The Reeburgh – Part I

I’ve lived in many houses during my life – small duplexes, smaller houses, large townhouses, larger houses, houses with gardens , houses completely surrounded by cement, houses that I loved and some I felt ashamed of, houses in the city and a few in the country, houses I longed to leave and some where I yearned to stay. During the mid-70’s I was watching a detective show on television and a woman called the police station to say someone had been shot and was bleeding to death in the hallway of her tenement. As the show progressed and centered around this woman who had witnessed the murder my attention began to focus not on the story-line, but rather on the apartment building. It looked hauntingly familiar to me. Could it be? Surely not. Yes, it was true…if this was a tenement, I used to live in a tenement. Lived in a tenement and didn’t even know it for over 30 years.

During my fifth year I was transported from a small southern farm town where everybody knew my family to the bustling big city streets of Chicago. I went from a small frame house on Coleman Hill to live in the larger-than-life Reeburgh on Cicero Avenue, just down from the Loop. The building with its huge expanse of brick, steel and iron seemed like a fairytale castle to me the way it sprawled over a full city block, winding back around itself and forming a concrete arena in the center. The patchwork of fire escapes each with its own steel ladder leading to the next balcony were magic to me, as was the endless sea of steel barred windows, some with ice-boxes protruding from within.

There was an imposing presence as you approached the building – no landscaping, no walkway or canopy , just one concrete platform step and doors heavy enough to keep out all the demons of the world. “Reeburgh Apartments” it said in gold letters marching across the thick frosted glass portions of both the heavy steel doors. Behind those doors existed a city within the city, a civilization made up of hundreds of families from all walks of life, speaking different languages, wearing different types of clothes, worshipping different Gods.

My memories of those people are childish memories, very unsophisticated and stemming from the observations of a young southern girl who had never to that point heard a foreign language. I loved the Italians and there were lots of them with seemingly endless numbers living in one apartment. They had hearty laughs and seemed to be all about food and family. The Oriental people were more subdued and quiet, always surrounded with lots of family and smiling secretly and shyly, humble and very warm. There were Jewish people who wore skull caps and celebrated holidays different from ours and the children were all dark and beautiful. The Germans were loud and boisterous and always seemed to be happy.

There were lots of southerners like us all of whom seemed quiet in demeanor and more hesitant to reach out and make friends. This was not due to any sense of aloofness or unfriendliness, but having come mostly from small towns in the south we walked and talked in a slower almost fluid manner. The onslaught of new and different cultures together with their unfamiliar languages, music and customs put us a bit in awe, as did the very fact of so many people living in such a small spaces. This after the vastness of the cotton and cornfields we were used to.

I love being alone – something I’ve carried with me since childhood – but life at the Reeburgh didn’t allow much opportunity for isolation. So anytime I was asked to go check the mail as I was this particular evening, I jumped at the chance. It was around suppertime in the evening and Daddy had forgotten to do it earlier when he came home. Closing the door behind me I always breathed deeply as I entered the hallway, warm and humid from the radiators hissing steam every few feet and filled with thick delicious smells of every kind of ethnic cooking imaginable. The kind of smells that make you want to eat even when you’re not hungry. Some were easy to identify – pork chops, pot roast, spaghetti, pizza, fried potatoes – others were mysterious but just as tempting. I shut my eyes and tried to isolate each smell, identifying the food and which door it escaped from. I would often smell bacon frying and I knew that meant breakfast for supper and wondered if they had sawmill gravy and biscuits like we did.