Reflections (II)
2021
Farewell, Little Canada: An Excerpt charles gargiulo
W
ithin a couple of weeks of school starting another bombshell hit. City officials announced a whole bunch of new buildings were going to be torn down in Little Canada, including all the apartments on our side of Ford Street. This included the building that Al and Henry lived in on the corner of Ford and Austin Street. So, it was goodbye Henry. When his family moved to Lawrence, he was gone for good. Fortunately, Al and his family got a place on the other side of the North Common, about a half a mile away. Although he wasn’t going to be around every day, he was at least close enough that we could still get to see each other occasionally. But this news was the worst blow yet. Only a miracle could save the rest of Little Canada from the wrecking ball. I kept wondering who these “urban renewal” people were and how they could get away with this and why, WHY wasn’t anybody stopping them? They had already started destroying things on the other side of the canal and farther down Moody Street, near Downtown, and now the number of buildings being abandoned or being readied for demolition was increasing like plague victims. People remaining in Little Canada must have felt like people in the Middle Ages when the Black Death hit, watching their neighbors dropping like flies and wondering when they and their loved ones were going to get it. We had no idea what was behind it or how to stop it. I was afraid to visit my Aunt Rose because I didn’t know what to say to comfort her. She wasn’t stupid, so I knew she must have figured out our backs were against the wall. “Urban renewal” was almost on our doorstep. I’m not proud to say I avoided visiting her for about a week after the Ford Street families were thrown out. I was so depressed about everything that I was afraid she would see how upset I was and it would make her feel even worse. More people were leaving all the time. It seemed like every week when I did my tonic bottle collection route there would be more empty apartments where families moved out. Very few new families took those vacant places. It was not only sad, it started to feel creepy. Not only were we surrounded by abandoned and boarded-up buildings, the properties that had people living in them seemed to be slowly dying. Tenements once filled with tons of families bustling up and down the stairs greeting each other in the hallways and streets now had a trickle of people living in them. Empty apartments were inhabited by the memories of friendly neighbors. People who greeted each other on the streets and talked about all kinds of things now just barely said hello. If they stopped at all it was to tell the other person that they had received their notice to move or to share stories about who they knew in the neighborhood who were gone or going.
The Lowell Review
139
