The Secret Passageway

The Secret Passageway

W

hen 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.