My Old Fruit Belt Home and What Happened to It

I couldn’t speak but only stare when we drove to the Fruit Belt street between North and High where I had lived for twenty-one years, that enclave originally made up of German immigrants, who kept their houses spotless and nourished their gardens with the horse droppings of the horse-drawn vehicles that regularly traversed the narrow streets with overhanging Dutch Elms. What had been a street of well-kept homes is now decimated. Here and there on both sides of the road, houses have been demolished and empty lots yawn. Probably the most impressive two family house on the street with two spacious flats, the Hammer House, is simply gone. I kept looking at the space. Down the block, on the corner of High Street, there had been a real tenement building of the type you can still see in thirties movies, with fascinating (to a child) vertical rows of porches built across the back. I had been warned never to set foot in it. Dangerous in there, my mother warned. Gone.The houses of my friends Danny, Betty, and Harry were gone. The house where a family thought to be of Gypsy stock was gone. But more devastating than any of this was my old house, which is somehow still standing.

My father worked a long way away at Sealtest Ice Cream downtown on Elm Street. He walked back and forth every day, to and from work, in every type of weather known to Buffalonians. After a long day on his feet, he didn’t stop to rest when he came home but shoveled snow or cut the grass. Then he’d come in and listen to a program of music from Canada, where he’d been born, while my mother made dinner. He and my mother had prudently built a three car garage in the yard during the Depression and rented out two spaces for extra money. In the space all the way to the left, our space, my father hung a swing for me, which retracted into the ceiling by ropes when we needed to put our car in. Cool! My mother had saved and saved to remodel the little house she’d been given for a wedding present by her father. The house was well taken care of by my parents.

My childhood home, from which I walked to my elementary school and high school, has been badly used. The porch on the front, where I used to sit for hours reading, is still there but looks small and mean. The driveway is mostly gone. The garage which my father took such good care of is gone. I don’t like to think of what the inside of the house must look like, where my mother happily made a much larger kitchen and a longer living room where I could finally have a piano. She told the carpenter just how she wanted a new bedroom for me with a built-in dressing table, and had him build another new bedroom upstairs for my sister.

I wish my old house had been torn down before I saw it again.

-Marilyn M. Fisher