life remains with me.
the point is if you’re reading the poem or looking at the picture you’re not going to aim properly, and then i’ll have a mess to clean up.