A Brand New Neighborhood (Voisinage) to Explore
Now that the war was over, and we were living at 179 Ludlam St in Centralville, life felt renewed and with a glimmer of hope. People seemed relieved and more relaxed. These past four years of war had been hard with all the rationing of butter, coffee, fresh vegetables, leather goods, automobile tires, and gasoline.
All these hassles had been felt at home, but they did not even begin to address the fate of many Americans, who were killed or badly wounded in these terrible battles – those
who had lost arms or legs or the good functioning of their minds. Yet, still, there was noticeably a slight whiff of relief and excitement in the air. Everyone was a little bit more
cheery and hopeful. Maybe, the economy would turn around and prosperity appear at our front doors?
My parents had chosen to move from Barker St. (near the West Sixth St. and Lakeview Avenue crossing) to our new home in the winter of 1945 (January, 1945?). This must be
so since I do recall that my sister, Michelle, was brought home there from Lowell General Hospital after her birth on March 21th of that year.
This new neighborhood offered young boys like my brother Bob and me great opportunities for exploring the surrounding, residential streets that were lined with two
and three story clapboard houses of the standard Victorian style, a few, multi-family tenement blocks plus occasional vacant lots, a couple of tree-filled, granite strewn hillocks, cobble-stone streets, the Hildreth St. Cemetery and McPherson’s Field off Bridge Street. We had much to check out in these new surroundings.
Also to be found in our extended living space were several ma-and-pa variety stores, which provided their customers milk, ice cream, bread, donuts, pastries (Table Talk pies), cigarettes plus chocolate bars, bubble gum, Wise Potato Chips, and Coca-Cola, Sprite, Orange Crush, and more.
Some Details about our Tenement in this Refurbished House
Our front yard located at the corner of Ludlam and Dana was highlighted by two, towering, regional trees – one a maple and the other a horse chestnut – that arched their
branches high above the three-story height of our multi-family tenement complex. This little corner of Centralville’s real estate had once been fenced in for privacy, but that was
before a devastating fire turned this once large, one-family house, a mansion really, into an instant candidate for a transition into a multi-family tenement house.
After some extensive repairs, three separate families could be provided adequate housing under a roof that once could
only lodge one. For anyone, who saw the world with rose-colored glasses, progress could be measured by the density of inhabitants in residential housing. Over the years from 1900 to the time of this story, circumstances in the city had dictated that compact living in a multi-generational setting seemed to work best, especially when work was hard to find.
After that fateful inferno, which happened in the late 1920s or early 1930s, the original fence was apparently never replaced leaving the yard open to easy pedestrian traffic or
short cuts. We, Bolducs, looked upon this unusual yard situation as an opportunity to meet and greet neighbors – total strangers might not have been welcome – who willingly
accepted our open-air hospitality, which made their personal trips on foot shorter and easier. This may be how a person became a local hero in this typical, French-Canadian,
working-class neighborhood of the period.
A Time of Many Changes – Days from the 1945 and early 1946 Calendar of Events
My personal experience, while we lived on Barker Street, had been one of deep reflection, sadness and general bewilderment. I knew none of the children or adults on
that short street, which was dotted with ailing houses under a permanent, gray and gloomy sky. Of course, there must also have been times when that empty, weed-laden,
stone-filled, straggly, vacant lot located on Lakeview Avenue, which abutted our tiny back yard on Barker, might have been teaming with jumping grasshoppers, crawling
caterpillars and buzzing bumble-bees in the warm months. These tiny creatures were all proclaiming the raw and harsh beauty of that scene, but I could not join them, even
lightly, in spirit.
My Mom and Dad seemed to be more stressed out than ever before and my favorite grandmother, Mémère Bolduc, was no longer living with us. She always called me “Mon Petit Paul”, so I really missed her soft and encouraging presence. In her mind, I never could do anything wrong, which certainly was not the case with my father.
Often, he seemed angry and tired – a man barely able to deal with his personal situation. True, money was tight, although, we managed to eat frugally but well because my mother
could do magic in the kitchen with the bare essentials that the Big War allowed. However, there was often a sense of brewing tension in the kitchen air and in our daily lives as we tried to adjust, or simply to make do.
My brother, Bob, was also with us at the time. He had been born at St-Joseph Hospital in March, 1943 while we still rented that attractive, second-story apartment on Endicott
Street. At that point, I was an enthusiastic four-year-old, and I do recall my mother feeding him in his high-chair plus her changing his diapers while he laid in his bassinet blankets. A kid can learn a lot by just watching his parents handle the daily chores around them.
