Bluff Park Elementary School
The central part remains; all else is taken away.
The intended recipient was my grandmother, but before she was married – it was her maiden name. I recognized the town in Ohio, but not the street. A distant cousin had sent me an old postcard some merchant had mailed to my grandmother almost a century ago. So of course I went immediately to Google maps and found – nothing. It is not there anymore. It was worse even than an Elvis Presley song: there was no such number, no such home, not even the street.
This, unfortunately, makes a clean sweep of my father’s parent’s places. The houses on Belmont and Noble Streets where I visited them when I was a child yielded to the broad concrete sweep of the multilane Scenic Byway. Most recently and most lamentably, the impossibly small one-bedroom house with the most marvelous address – 3 Maple Street – was razed to make way for a patch of grass that likely will be more versatile.
Though my mother’s parents went far longer ago, their places remain. The North Hills house where mom spent her childhood, and the more urban quadruplex where she spent her high school years with her dad after her mom died, still serve their same residential purposes in those same places. I’ve seen them, though it has been more than a decade.
Not just indicators on maps, but the architecture that houses our histories is subject to alteration and elimination. Most of my elementary school was bulldozed about a half dozen years ago; they left the “historic” core building, but the cafetorium and most of the classrooms are gone. This stuff happens.
Because I spent more than ten percent of my life in Rome, where buildings remain for centuries and sometimes millennia, I find the fungibility of our buildings and places startling. My mom now lives in an area only recently developed, an entire civilization where no edifice is more than thirty-five years old. The awareness alternates between wondrous and creepy.
More often than you might think, I find people wandering about the campus here wide-eyed and wondering. It hasn’t changed at all since I finished school here in ’57! (or ’49 or ’68) they will tell me with delight. Three-quarters of a century isn’t that terribly long for either a church or a school to ‘hold the fort,’ so to speak, but it is an accomplishment that both interior and exterior remain the same in form as well as function. Thank God for mid-century masonry.
Here in Four Corners, we Catholics have a strong and steady presence in both population and construction. For years, I have asserted that Saint Bernadette School would stand long after Blair High School crumbles to dust, and while that may be an accurate assessment of the construction techniques and materials, does it speak to the inhabitation thereof?
In the “Ahaya” River valley where my dad and his folks are from, post-industrial decay and diminution have reduced the number and the condition of many of the buildings of every sort along with the population. Without people, living, working, learning, building, worshipping, and socializing, the buildings dissolve. That makes sense. But might the converse also be true? Is there any danger to the people if the buildings and places be reduced or eliminated?
Our buildings shape us and inform our being at least as much as we do theirs. To inhabit and maintain the structures most formative of our lives is a responsibility; to lose the architecture that gave us our form to the cult of disposability is a loss of some portion of our humanity. To lose track of the places where these buildings once stood, and we in them, is to lose the thread of our own story.
Battlefields and bridges, baptismal fonts and classrooms, houses and playgrounds and yes, even vacant lots are all places where our lives and their preludes came to be. Find them! Mark them on your maps, paper or electronic, and better yet, visit them. Take the kids. See what has changed as much as you have, and what is the same. To lose your place to the memory hole is to lose part of your life and your very self.
As for that postcard to my then-young grandmother that my cousin saved and sent me? I don’t remember where I put it.
Monsignor Smith
