By Ken Hamilton
Niagara Gazette
Column by Ken Hamilton —
By the fence at the edge of his property, there on a corner of the quiet Tennessee Avenue, the 80-year-old Paul Lowery sat in his mechanized wheelchair and gazed out past the Henry J. Kalfas Magnet School.
Just to the right of him was the garden that his wife, Hattie, once kept. Instead of the bright red tomato-bearing plants and the billowing heads of the collard greens, now a slightly overgrown garden spills over from the plot on the south side of the large garage. For every birthday that Paul has had, Hattie has had one. She is much too old to be out there on her knees with a garden trowel, digging into the dirt and taking care of it.
From where Paul now sat, the green lawn gently fell from the sidewalk, rolled down through the Home Depot volunteers’ new kickball field, then under the new colorful jungle gym that replaced the old, gray steel monkey bars, and up to the edge of a parking lot that was once the children's playground. That playground was also the neighborhood’s basketball court, but there are those who yet believe that the sport attracts a negative element on this side of town — they call them the neighborhood kids!
That was back before Beech Avenue became a magnet school, before the yellow buses choked the quiet streets twice a day, and when children walked home from school for lunch. Now the playground contains the expansion classrooms that attached themselves to the white-brick schoolhouse. The rest of the pavement serves as a parking lot for a teaching staff that is disproportionally larger than the one that existed when Paul saw them build the school from the corner upon which he now sits.
Like an old friend, on yet another low hill, just off to his left, sits the old, city water tower. When Paul made his way from the decrepit old Hyde Park Village to his new house on Tennessee, the city had that tower painted gray. The nearby and growing Town of Niagara had painted theirs in a red and white checkerboard motif. That one remains as it was when first painted.
In Paul’s day, when a young Tom Jolls was Commander Tom on a WKBW Channel-7 children’s television show, Jolls’ sidekicks were a clown named Checkers and a primitive version of a robot called Can-Can. The neighborhood children had given those same names to the two towers. Even on our black-and-white television sets, we children could still discern oversized clown suit of Checkers as being red and white. Paul and Hattie would have preferred a Garden of Eden in a neighborhood more like the one near the tower named Checkers, rather than beneath the old Can-Can that sat with them on the other side of the railroad tracks, at the edge of town, and beneath the once-belching smokestacks.
Unfortunately, the children that watched Commander Tom on the black-and-white television sets were not the only ones that discerned colors. So did the adults. The realtors and the bankers in 1957 redlined some people like Paul into certain neighborhoods, and others, unlike him, into yet others.
Though we are not yet post-racial, America is not what it used to be — though the mists of Niagara Falls has some catching up to do with some of the rest of the country. Soon there will be a ribbon-cutting to celebrate blacks now empowered to redline the less fortunate.
The city’s water tower is now green. In fact, the neighborhood is almost as green as it ever was, too, except for what Paul’s fading eyes is witnessing. He and his old friend, Can-Can, sat and watched what was happening in what was once the area’s park.
I said to him that it was a shame that they would take away a park to expand a public housing project. He looked back up at me and agreed, saying that he understood the need for more housing, and that he was not against HOPE VI, but them putting it there was just not right. Paul’s concerns ran deeper than just the loss of the park — it ran back to 1957 and why he was there.
There was a time that few who lived there thought the Highland neighborhood to be a single neighborhood. With Beech Avenue School on 17th Street, and Center Avenue School on Highland, it was, indeed, two separate, distinct neighborhoods, with two brownfields and that park separating them.
The Center Avenue School-side contained the businesses and the former homes of Italians, Poles and other European immigrants that, the same way they had fled to economic freedom, they fled across the invisible redlines and off into the better neighborhoods; neighborhoods like the one in the shadows of the checkered tower. It’s the same way, and the same kind of neighborhoods to which many blacks now move.
The Beech Avenue School-side contained the new-builds that accommodated the emerging half-dreams of the redlined sons and daughters of Africa. Some perceived the commercial Highland-side as the “bad” side, as commercial sides often are; while the more residential States Streets-side (so-called because its streets are named Tennessee, Virginia, Rhode Island, New Jersey and so on), was considered by most, the “good” side.
Now with a demolished Centre Avenue School, the loss of Highland being a commercial strip, Beech Avenue becoming a magnet school with students bused from other neighborhoods, it will be difficult for even eyes younger than Paul’s and mine to distinguish what is bad and what is better.
With the loss of a park that once separated the two sub-neighborhoods, and its saturation with low-income rental units, it is bound to be worse off in the end than what it was, even at its worst. As bad as it was in 1957, even then the neighborhood contained a growing number of newly built, owner-occupied homes. The new, expanded housing project will contain only newly built rentals. And with the ground chemistry and its necessary remediation, what hope does this HOPE have in attracting private, new build homes?
Paul sighed as his eyes fell back toward the misplaced construction site. My eyes fell upon his small, but well-maintained yellow home, and I wondered how he and his wonderful wife had been able to raise 11 successful children within its restricted confines. The answer was not that hard to discover.
You see, many years ago, he and Hattie had brought from North Carolina with them an ability simply to raise things, and a commitment to each other to see things through to their harvest. As Paul sits in the autumn of his years, this was not only evident from their offspring but also from the neat hedgerows that enveloped a part of his property, the trimmed lawns on the other side of those hedgerows that a neighbor now keeps, and from what was Hattie’s vegetable garden.
As Paul sat by the fence in his mechanized wheelchair at the edge of his lost Garden of Eden, he looked out into his bygone years. I stood beside him, looking off into the same direction, but out to a more circular time-in-space. I was a place where I had often stood, somewhere between the year 1957 and my 57 years. And it was the same, but less.
From that corner, I could clearly catch a glimpse of Paul’s yesteryears. Some of those years were mine, too. They were like a much younger Hattie’s, beautiful garden — the way that it was when the two of them first moved into their owner-occupied home. Nearly every parent of the 80 or so children on every street had one. There was the hard work in digging it, planting it, weeding and watering it, and then there was the reward that the husband and wife had in the harvest.
Gardens won’t be allowed at the new housing project because of the contaminated soils upon which it is built. And without the new neighbors having a traditional sense of both ownership, or the permission and ability to grow vegetables, Hattie’s current garden is, in a sense, a foggier harbinger of things to come.
Things still grow in Hattie’s garden, but absent of everything else, they no longer nourish the families of the neighborhood, as those Gardens of Eden in the neighborhood once did.
