Cortland Street

Whenever I think of Cortland Street, it is almost always of a hot, sunny day with a dozen assorted kids playing up and down the street. I’m dressed in a sleeveless button-up shirt in red checks with faded shorts and gym shoes with a half-moon of white rubber across the toes. My white ankle socks irritatingly ride into my shoes when I run and I’m always stopping to pull them up. My sister Sue, four years old, is also a member of the neighborhood gang, and though she sticks with the younger kids, she usually has an eye out for me, just in case. Even at this early age, she’s stubborn and won’t admit to needing me for anything. Still, we have a secret understanding that we share without saying - we know we have each other.

Sue looks like me only shorter and fairer. We’re slight, skinny kids with pixie haircuts and big brown eyes. We share the same room and a mutual skepticism about that baby who cries so much. But this is summer - a time for endless play, and we take off each morning for the yard and beyond, while my mother stays in the house. The city heat and humidity gives us all rings of sweaty dirt in the creases of our necks, arms and behind our knees, but we don’t seem to notice. We lived for playing in packs, all day long, roaming from one yard to another. We dreaded the sing-song call of any mother, beckoning any player home for dinner. By summer’s end, most of the grass on the parkways and in many of the yards had been trampled away.

The parkway in front and on the side of our building gave us room for bike riding and the adjoining empty lot, though less than 25 feet wide, seemed like a huge playground. There was never a shortage of kids, games or things to do, only sunny days to do it all in.

Ours was a pleasant, if small, apartment with a non-functioning fireplace in the living room. The front living room windows looked south, down Long Avenue and the one west window gave the view up Cortland. It was the window my mother called us from, the early evening sunlight shining on her like a beacon, as she shielded her eyes and yelled out our names so the whole block knew it was time for our supper.
"Nan-ceee, Su-zeee, come iiinnnn nooowww!"

There was an unheated tandem room, often called a sleeping porch, off my parents' bedroom that was used as a playroom when the weather was warm; a second bedroom, a dining room, kitchen and small back porches for each apartment. In the lot next to the house, my parents put in two diamond shaped flower gardens. Gladioli and carnations grew as best as they could, despite the abuse of kids running over and through the beds. We had a swing set in the back that my father anchored into the ground with cement at each leg. I would push Susie on the swings until she learned to pump for herself, giving her “underdogs” to make her go higher.

We lived on the second floor and my parents rented out the first floor apartment to a couple of different families during the few years we lived there. There was a separate garage at the back of the lot but I can’t remember my father ever putting his car in it. The building itself was not very old and my father’s abilities in carpentry helped to keep it in fairly decent shape.

The alley behind us backed up to a train yard and across the street on the east side was a disposal company - two good reasons right there that might encourage my parents to move. Long before environmentally sound practices were the norm, a time when the smell of burning leaves only indicated a foreshadowing of winter, big red Roy Strom dump trucks regularly emptied their contents behind the company’s fence, much of which they proceeded to burn. Often it was a load of old tires. And it always seemed to be at a time when my mother’s freshly washed sheets were hanging in the back yard.

“It stinks! It stinks!” we would yell to her as we ran into the house, our hands covering our noses and mouths, whenever the burning and smelly smoke interrupted outside play on a summer day. She became fiercely angry whenever this happened and I can still see her storming across the street to the Strom offices, sooty sheets in hand, to give whomever a piece of her mind. She wasn’t a very tall woman, but like a cat encountering a larger enemy, the anger in her eyes and voice made her appear to be a formidable opponent. She had soft brown hair with a little bit of a wave that obeyed her much less than her children. She had a lovely figure in those days, something I’m sure my father noticed when they first met.