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154th Street and Vine

 

So this is a photo I took a couple of years ago while working one afternoon. It's just a single abandoned home with a marriage proposal. I doubt the person who lived there wrote the message, but I suppose it's possible.

It's kind of hard to look at this house and see the vibrant colors slowly fading, or overgrown lawn. I didn't look too carefully on the sides and the windows seem intact so I assume that this could be rehabbed into something livable again. From the style of the architecture and the area it was in, I'm guessing it was built sometime between 1950 and 1970.

Obviously there was a time when the people who lived here called this place home, and would eagerly return every evening, knowing that they had this little piece of sub-urban paradise. I'm sure there were other times when the house brought pain because of hostile or violent families, or the death of a loved one or even some personal agony over love lost or found.

What makes this picture more noteworthy is where it was taken. Here, you see two houses—one abandoned, and another that was not. It's not quite clear but the brick house next to it was kept up and appeared to have people living in it. These two houses are but two of many in a small suburb near Chicago. The abandoned and vandalized house was one of many. In that particular area, about half of the homes were in an unlivable state, due to fire, vandalism or lack of maintenance. Those homes were scattered throughout the town, and often right next to homes that had well manicured lawns and were well maintained.

And it's not just houses that are like this—there are apartment buildings and storefronts in the same condition. There was even one intersection that had abandoned commercial buildings with apartments on top … on all four corners. The scene of urban decay was staggering and I wished I took many more pictures, but I refrained because it wasn't safe for me to do so. It was okay for me to drive around the neighborhood and knock on people's doors to ask survey questions, but taking the number and kind of pictures would draw unwanted attention.

So I knocked on the the front door of the brick house. A black woman about 40 years old answered, and I asked to speak to Shanelle. She said Shanelle lived across the street and so I went and met her, another woman who appeared to be in her forties with a sad expression that told me she had tasted the bitterness of life. She explained that the graffiti was put there by her brother, who did it as a joke to make her beau jealous. It worked, she said, and a few months later they did marry. They lived for a while on the west side but kept coming back here because the home belonged to Shanelle's mother. A few years ago her mother died and Shanelle moved back for good.

Now she just watches as the neighborhood and her town slowly die. The schools struggle because they don't have enough money to infuse the kids with hope. In the driveway was a car that could take her away from all the anguish and despair that radiated from the empty houses.

I asked Shanelle about her husband and she stopped talking and stared at the door across the street.

 

The 100 year old woman

It wasn't a particularly an old house but rather a younger home that had seen better days. It sat behind a wall of brush and young trees that served to hide it from the rural highway that went past. The original construction was supplemented with sheets of Styrofoam and collected wood to build a protected porch on the back side of the house. The front door wasn't apparent so I followed the tracks in the snow to the door on that back porch. The interior of that porch felt dark but it was close to nightfall and provided shelter from the wind.

I knocked and a woman who appeared a hundred years old came to the door. I told her why I was there and she didn't believe me. She wanted to see the money. I gave her a single fifty dollar bill and she examined it closely before telling me that it looked fake. I told her it wasn't and that she could keep it if she answered my questions, but was prepared to give it to her if she refused. She then held it up to the light to see the outline of a second president in the bill.

She disappeared for a moment in the house and then returned, dragging a chair which she set by the door. She then sat in it and took out a Benson and Hedges cigarette and lit it up. The rest of our meeting was punctuated by the smell of burning tobacco and the slow death of her lungs. She didn't care, she told me, she was going to be dead soon anyway.

So she told me her story about how when she was young she would imagine that she would leave the place she was and move to the big city and become someone famous, maybe an artist or something. She remembered the day she could read, and how the moment came in such a way that she saw the lines and shapes actually talking.

She searched endlessly to get an opportunity to leave, to go someplace where things could really matter and that she would be in an ocean of humanity that would buoy her creative spirit in the way of community support. But despite the pristine beauty of the north woods there laid a trap. “It was like walking through blackberries,” she aid, “and having the sharp thorns drag at your clothes, saying wait a minute, wait a minute, there's just one more berry over here you have to get. You get aggravated at their tiny thorns but them give in and reach for that luscious ripe berry, and when that happens you realize how you've been trapped by the blackberry patch.”

She worked hard at her one talent—singing--and used this as a vehicle to drive her south to the big city. She loved singing when she was young and know many songs, mostly traditional and some modern ones. When she came to the city she found singing wasn't enough by itself. She managed to get a job as a clerk and worked hard every day and would sing on street corners or small bars at night. She met others like her who could play instruments like a guitar or piano and so she would sing with them.

It was one day when she and her band mates secured a well paying gig at a restaurant and they played there but no one clapped. It wasn't an insult or anything just the nature of the place, the people all caught up in the sophistication of their lives so much that they didn't acknowledge the art laid before them. She then realized that there was nothing here holding her back—that if she wanted to go places she would have to charge this thicket of indifference and thrash about to attract attention and fame. It was kike she traded the soft thorns of a blackberry bush into the hard thorns of a thicket.

It was fall when she returned, she marched through the colorful trees up state until she was deep again in the north woods. There she would only sing in church and found a man and scratched out a family among the trees of the forest and relax at the lake in hot days.

I had her sign my tablet for the $50. She lit up another cigarette and said now she was like the wind, no longer full but only an empty force that really was all the weight of the world.