One of my new favorite things to do is take walks at night with Aimee. Even though it is bitter cold out there and Chuck Taylors are my most insulated shoes, it's great getting out there and really familiarizing myself with the neighborhood. Talking long walks really make me feel like I am missing out on so much when I'm driving, or even biking. I notice little things when I'm walking- little, intriguing things. A long, long time ago, before people got too lazy to walk to the corner store, and way before video games, Ipods, internet, and cell phones, walking was a very common and popular pastime as well as necessity. Often, when I am looking through old boxes of photographs from the 20's through the 60's and even 70's, I see people outside. In the backyard with the family, having a picnic. Proud, hard-working homeowners posed in front of their own homes. People playing on the block, riding bikes and scooters, pulling wagons, standing next to their father's car, or taking a dip in the little pool. Obviously, I wasn't around then, but I'm going to assume people appreciated simple things such as walking in the neighborhood and talking with neighbors. And because people spent a lot of time doing these things, they inevitably left some signs behind that still exist to this day...signs that are hard to come across if you're driving down the street.
Aimee and I like to admire some of the houses in our neighborhood. I love to identify houses I think might be old, and verifying the date it was built online via the Cook County Assessor's Office. One of the houses on the next block over is a beautiful frame Victorian with beautiful detailing and an impressive front porch. In fact, we looked into this house when househunting, but ended up passing since it had recently been totally gutted on the inside. I was slightly surprised to find out this house was built in the 1880's. That alone isn't surprising, but the fact that it is surrounded by mostly mid-century cookie-cutter-style ranch houses is. I imagine this house as a farm house in the middle of a big field, before the area was subdivided in the 1920's. I imagine horses and wagons being the sole method of transportation, I imagine no electricity, no plumbing or hot water, and I imagine a hard-working farmer sitting on that front porch after a hard day's work, probably unaware of the pending expansion of the city of Chicago and the huge housing boom that followed. I wonder if the family still lived in that house as the fields quickly went from corn to curbs.
That's the stuff I often think about.
And when the Kennedy Expressway was built in the early 1960's, I wonder how the neighborhood (and the city altogether) felt about having this huge scar dug into the ground right through their neighborhood to allow fast cars and trains and the accompanying noise to invade the once-tranquil neighborhood. We were walking toward the expressway when the sidewalk abruptly came to an end. The last house on the street- a lucky survivor spared by the city- predates the expressway by a good forty or fifty years. How did those people cope with the change in atmosphere? I notice the sidewalk stamp directly in front of the house. This sidewalk was built in 1924 with pride. If that sidewalk could talk.
I guess my point is, is that little things like these can be seen everywhere, you just have to look. There are signs of good times, and bad times, but all of it is history and there is always something we all can learn from. In this era of wireless this and that and a constant need for the Easy Button, sometimes it's nice to just get out and walk, and observe.
I'll end this with a photo I took yesterday with my new camera (which, by the way, I plan on using regularly for this blog). This is right behind my garage and harks back to the 1950's, when it wasn't unusual for kids to spend hours playing in the alley (and not tagging).
