The House on Court Street
Sun., September 29, 06:53 AM
This is a recycled piece. If you know any of my kids, you might have read it already. So I hesitated about including it here. But the place where I grew up says things about me, and so here it is. Do you know a place like this?
Court Street, a tiny street a few blocks from the University of Connecticut in Stamford, was not such a great neighborhood in 1938. The houses were old, and some of them had been commercial establishments a decade or two earlier. My father’s family had operated a store in the front and a soda factory in the back. Nevertheless, the houses on the north side (our side), which backed up to the Rippowam River, were better than the row houses across the street, which were occupied by what we would probably classify today as “white trash.”
The Rippowam was usually a quiet stream. The riverbanks were high on our side, so that one couldn’t easily get to the water except where there was a staircase. On the other side the banks were lower. That was Woodside Park, but you didn’t get to the park by just crossing the river; a few blocks to the east or west were bridges, and people went around.
The river curved down around the west end of the street – that’s why it was so short – and kids could go wading there. A few intrepid ones crossed the stream, but that part of the park wasn’t developed and you could get lost in the weeds that grew higher than your head.
Number 16 was an add-on to an even older building. Each side had living quarters upstairs and down; the two upstairs apartments shared a bathroom. The downstairs of the newer portion had once been my grandparent’s store, which was later converted into a four-room apartment; that’s where we lived. Black people lived in the other three apartments; some of them were possibly the nicest people in the neighborhood.
The four small rooms at number 16 ran straight front to back, with no hallway at either door. Step through the front door and you were in the living room. Straight ahead was a wide doorway with draperies at the sides, but the drapes were never closed. You looked right into my parents’ bedroom. At the back of the front bedroom was a door – the only inner door with a lock and key – that led into the back bedroom. And the back bedroom led right into the kitchen.
Because our bedroom was right off the kitchen and there was no door between them, Brother and I were allowed to listen to the radio if we were in bed by seven-thirty. We listened to shows like “Inspector Hearthstone of the Death Squad” and “Mr. Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons.” After nine my mother turned on her own programs; Brother may have been asleep, but I enjoyed “Lux Radio Theater” and “Can You Top This?” – even if I didn’t always under stand the jokes.
A couple of closets off the back bedroom had been combined and transformed into a bathroom, a narrow room, chilly in the wintertime because it was under the outside entryway to upstairs. For years the bathroom held only the tub and the toilet; Daddy shaved at the kitchen sink. The room was barely wide enough for the tub, but you could open the other door (two closets, you see) to get access to the tub from the side.
The kitchen contained a cabinet with an enamel counter. Dishes, pots, and groceries were all stored in that cabinet. When Daddy and my cousin Marty installed a sink in the bathroom, they moved the mirrored medicine chest from the kitchen to the bathroom. Then and only then was there room for Daddy to put cabinets above the kitchen sink.
Besides the sink, there were a refrigerator (not an icebox like the neighbors’) and a washtub – suitable for laundry and bathing small children – and two stoves. The table and four chairs had been one of my mother’s purchases, I think. Maybe they weren’t her first choice, but they were good stuff; the chairs are still in use sixty years later. There was also a high stool, built by someone in woodworking class, that served as a seat for the smallest child. When Grandma, a rather short lady, sat on the stool, she had no lap. I liked sitting on the stool myself.
My mother cooked on the gas stove, an ordinary range with an oven at one side. But an entire corner of the room was filled with a kerosene-burning stove with a flat surface (usually heating a heavy teakettle) and a large oven. The kerosene bubbled from a large bottle that was replaced periodically by a deliveryman. On cold mornings my father got up and lit the stove so that the kitchen would be warm by the time everyone else got up. Sometimes we put our clothing on the ledge by the oven door to warm it up.
My grandmother baked bread in that oven every Friday. She mixed the dough on Thursday night, wrapped the bowl well, and put it into her bed (to keep it warm) to rise overnight. In the morning she would shape rolls and an occasional large challah. For a treat we might be allowed a little dough to play with and “bake” on the ledge.
The building had two cellars, accessible only from outside. Under our half of the house, the back cellar was dark, damp and dirty. Though it was used for some storage, the important thing in the cellar was the coal furnace. The furnace supplied heat for the house and also the hot water. Daddy banked the fire at night and went downstairs in the morning to add coal and poke up the fire for the day. Coal was delivered by truck; the driver placed a chute from the truck through the cellar window and poured coal directly onto the cellar floor.
