
Six years before I was born. This is the neighborhood I spent my early childhood in. We left when I was nine, but I still remember walking up Herron Avenue -- we lived at 3836 -- to Powers Street and across that bridge in the second photo every day on the way to school. I imagine my dad took these pictures from our third story window, so you can't see my house. We lived on the banks of the Mill Creek. In summer it stank like an open sewer, which is one of the reasons we moved. My parents and grandparents lobbied the city government constantly to have it cleaned up, but I thought it just smelled like home.
I also thought that the name of the creek was the Milk Rick. I believed that a "rick" was a type of stream. It was a land flowing with milk and sewage.
Wait, I've found it. Here's my house. Unfortunately, by the time I came along the clapboards had been replaced with asphalt siding, the salt-and-pepper kind Do you remember asphalt siding? It was a "shotgun" house -- one room wide, three rooms long, three stories high. My mother's parents lived on the first floor, we lived on the second, and my father's mother lived on the third.