fun with street view

I highly doubt that this was something Google thought users would do with the controversial street view feature. Lately I have been having trouble sleeping. The other night I somehow found myself looking up addresses of places I once lived.

I had been browsing BlogHer, looking at the speaker bios. I came across a woman who is a professor at a college that I once lived a stone throws from. The school is still there. Somehow I ended up on Google and then I found myself touring my old neighborhood.

Above was the first school I attended. It was right across the street. I remember it being P.S. 17, but I think they renamed it to P.S. 1. I know that this school district was the first in the country to be taken over because it was so bad. I remember my mom calling me to watch the Today Show as they announced the news.

My cousins (who lived around the corner) also went to this school. Two of them decided to burn the teacher's desk when they realized they were going to fail her class. Another climbed that fence (twice) and broke his arm (twice). It wasn't my imagination that kids didn't learn at this school.

I entered kindergarten able to read and write. First grade had the same books as kindergarten and required that we return after lunch. There is only so much "Fun With Dick and Jane" a girl can take. I routinely had headaches in the afternoons so I didn't have to go back. I also peed in my seat because I was afraid to ask to go to the bathroom. Once I was sent home in boy's underwear.

A few other memories before we move on:

• At an assembly, I watched a boy stick a fork in an electric outlet on the stage. Yes, he got shocked.


• My dog, an Old English Sheepdog, got out of the house and ran up the block to his favorite park. I ran after him and into my kindergarten teacher, who taught my father and my aunt. Her name was Mrs. Dingly. My father called her Mrs. Ding-a-Ling. My aunt told me stories of how badly she treated black students.


• We moved before the school year ended, but my parents didn't want me to tell. It was June and hot, and I showed up wearing a halter dress and got picked to bring up the attendance sheet. When the Vice Principal saw what I was wearing (my back was exposed but the dress was sown closed, not tied), he told me that I was to change at lunch. Only problem I had no clothes at my grandmother's and couldn't tell him that. When I explained to my grandmother, she sent me back with a navy blue button down sweater. I wore that sweater all afternoon, buttoned up.

The Google van didn't go down this street, so I can't see a full on photo of the house where I once lived with my grandmother. It was a true nuclear family situation. We lived downstairs from our paternal grandparents. In the live-in attic, my grandmother's mother lived. Later my great-aunt (my maternal grandfather's sister) and great-uncle would move in.

I don't know if that sign was always there, but it is a good representation about how I felt about that place.

This is the street where I learned to roller skate and ride a bike. It is cobblestone. And I think there were more trees.

We knew most of the neighbors. Next door there was another family with two girls (the same age). They lived upstairs from their grandparents, and had a baby brother (we had a dog). When it snowed, we would go to the neighbors' yard across the street (on the end) and make snow angels in their yard because that was where the snow was the deepest.

This is the house that fell on me (well a piece anyway) while I was sitting in the yard on the slide, eating a baloney sandwich. The nail went into my head and required three stitches to repair.



At the end of first grade, my parents bought the house above. It is an attached home. We lived on the right side. My mother was a real estate broker, and worked down the street. The house had been foreclosed upon. The previous owner was a drunk and a wife beater (I wonder when that trend stopped). The house was a mess when we took possession.

The first time they took me to see the house, I cried. I didn't want to live there. It was awful. I didn't want to leave my grandmother and my friends for this dump.

My mother transformed the place. She put in wallpaper and new carpet. She was even crazy enough to stucco the ceiling by hand. I hardly recognized the place when we did move in.

The gate which seems to be missing, but never closed properly, is where I put the trash can against it to close it to keep the dog in. That would have been good, except I tied the dog to the trash can. When he moved the trash can moved. It scared him (he was afraid of his own shadow) and he took off. He was done for several days, during which I was inconsolable.

This is the stoop where my sister sat and cried because our insane babysitter, Anne Marie Rogan, didn't feed my sister lunch. She purposefully bought things my sister didn't like and then made her sit outside when she started crying. Our neighbor found her and took her inside and made her lunch and told my mother. But that isn't what got Anne Marie fired.

Anne Marie was in the 8th grade and the daughter of one of the people my mother worked with. Anne Marie borrowed my mother's clothes and played my parents' records and invited her friends over. She could eat a whole can of fruit cocktail by herself. When her friends came over she would send us to our room to clean. She would brag to her friends that she had us under control. She would spend the afternoons on the phone, before call waiting, and my mom would have to have the operator break in. But none of that got Anne Marie fired either.

I told my parents what was going on in their home when they weren't there. When I kept at it, they finally started to think that maybe things were not okay. And one day my Mom, who worked down the street, came home. She found Anne Marie on the couch with her boyfriend. I think they were more than kissing. She was finally fired, but then we had no babysitter and had to eat lunch at school. This required special permission and meant that we sat in a classroom and ate lunch.


This is the school. St. Anne's. It had no playground.

It had a church. We were supposed to go to the children's mass on Sunday. I had to answer questions about the sermon on Monday morning in religion class. I was going to fail. My parent's didn't get up early on Sunday. As a compromise, my father, a non-Catholic, took us to 5pm mass on Saturday.

When Anne Marie was preparing for her confirmation, she was required to attend mass on Friday morning. Since she walked us to school, this meant we went to mass too. Sometimes the priest didn't finish by 8:30am, but we knew better than to leave mass early (that was a sin). Instead we walked back to school with the 8th graders and slipped into our classrooms on the first floor. One morning the Principal, a nun, was waiting for us. She wanted to mark us tardy. It took everything to bite my tongue and not call her a hypocrite.

The window I think is the gym. We had a gym uniform which we wore under our uniforms instead of our shirts on gym day. It had matching bloomers. Seriously - bloomers. When my sister left crayons in her uniform pocket, and my dad washed and dried them, it ruined all of our (mint green) uniform shirts. We had to wear our gym uniforms that day and everyone thought we didn't know when gym was. We eventually got new shirts and I learned how to do the laundry.

That door is where my mom passed out after the Principal explained what my sister, who was in the first grade, was up to. No one will ever know because she doesn't remember. And really it doesn't matter because they are both gone.



They are buried here. Which is down the street from the first photo.

My maternal grandmother is also buried in the same plot. I remember visiting her grave as a child. This is a large cemetery. You can drive through it (but the Google Van didn't).

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