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How would you describe the neighborhood you grew up in, then and now?

You Asked. big grin

From my biografy:

The earliest memories of my childhood that I can recall were at 1817 N. 18th St. in St. Louis. It was a two story old brick building made into six apartments. This was home for my first decade.

The neighborhood was old, and probably quite run down, but such things did not impress children with no sphere of reference. In fact, it was a place ripe with all the new discoveries a child could make in a one-block area.

There were vacant lots next to our house where old black abandoned cars from the thirties were parked for us to play on. There were engine cranks to play with and spotlights that moved by a handle inside the car. Of course, they were mountains to climb, scaling from the run-boards to fenders to hood to roof.

In front of the house were two large sycamore trees, growing out of the cool brick sidewalk by the curb. The smell of sycamore always takes me back there. People would sit on their front doorsteps in the heat of summer, neighbors were known. In fact, the Bomaritos who had a family bakery across the street were known for their loud and physical arguments, an evening's entertainment for those on their doorsteps eating hot tamales from the street vendor's cart.

During the day we kids would stand outside the open door in the back of the bakery and watch the men kneading the dough by hand on tables with flour everywhere. It wasn't until I was being baby-sat by someone of the Bomarito's family that I experienced real bread; chewy, fragrant, crusty, Italian bread, unlike the soft white characterless "Wonder Bread" that most Americans ate.

Although in the Midwestern U.S., St. Louis had immigrants from Europe in the late '40s, and this is where I had my first exposure to languages and cultures different from mine. I wasn't aware of any children being different, because childhood is a universal thing, but the older immigrants would speak in their native Polish or Italian or whatever on the street, and I would listen with interest.

Taking up almost half the block where I lived were the Gothic buildings of St. Liborius Catholic Church and convent, with its grotto and gardens and stations of the cross. It was a good place to hang out, and I suppose we children were a part of the decor. We knew to be quiet while walking in the garden by the grotto of the Virgin Mary. On the other side of the church we gathered the less damaged of the flowers thrown out of an upper window into the yard. This was the sloping yard where we played on sleds in the winter until our feet and hands hurt from the cold. In the front of the church we scraped rice off the sidewalk that was thrown at weddings and had our own play weddings in the back yard at home.

In the summer we enjoyed getting dirty, which probably gave us a natural immunity to polio and other diseases before the vaccines were found. We had battles with dust bombs in thin paper bags, which turned to gritty mud on our sweaty bodies.

There was an alley on the other side of the block known to us kids for the number and size of dead rats to be found there. Not that we had to wait for them to die to see them, but we got a closer look at the dead ones. On the same alley, in the yard next to ours, were outside toilets, still in use. I remember when inside toilets were abruptly put into our neighbor's house, with no special room yet built around it. Apparently the day of the outhouse in the city had come to an end.

Milk was kept in the ice box and the ice truck would come delivering blocks of ice. But, the milk came in a horse drawn wagon from Pevely dairy. The horse was always something to watch as a child, as it stood waiting at the curb towering over us. At that time horses in the city were not unknown and would often be seen pulling junk wagons. This late use of the horse as a work animal was the result of wartime gasoline rationing and material shortages such as rubber and steel. The electric streetcar was still used extensively in St. Louis in my early childhood, though steadily being replaced by Diesel buses.

I know, I know TMI-DNR. The Internet - Home of the Two Word (or anagram) Sound Bite!

The demographics are pretty much still the same in the area I grew up in in Queens...in Brooklyn, more Hispanics have moved into the neighborhood.

60's suburbia.

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