More Details about that New Neighborhood
Our new tenement apartment was situated on the bottom floor of a big, old, gray and white, painted, clapboard house, a Folk Victorian, they called it. This wooden structure may once have been quite elegant and beautiful in its days of glory, perhaps, in the 1920s or 1930s. But, when we moved in, it remained marginally respectable, while sitting in a neighborhood of working class people, folks who just held onto a living standard that might have been called modest, at best.
Many families in the area could not afford to own a house or, certainly, a tenement building so they formed the solid bottom rung of a renter-class, socioeconomic group. We, Bolducs, found ourselves solidly in this category and, although we might be the poorer mice in the churchyard, we also realized that some folks living in Little Canada (like Aiken, Moody, Austin or Race streets) or in the Acre, off Fletcher or Broadway, might have looked upon our digs as quite attractive, indeed.
Really, just how these other Lowellites felt about or responded to the broader mores and issues within the city remained a mystery to us although we might have willingly
accepted and benefited from any wise advice and gentle counsel that they could have proffered.
Yes, we were very lucky to be living in Centralville – mostly because our house was owned by Aunt Alice Charbonneau whose lawyer-husband, Henri Charbonneau, had once been the city solicitor and owned several houses across the city. I suppose that he had done well in the “lawyering business”, and had managed to be well acquainted with several, high-ranking, city officials, land developers and real estate agents during his professional years.
These business connections formed one important life lesson for some of us living on the more ragged sidelines. Apparently, in our world, there appears to be a great
advantage in being well-connected with the movers and shakers in town.
Gossip, Family Stories and Ways of Being
Of course, I only caught a few tidbits, here and there, of family history and generally believed gossip about relatives, friends, and neighbors. There were a lot of interesting and very tempting stories and tales to be overheard in our house. But, of course, we never knew just where and how these stories had been embellished, changed, altered or simply fabricated to make for juicy news.
Our front and side yards were provided with much dirt-covered, open space where grass apparently once grew under two healthy. large trees – one a maple and the other, a horse chestnut. These two trees even reached above the slate-tiled roof of the three-story tenement building.
These two, huge trees plus a third tree, of type unknown (we kids called it the banana tree because of its many, thin, banana-shaped pods), located near the entryway to our
home’s main entrance on Ludlam Street gave our abode a tree-covered character that must have been the envy of the entire neighborhood.
Only the Bergerons on Dana Street had a private forest on their lot that began to offer any competition to our favorite three trees in Lowell. Sometimes, even lowly church mice have something special to talk about. We certainly had.
Again, we seemed lucky because the fence that once enclosed this corner lot at Ludlam and Dana disappeared or disintegrated, years before. As a result, neighbors and visitors in this part of town could and did, regularly, cut through and use our open space as a convenient shortcut in their wanderings about the locale.
To some, this practice might have appeared like an invasion of privacy, but we, Bolducs , accepted this custom as a real opportunity to appreciate the generally pleasant folks, who made our little corner of reality so interesting and unusual, at times.
Naturally, it would have been upsetting to discover that bad,
cruel or mean people also used our generous shortcut, but there seemed to be no reason to suspect that there might be such unsavory characters in our portion of Lower Centralville.
Also, since nearly everyone in Lowell went about his or her business on foot, the available shortcut was our modest way to make daily living just a bit better for our fellow human beings. Years long ago, in our ancestral, regal homeland, this gracious act of good will would have elicited the comment that: “Noblesse oblige” but, given our state of near penury, the use of this term was more artistic than proof of our former noble past.
Again, everyone, except the cripples and the super-rich, walked in Lowell at the time. Cars were not very popular in town. Actually, they were quite rare.
The recent World War II episode certainly had altered the usual automobile production schedules, but marketeers on the radio and in newsprint were already stimulating our natural American impulse for vehicular comfort.
My brother, who always loved automobiles, could easily look up Ludlam St. toward Pinard’s Market on Hildreth, and only spot one, ancient, pre-war vehicle parked on the
right-hand side of the street near the attractive, grass-covered lawn in front of the home of those beautiful Irish girls – such pretty girls – and such a magnificent, two-level,
family domicile with a curving driveway leading to separate garages far removed from the street. What elegance, what reserve, and class!
Maybe, one day, when both, Bob and I, were grown, we would also be living in such splendor and opulence? With the war over and done with, we, two, brothers were
looking for ways to reach those dizzying heights, and no longer live on the edge of poverty, hand-me-down clothes and paper-thin hopes.
But, of course, a slim hope here and there was way better than no hope at all.
End of Part #1