The Secret Passageway
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I was a kid my family didn’t go on vacations, so instead I made up exotic names
for the ordinary and everyday places on Oakford Avenue that I played in and
around. There was “Paradise,” and “The Secret Passageway.” Even “The Alleyway”
seemed to have a special sound to it when we whispered it as our destination.
Going to “Valerie’s Pond” was like traveling to the jungles of India.
The
“Water Tower” loomed over the whole neighborhood as if it were part of a
medieval castle.
We
wondered what lay behind the doorway that we never saw opened. What secrets
were just inside the dark open windows at the top?
The
names make me think, now, of the treasure maps in the stories that we all read
at the time. There was no treasure hidden in our neighborhood, but if there had
been, here’s what the map of our block would have looked like.
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This is the block where I grew up in Baltimore. I lived in an apartment at 4008 Oakford Avenue. We moved there around 1941, and moved away in the summer of 1951. |
This is what
the block looks like now, in a satellite photo taken around 2006. Some things
from my childhood are still there; some are not. The apartment building to the
left of 4008 is gone.
Four
families lived in each of the Oakford Apartment buildings; two downstairs and
two upstairs. Across the alleyway, fronting on Ridgewood Avenue, were
semi-detached houses: two families lived side-by-side in two-storey homes. They
shared a wall, but had separate walkways from the street, separate entrances,
and each had its own covered porch. If you look at the satellite picture you
can see that the Ridgewood houses were fronted by large lawns. The Oakford
Apartments had only a short slope of grass down to the sidewalk.
I
envied the kids who lived on Ridgewood. They were not crowded into a tiny two
bedroom apartment, and they had porches that they could sit on in rainy weather
and work on projects, or play games. We would play on their front lawns. I was
very aware that they lived a step up in the economic scale of the neighborhood,
even if it were only a small step.
The
big step up was at the end of
Ridgewood, next to the grounds of the Water Tower. That was where a girl named
Valerie lived, in a bungalow that was not shared with another family on the
other side of a wall, or with neighbors who lived on the floor above them. It
was the most beautiful house in the entire neighborhood, on what seemed to me
to be a huge piece of ground with pathways and trees and flowers and—most
exciting of all—a pond full of fish.
“Valerie’s
Pond.”
The
name still has a magical sound to it. I’m sure it’s the reason I have always
been attracted to ponds.
I
did not refer to it as “Valerie’s Pond,” however. I called it as I heard it: Vallalee’s Pond.” It was only years later that, on reflection, I realized that
the girl was named Valerie.
I
have some photographs taken when I was about two years old, on the grounds of
the Water Tower. At that time we lived on Oakford Avenue, but just across the
street from the apartment at 4008. In one of the photos, Valerie’s house is in
the background.
This
photograph of the side of Valerie’s house was taken around 1938, from the
grounds of the Water Tower, which stands just to the right side of the picture
taker, but out of the camera’s view. Behind the house, across the alleyway, on
the right side of the photo, is the back porch of our apartment on Oakford
Avenue.
In
the photo above you can see, running along the side of the house, a low hedge
that separated Valerie’s house from the grounds of the Water Tower. Just behind
the hedge was a private driveway that connected Ridgewood Avenue and Oakford
Avenue. That driveway led to a small one-car garage that Valerie’s dad parked
in. If you look at the map you can see that, toward the Oakford Avenue end, the
driveway ran along the side of the last of the Oakford Apartment buildings.
There, the driveway was separated from the apartment by a long wire fence. The
narrow space between the driveway and the apartment building was “The Secret
Passageway.”
The
reason that I called it “secret” was that no one knew you were there when you
stood in the space between the fence and the concrete foundation of the
apartment, As skinny as I was at that time, I had to stand sideways to move
through the passageway.
The
fence was covered with leafy vines—I remember grape vines and morning glories.
In the summer the leaves were so dense that it was really hard to see through
them. It was a safe place where no
one would discover you, but it was also a place where you could discover
things.
One
finding was the grapes. To me, grapes appeared once in a while on our dinner
table, and otherwise I saw them displayed in the grocery store. It never
occurred to me that they grew somewhere, and I certainly was surprised when I
discovered that grapes grew on a fence near my home. Through the summer I
observed the grapes as they grew fatter, and turned from pale green to purple.
That was the point—when the grapes were plump and purple—that I risked death by
poisoning: I would bite into a grape!
