“The Forbidden Garden”

by Rosalie Bock

May 2008,

I was born in 1938.  For the next twenty-two years I lived one house and a garden from the PRCUA building at Augusta Boulevard and Milwaukee Avenue.  What the PRCUA actually did never became clear to me.  The building was the most modern and solid edifice on the block which consisted mainly of frame houses most of which were in need of paint and repair.  The pinkish color and the curved lines of this modern building were beautiful, adding a sort of ironic ending to the street. 

The neighborhood consisted of the hopeful and the hopeless.  People who came to America to find a better life, and those who had failed miserably in this quest.  The languages were varied  but were primarily Polish.  My family owned the house we lived in since 1900.  Originally a cottage, it grew upward as they filled in the swampland and raised the street.  The first floor was below the level of the Boulevard, and we had storage under the sidewalk where we kept the wood and coal that heated our rooms.  Next door, there was an exact duplicate of our house except that it had a slight lean to it, bringing the houses so close that I could lean out of my bedroom window and touch the window of the leaner. They looked like two companionable old women.  Next to that, was the PRCUA Garden. As large as a city lot and surrounded by a wrought iron fence, it had a beautiful lawn with a garden in the center.  Cottonwood and Catalpa Trees gave it a lovely shaded atmosphere.  

Sometimes I would bravely roller skate to the corner where the door to the Genealogy Offices is now, and hurry back toward my house.  Usually someone from the offices  saw me, and came to the door to shoo me away. Neighborhood kids were not permitted to defile the territory around the building in any way.  However, the sidewalk around the PRCU was wonderful for skating.  It was smoother than the sidewalk along rest of the block, so was very tempting.   So was the garden.  When my brothers lost a ball over the fence, they dared me to go in and  get it.  I would creep in, frightened, to get the ball which was usually in the central motif.   I always got caught.  The side  door would open, a man would emerge, and even though I did not understand Polish I realized  the words he was spewing out were not welcoming, especially combined with the fist he was shaking at me.

Across Augusta Boulevard, on the other corner of Milwaukee Avenue, the antithesis of the PRCU building with its curve and color was a brick triangular building that housed Fine and Sons Furniture Store.  We were very grateful for its existence as it provided us with scrap wood from the furniture skids that helped to keep us warm.  Like the gleaners who take the leavings from the farms of Europe, we would run across the boulevard and take the wood that was left for us.  I used to imagine what that corner looked like when the building there was a saloon.  My mother used to get a nickel’s worth of beer in a bucket for her father, and gawk at the painting of the naked lady above the bar.

 Milwaukee Avenue was the lifeline that compared with the Kennedy Expressway today.  It was an old Indian Trail, and runs diagonally through the city from the Loop to the City of Niles and further northwest.  Most importantly it provided commerce, sustenance, and finally, St. Adalbert’s Cemetery.  The streetcars that ran down the middle clanged along all day and all night.  They were red, and run by electricity, and cost a nickel to ride.  They could take you downtown or all the way to Devon Avenue, where you could go to the Forest Preserve there, or walk the rest of the way to St. Adalberts.  At this end of the Avenue sat a little castle like building, the sign said it was “One in a Million”.  This referred to the best milk shake you ever tasted.  When MacDonald’s bought them out to get the machinery they used to make their confections, they added hamburgers to their fare.  Ten for a dollar, they were small but tasty morsels that were a precursor to what was to come.

Around the corner from Augusta Boulevard though, the commerce was much less enticing.  On either side of the street  one could find a wallpaper store, a linoleum store, a meat packing house, which emitted some very awful smells when they burned the leavings;  several used furniture stores, (Today they would be antique stores) small clothiers, and even a couple of fortune teller shops which were to be avoided because they liked to “steal little kids”.  They looked and dressed like the gypsies of old, so they were scary.  Mostly we kids stayed close to home, playing roly poly, a game played with a good bouncing ball, on the sidewalk in front of our houses.  We also jumped rope, played hopscotch, and of course, the two best, Hide-n-Seek, and “It”.  Maybe kids with better vocabulary would call it “Tag,” but we just yelled “It” and the game began.  Nobody would hide in or near the garden. 

We really were urchins.  Most of us were at or below the poverty level. Many were the victims of families ruined by alcoholism or depression or other problems.  One of our grown-up neighbors had syphilis which ate away his nose.  This poor man hid away in his flat, cared for by his little wife.  We called him the “Count” I do not know if he was royalty from some far off state, but he spoke only Polish, and then only when absolutely forced to do so.  I think the name came from the fact that he used a cigarette holder when he smoked.  In the flat above him lived a lady who got drunk every night and would be brought home from the tavern around the corner in her child’s baby buggy with the baby on her lap.  In the back of this building lived a man who would come home howling drunk, singing or howling at the top of his voice.  He was killed when he put his head in an elevator shaft looking for an elevator car.  At the lowest level, in a sparking clean apartment lived “Busia,” who was grandmother to the whole block.  She used to give her real grandkids baths in a large round metal tub, “balia” in Polish, in the backyard.  She was warm and loving to everyone. 

After the Second World War, new people moved in, displaced persons, including kids wearing big tags on their coats declaring them “DP’s,” men who were damaged by the war, legless, or shell shocked: and foreign wives of soldiers, many of whom were never quite accepted by the then established neighbors on the block.   There never was a feeling of comradery here, we were all fighting too hard to make it through the day.  Meals of potatoes and milk, bacon grease on rye bread, or soup that lasted the whole week were all a part of our lives.  We learned to live and let live, not interfering with other’s lives, even when we knew the guy next door was beating his wife and kids.  Survival was the name of the game.  True, there were some families along the block that had the nicer houses but we never interacted with them except to say “Hello”. 

When I came back to do some genealogy work at the center, I found that the garden was gone, the houses were gone, and where my home used to be, was a new garden, with a Polish and American Flag planted right where my room used to be.  I finally got into the forbidden garden!

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