Memories of Burnside

Memories of Burnside

Fancy apartment buildings usually have names, like the Vendome in Brooklyn or Malden Towers in Chicago. But here, where I’d grown up, at 1307 Overlook Street in the blue-collar rust belt town of Burnside, there was just a three-story brick building with thirteen apartments. Only the four-digit street number identified the place, visible as well-patinaed copper numbers anchored to bricks above the double wood entrance doors.

We’d moved away from here twenty years ago, back when I was ten years old. Now, as I pulled into the tenant parking lot near the front doors, I couldn’t help but notice the soot-stained bricks, the hazed-over windows, the tall weeds sprouting up through cracks in the cement.

The rents here were the highest in Burnside, because of the spectacular view out back. There, the lawn ended at a chain link fence, and several feet beyond that, a hundred-foot shale cliff dropped to steeply sloped woods, then another cliff further down, and finally to the Mon River, as it flowed to join the Allegheny in downtown Pittsburgh.

Once inside the building, I saw that the clunky wood stairs were gone – replaced with dull, gray linoleum and metal railings painted black. But the place still smelled the same, with hints of mildew, the air clammy in winter. Dust motes swirled in a blinding ray of sunshine beaming from above. Without seeing it, I knew the window through which it shone – gray paint chipped around the edges, twelve square panes hazed with factory soot from across the river.

“May I help you?”

A woman’s voice echoed from the darkness above. She sounded elderly, with that slight crack in her voice as her pitch rose at the end.

“Hello,” I said. “I used to live here. Just wanted to see the place again.”

From the second-floor landing, the woman’s shins and shoes were barely visible in the dimming light. A door hung open behind her. Unit F, I knew.

“Which apartment?” she said, and she started hobbling down the steps toward me, her hand tight on the rail.

The ray of sun faded as a cloud moved over, and wind whistled through a gap between the tall double doors behind me. Despite several updates to the building, they’d never replaced those heavy oaken monsters. What a battle they were to open on a windy day. And up here, beside the towering cliffs along Overlook Road, it was always windy.

“Top floor,” I said. “Hey, I'm sorry, I didn’t mean for you to come down.”

“It’s okay,” she said, a little breathy, as she stepped down before me, when I finally recognized her.

“Mrs Henge!” I said with a grin. Her bespectacled eyes, still their shocking shade of blue but now heavily pouched with age, widened in surprise.

“Do I know you?”

“Richard Miller, though you probably remember me as Ricky, or Rick. From about twenty years ago?”

I hoped for a beaming smile of recognition. Instead, her face hardened, mouth pinched shut in a line. I felt crestfallen. Had she forgotten the past we’d shared? After all, she was the kind lady who gave out cookies every time she baked a batch. And every summer, she let us kids find and pick the largest beefsteak tomatoes in her garden.

My happiest memories were from this place, perched on this hill – the highest point for a dozen miles. Everyone knew everyone, and we were all friends. We held potluck Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners in our apartment that filled the top floor. And Independence Day cookouts in the backyard, the dads drinking beer while they played horseshoes.

“Yes, I remember you. Your family lived on the top floor. Your dad owned the place back then. In fact, you folks had the whole top floor.” Her last words held a tone of veiled disapproval.

“Until we moved away,” I said. “In 1930, dad joined a law firm downtown. Gosh, how I missed all of you.”

She never smiled, just nodded slightly, her eyes unblinking as she regarded me.

“What brings you back here,” she said, not as a question but a statement of fact, like something about my visit made her uneasy. As if wondering why I'd come here.

I explained how I’d been in town for the past week for my dad’s funeral, before I headed back to my New York City flat. Mom wasn’t doing well, either. With no siblings, I’d have to care for her myself from now on.

When I asked who lived on the top floor, Mrs. Henge said a downtown rental corporation now owned the building. Not long after we moved out, the company took over and divided the floor up into four separate units.

“They tried renting the whole top floor out, at first. But the rent was way too high. We aren’t rich folks, you know. Not many of us, anyway.”

Then she pretended to glance at her watch, though all I saw was her bare, freckled wrist, and claimed she had something boiling on the stove. After a curt goodbye, she climbed the stairs and closed the door behind her without another word. I exited to the building’s backyard, then to the rear fence and the yawning vista beyond. I was finally back, in this place of energy and magic I'd been reimagining for twenty years.

Across the river stood an immense three-mile stretch of iron and steel works, their line of eight smoke-belching blast furnaces hissing and roaring with heat. And the smoke columns – some black from burning coal, others rust-brown and occasionally orange as ore impurities poured from stacks. The noxious smoke usually blew along the mill’s length, though today it was floating directly toward and over where I stood. Over ten thousand men and women toiled in those works – the most of any mill in the steel valley region, where close to three quarters of the families in Burnside earned their livings.

I’d forgotten the gloom and grime in the region, especially in winter, where once-white snows blanketing the city of Steelport, spread out far below me, were tinged in varying shades of gray and brown. Large sheets of ice flowed lazily downriver, right to left, the water between them green-black and sharply ridged from wind.

Life here had been great – playing with the other kids from school, hiking the cliff edge for miles, and watching the steel works across the river, especially at night, when immense tongues of blue fire lit the backyard – bright enough, along with the lights of Steelport, to read by in the dark.

The wind continued to rise as I stood here, the air warming until I unzipped my coat. From across the river, in Steelport, came the frequent sounds of police sirens. I watched flickers of blue and red light, speeding on their ways down avenues and through the backstreets of town. Now and then, I heard an ambulance, its siren wailing as it sped toward Steelport Hospital, the place where I’d been born.

Then a cloud of orange-brown smoke belched thickly from one of the blast furnaces. It swelled to enormity, then blew toward me like an immense chunk of colored cotton candy. Soon, it filled my entire view, so I turned my back as it engulfed me, the yard, the entire building, in a noxious, chemical fog. I tried to hold my breath, but had to inhale before the cloud began to thin out. The stink of rotten eggs, along with the scents of various metal oxides, assailed my nostrils, but at last it blew clear.

I’d held memories of these smoke clouds, but being enveloped in one, here and now, made me wonder at the inner condition of my lungs, and especially those of people like Mrs. Henge, who had lived here for decades.

Then I gazed across the backyard, with its cracked cement bird bath, its tall weeds growing along the fence lines. Had it always looked like this? From behind a second-floor window, Mrs. Henge stared down at me. No smiles. No waves.

A half hour later, I was driving my car up and down the streets of Burnside. There was old Harvey’s Tavern, its front neon sign still half burnt out. Beside that stood the Dairy Delite, its parking lot so worn that the pavement was now more black-gray gravel then asphalt. Up and down Main Street, the windows of weathered store fronts stared out onto mostly empty sidewalks. The windows of Taft Pharmacy, with its huge candy counter, across the street from my grammar school, were partially boarded up with plywood. My old school, Emerson, had been converted into a small office building.

At last, I set direction back toward home, to New York City, and felt a kind of haunting relief at seeing Burnside recede from view in my rear view mirror…