Our
mothers told us that we should never eat anything that grew on trees or bushes
or vines. “They might be poison!” We knew about poison because we had seen the
movie or read the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. We were not afraid of apples, but there were plenty
of wild berries to tempt us. The hedges in front of our apartment had small red
berries. They had a bitter taste, so we did not eat them after the first test
bite. There was a little red berry that grew on the ground that looked a lot
like a strawberry. It didn’t taste good enough to bother with. There was a bush
with small purple berries. We didn’t eat those, either. We mashed them into a
pulp and used the juice as a dye for “war paint” when we were Indians. There
was a big blackberry bush at the house on the corner of Oakford and Garrison.
We knew those berries were good to eat because whenever we picked them, the
lady who lived there hollered at us, and threatened to tell our mothers.
Another
discovery from within the Secret Passageway was the life of insects. Of course,
insects were all around us in the summer, but we usually did not get so close
to them. But in the narrow space between the fence and the wall of the
apartment building, there was hardly room to turn. Since I moved through the
passageway sideways, I had a choice of facing the concrete wall, or facing the
fence. The wall was not at all interesting, so I faced the
leaf-and-vine-covered fence, and everything that lived along its length. It was
full of life! And since the fence was taller than I was then, it was all in my
face.
There
were Japanese Beetles with glistening green and purple bodies, and ladybugs
with black polka dots on glossy red backs. All kinds of spiders, hairy with
fangs, lurked behind leaves, waiting for something smaller to come close. The
spiders were not that large, but since they were just inches from my face they
seemed huge and scary to me.
Although
they were hard to spot in the dense green leaves, praying mantises were there,
and they hunted everything. It was not unusual to see a mantis finishing a
meal, with just a wing of its victim sticking out of its mouth. Of course there
were wasps that fed on the sugary juice that oozed from the broken skins of the
grapes. If I saw a wasp I froze and waited until it moved on. I was afraid of
wasps. I was close enough to them that I could see that they had mean looking faces.
There
were ants everywhere, especially on the ground, cleaning up whatever fell from
the activities of their fellow insects in the jungle above, and carrying it
down into their underground nests. The Secret Passageway was not just a hiding
place where I could fantasize adventures; it was also my own personal insect
zoo.
“Paradise”
was a different place altogether. It was the space between my building at 4008,
and the one to the right: 4006. It was overgrown with bushes and weeds and
flowers. There was no gardener to care for it—it just grew. No one fertilized
the plants and bushes, watered them or pruned them, or tended to them in any
way. It was an untamed space full of color.
Some of the bushes (I knew they were called “forsythia”) had small bright yellow flowers. Others (the
“hollyhocks”) had clusters of huge pink and red blossoms, much larger than my
hand, that attracted bees and butterflies. Paradise was uncultivated—wild and
colorful. It was a huge contrast to what I saw when I stood in front of my
apartment building, staring at the dark brown wooden shingles that covered its
depressing exterior.
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A bumblebee |
The hollyhock flower provided an opportunity for adventure. Large black
and yellow striped bees (we called them “bumblebees”) were attracted to the
center of the blossom, to the part that was covered with pollen. The bee went
headfirst deep into the flower. While it was in there you could, if you were
very careful, and very brave, close the petals of the flower around the bee,
leaving it trapped inside.
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The bee catcher's dilemma |
A trapped bumblebee is very angry! It buzzes vigorously, and loudly,
and you can feel the vibration of its wings right through the flower. Only the
thin petal separates your bare skin from the stinger of the bumblebee.
Mastering the skill of trapping the bumblebee was important, but there was an
even more critical skill to learn. What did I do when I tired of listening to
the bee (the angry bee!) buzzing inside the blossom? If I just loosened my grip
on the ends of the petals, the bee could fly out, but would it? It seemed more
likely that the bee would walk out onto my hand, raise an amused eyebrow, and
sink its stinger into my palm. The trick was to throw the blossom away from
yourself as hard as you could, and run in the opposite direction. I got very
good at blossom tossing.
There’s
another feature of the Oakford Apartments that you can see if you look closely
at the satellite photo. Between the buildings at 4006 and 4004 there is a
sidewalk that connects the alleyway to a sidewalk that runs along the front of
all of the buildings. (There was a
sidewalk between 4008 and 4010, but when 4010 was demolished, the sidewalk
disappeared as well, so it does not appear in the photo.) The sidewalks served
lots of purposes, but one of them was especially exciting to me. It was used
for the delivery of coal to the basement of each building.