The front cellar, under the other side of the house, had two rooms. The back room was Grandma’s equivalent of an attic, I guess. Among other things it contained supplies that had been used in the old store. A roll of butcher paper provided drawing paper for years. The front room of that cellar was usually empty, except in the weeks before Thanksgiving when Daddy kept a live turkey in there. The door was always locked, but we could look through the glass window and see the turkey.
Eventually we got an electric oil burner, which replaced not only the coal furnace (and the pile of coal!) but also the kerosene stove in the kitchen. I remember it was a very big undertaking; we needed both a plumber and an electrician for the installation. No one had to go downstairs to put coal on the fire – we had a thermostat! – and there was always enough hot water.
The house on Court Street was far from perfect. My mother used to say she had the best mother-in-law in the world, but she still felt that no mother-in-law should live with her children. My grandmother in essence turned the house over to my mother. She was there to help – mother often said that my grandmother taught her to cook, for example – but she never forced her will. It was my mother’s household.
On the other hand, with limited funds mother had some difficulty making the house her own. They bought their own bedroom furniture, but the living room furniture was there before she got there, and it would be years before she was able to change it to suit her tastes.
What the house did have, however, was outdoor space. There were large porches, front and back, and lawn and gardens. There were lilacs along the driveway and grapevines in the back. Both my father and my grandmother loved gardens, and the aroma of flowers and grass and fresh tomatoes was perfume to the city girl. I remember my mother making grape jam, covering the jars with paraffin. She told me she had tried to make wine too, but with less success. We had fresh tomatoes all summer, and at the end of the season Daddy pickled the green ones. They were delicious!
There was plenty of room for children to be outdoors. Mother was a believer in giving babies fresh air; it was easy enough to put a carriage out on the porch, which was roofed to protect against rain or too much sun. A toddler could play safely in the yard, and little boys who tended to wander (like my brother) could be tied to the clothesline. He hated being tied, he promised he wouldn’t run away again, and he didn’t. My little sister, on the other hand, required constant watching, but babysitters – mostly me – were available by then.
For years my mother sent out the heavy stuff like sheets and did the lighter laundry herself in the washtub in the kitchen. The laundry was returned still damp and had to be hung outdoors on the clothesline. In the winter clothing often froze on the line and was brought in to thaw and finish drying. (One-piece winter underwear, frozen stiff, looked as if it were ready to walk away on its own!) Even after we had an automatic washer – the first family on the block to get one – clothes were hung outside to dry. I still remember how to hang clothes so that the wind would blow through them and dry them quicker and smoother, even though I haven’t hung clothes outdoors for more than thirty years.
It was lucky that there was room outside, because inside there was little to spare. We could manage to feed five or six in the kitchen, but for lots of company we had to move the table into the living room, pushing the sofa and chairs out of the way. The crib with the newest baby was always in my parents’ room. When my brother was born, I shared the back bedroom with my grandmother; after my sister was born, Grandma went to live with her daughter.
Eventually, all three of us kids shared a bedroom, with Sister and me on a studio couch. The bathroom was just about the only place you could get any privacy and, naturally, you couldn’t stay in there for long. Outdoors I could take a book and sit on the riverbank behind the garage, or hide in the middle of a forsythia bush. (Forsythia branches hang over until they touch the ground, and then they take root, leaving a space inside.)
One thing you could say about Court Street was that it was accessible. Elementary schools – first Franklin Street and then Hart – were only a few blocks away, and it was safe for children to walk to school. Even the junior high and high schools were within reasonable walking distance. If my father happened to have a day off, we might get a ride to school, but most of the time we walked.
After school we walked to Hebrew School or music lessons; if they ended late, Daddy would pick us up. Mother didn’t drive. She walked to the A&P on Broad Street, downtown to Atlantic Street, or to the butcher’s on Pacific Street. When she went to work in the new Bloomingdale’s department store, she walked to work.
My father always worked very hard, often at more than one job, and when mother started working too, they felt they could afford a better house. The house on Glenbrook Road, fifty years newer than the one on Court Street, seemed gigantic to us. It had a large living room and a dining room, an attic as well as a dry basement, and there were enough bedrooms so that Sister and I didn’t have to share with Brother. The bathroom had a radiator and, as Daddy said, now we’d never get anyone out. If we felt any nostalgia leaving our old home (after all, I had lived there for fifteen years), the hopes and dreams for our new home certainly prevailed.
As we prepared to move, Daddy enjoyed singing with Rosemary Clooney: “…ain’t gonna need this house no longer, ain’t gonna need this house no more….” Within months after we left, the worst spring flooding in memory sent the Rippowam raging over both banks. For a few days Court Street was passable only by rowboat. Naturally there was lots of damage, but the building that withstood the pressures best was the house at Number 16.
And it’s still standing there.
