This week’s writing Spark was a picture prompt. I chose the first picture in this writing as my inspiration
These Times They Are a-Changin’
I grew up in the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s. I have fond memories of all the places and things I did there. My mother passed away in 1998, so that was the last time I got to visit my old stomping grounds. The picture of the old RKO Marble Hill Movie Theater that I found online reminded me of when I used to go there to see movies with my parents and sisters. As I aged out of children’s prices, I was taught the art of lying about my age, as I was short for a 12-year-old. I was asked to do that for many years.
Seeing that picture inspired me to return to my home grounds and see how it changed. I was not in the mood to travel there by car, train, or subway, usually a two-hour trip on a good traffic day, so I decided to take a virtual one using Google Maps Street View. I was astonished at what I saw.
Where the movie theater used to stand, there is now a Walgreens pharmacy. Across the street, where my mother used to work as a dental assistant, there is now an AmeriTel T-Mobile exclusive dealer.
Around the corner where the Dale Movie Theater was (the other place we occasionally went to see movies) is a parking garage and an H&R Block office.
Moving up Broadway, a few blocks away, where there used to be a public swimming pool in the summer (in the winter, it was an indoor ice skating rink), there is a shopping mall. I spent most of my early childhood and teen years either swimming (and when I was old enough lifeguarding) at the pool or winter skating (note: In 1971, when I was playing ice hockey for Stony Brook University, we played an away game at that rink. It was one of the only games I ever scored a goal and my parents were there to watch me).
Seeing those changes, I became reticent to check where my old apartment house was. There were so many memories that I didn’t want tainted, but I couldn’t resist.
My parent’s apartment house was on the street opposite Manhattan College in a sect
ion of the Bronx called Riverdale (not the one where all the Archie comics and TV shows refer to, though I was an Archie comic reader). There was a small park adjacent to the building, as was the hill on which our apartment building was built. Half of the building was on the lower street across from the college (the basement and first five floors), and the rest was built on a parallel street at the top of the hill (floors 7 through 11. The 5th and 6th floors were where the two halves connected.
I’ve written about the bare hill on the side of the apartment building before: https://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=2755, Notice the bottom of the hill next to the apartment.
The lower part was easy to sled on. The part you don’t see going up to the other street was steep. That was not used for sledding at all except for in the warmer months. That’s when we broke down cardboard boxes and used them to slide down the dirt-covered hill. That was until someone decided to build a house there, ending all attempts at sledding there.
Returning to the old neighborhood, I expected to see the apartment and the house blocking the steep hill. Google Maps allows me to see pictures taken in different years. In the most recent year (2022), the house was demolished. In the 2019 picture, it still stood. They are building a mixed-use apartment complex in place of the destroyed building. What was woods and greenery will now be an apartment building.
I know that as we move into the future, we look for improvements in our lifestyles—better housing for everyone, more access to things we need—but let’s not forget where we came from. Let’s not take away all of the things in life that nurture us and that we enjoy. Let’s make the places that we live in the ones that we want to return to in reality, not just virtually – the parks, the swimming holes and public pools, the frozen lakes or rinks, the walks through the woods and quaint villages where people sell wares at outdoor markets, and good places to eat that aren’t fast food or cost a fortune Places that we are proud to be part of.
Yes, these times, they are a-changin’, but let’s slow down and make the change enjoyable. Don’t relive the past, but also, don’t forget it.