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A radiator |
Our
apartments were heated by radiators. Here’s how they worked. There was a big
furnace in a corner of each basement. Coal was shoveled into the furnace by the
janitor—the maintenance man for all of the apartments in our block. As far as I
know, the coal was kept burning all the time. There was a huge coal pile next
to the furnace, and James the Janitor (we never called him just “James.” He was always
“James the Janitor.”) shoveled coal into the furnace throughout the day. Water
pipes passed through the furnace, just above the fire, and the heat turned the
water to steam. The steam then flowed through more pipes that led up to the
radiators within each apartment.
Small
rooms (like a bedroom) had a single radiator. A larger room might have two. The
hot steam passed through the inside of the radiator, and this heated up the
metal surfaces, which became too hot to touch. The air in the room was then
heated by its contact with the outer surfaces of the radiator. This cooled the
steam inside the radiator enough that it condensed as hot water, which then
flowed back downstairs into the basement. There was a valve on the inlet pipe
that let you control the flow of steam into the radiator, and in that way you
could regulate how hot it got.
It
took a lot of coal to keep the furnace going continuously, especially through
the winter. That’s where the sidewalks from the alleyway come into the picture.
About once a week, a coal delivery truck would drive down the alleyway and then
turn onto the sidewalk and pull up to a point at about the middle of the length
of the apartment building. The basement had some windows that where just above
ground level on the outside. From the inside of the basement, those windows
were just below the basement ceiling. That ceiling was the floor of our
apartment.
The
coal man would place a chute (it looked just like a sliding board at the
playground) through one of the windows, and then shovel coal from the back of the
truck onto the top of the chute. From that point the coal would slide down the
chute, through the window opening and end up in a huge pile on the basement
floor below. After the coal truck left, James (the Janitor) would shovel the
coal into a wheelbarrow and form a big coal pile next to the furnace on the
other side of the basement.
Coal
delivery day was exciting. As soon as my mother heard the truck, she ran around
and closed any open windows. She did this because, otherwise, the coal dust
would be blown into the apartment and coat every surface with a gritty black film.
I was excited because I enjoyed watching the coal flow from the bed of the
truck down the chute, to disappear into the basement below me. Television had
not yet been invented, so watching jet-black lumps of coal flow down a shiny
metal chute was more stimulating than you can imagine.
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A lump of coal |
After the coal truck was gone, and James (the Janitor)
had finished his work, I would go into the basement and search for any pieces
of coal that he might have missed. We used coal like black chalk, to mark off
the boundaries of the street games that we played, or to write on the walls or
sidewalks.
The
furnace served another purpose, in addition to being the heating source for our
home. It was also the “Incinerator.” That was another magic word in our
vocabularies. The kitchen in our apartment had two doorways. One was the way
into the dining room. The other opened into the narrow hallway that led to the two bedrooms
and the bathroom at the rear of the apartment.
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The chute to the incinerator |
As
you stepped through that doorway into the hall you faced the wall that divided
my apartment from the one next door. In that wall was a small square hinged
door about twelve inches on a side—it was the chute to the incinerator. It was
just like a laundry chute, except in this case whatever you put down the chute
fell into the furnace to be incinerated. When you pulled the chute door open
you could feel the hot air rising from the furnace below. If someone else in
the building had recently dropped rubbish down the chute, you got the odor of burning
paper or, sometimes, even garbage along with the smoke.
This
was not a pleasant experience, so I learned the art of opening the chute
quickly, dumping the rubbish into it, and slamming the door shut.
When
I think back to the time that I lived in that block of Oakford Avenue, I
realize what an adventure it was. Each day was an opportunity for discovery. It
was so different from sitting in front of a television set today and watching
something that is completely separated from your own life. When I was a small
boy, I created my own programming each day that I went outside. The programs
took place in exotic lands: Valerie’s Pond, Paradise, the looming Water Tower.
And
my special place: The Secret Passageway. It wasn’t just a narrow space between
a concrete wall and a vine-covered wire fence. It was a “theme park.” You did
not have to buy a ticket. You just had to watch as life happened in front of
your face. And if nothing was happening, you could memorize what the tendril of
a grape vine looks like, wrapped around the rusty wires of a fence, and wonder
how a dragonfly wing ended up there.