Mexican War Streets trailblazer will be missed as times change
for a visit. I knew nothing of the Mexican War Streets, but what I inferred from her warning: “Hide your cassettes and lock your car.”
As I turned onto her street that day, the Chatterbox Lounge on the corner was my first impression. I decided the street looked dicey, but maybe only because my information to that point was a warning and a seedy bar.
You should still lock your car, but no one makes a point of telling visitors that now. The Chatterbox isn’t there anymore. There is still blight, but appearances don’t matter so much when perception begins to change.
“I had friends say, ‘How’s the North Side?’ ” Larry said in a voice laced with mock suspicion, “and I told them, ‘You would see if you’d just come into the neighborhood.’ The guy who lived beside me moved because his mother worried about him living on the North Side. He moved to Shadyside and got robbed.”
I visited Larry at his new place recently. We sat on his tablet of a patio with a view of the Ross Park Mall parking lot through the trees. He has one floor, no steps to contend with as he had on Resaca.
“I was losing my balance, and the banister was kind of wobbly,” he said. “Friends said, ‘You’ve got to get out of that house. Those stairs are going to kill you.’ ”
Larry taught at Sewickley Academy for 40 years — English and history. In 1972, he took his students on a field trip to the Mexican War Streets. He had never been there before.
“It was a course on social change,” he said. “That trip must have stuck with me.”
By 1998, when I bought my house, the neighborhood was already pretty gentrified. Most of the houses that had been cut up into apartments earlier were back to single-family status. But housing prices were still reasonable, even by standards of that time. Buying when I did was, unwittingly, the wisest investment I have ever made, but a neighbor gasped, telling me I had overpaid for my duplex.
Her perspective was of 20 years earlier, when the whole neighborhood was threatened with urban removal and there was so much blight that properties were selling for used-car prices. If you could get a decent duplex today for the price I paid in 1998, the gasps of disbelief would be in your favor.
These days, when they find out where I live, fewer people ask me, “Do you feel safe there?” More say, “Oh, I’d love to live in the War Streets.”
Larry had become one of the long-timers as he was packing to move. We threw a goodbye party for him one night in late September, when a brief rain pushed the sidewalk gathering indoors. His house was the obvious venue — almost empty with a lone table. We set up the spread on that. Most of the neighbors who bid him farewell had moved in after I did.
I expect to be a long-timer one day. I hope I can maneuver my steps until the end. But elders everywhere are exchanging big homes for small units. This large demographic transition will remain a constant. The waves of elders moving create more unseen change, as demonstrable as lower crime rates and higher housing costs.
Larry was a stalwart, someone who looked out for us. He would post notices about strange activities in the alley. He witnessed a man in a pickup removing a nameplate from the house across from his. He grew basil in pots on his stoop and put out scissors and a sign for neighbors to help themselves.
“How I enjoyed living there,” he said. “I loved the neighbors, the park and the lake. I hated giving up my garden. But I won’t miss Steeler Sundays, when you can’t find a place to park. I won’t miss the fireworks.”
He will miss his 10-yearold beagle, Polly, for whom he had to find a new home. But he has visitation rights, as he always will have on Resaca.