I was listening to the Good Hang podcast with Kerry Washington (love!) and they were talking about her show The Street You Grew Up On - I need to watch, I think I’d love this.
Tell us about the street you grew up on. Or the street you grew up on (if more than one) that is most memorable to you and your age range there. The people, the activities, the quirks, the regional location (like a state), urban/rural/suburban - anything you want to share!
I grew up on one street only - we did move houses one time, but we literally moved across the street! Michigan, small city, mix of white/blue collar families, very middle class - which does not mean upper middle class. AVERAGE. A bike riding neighborhood and bike MILES we did. One long street that had some “fancier” houses had a boulevard and one of my best friends lived on it so we rode that thing zillions of times. In the summer, there was a public pool two blocks away that was our second home. It was at the jr high - we walked to our elementary and junior high. A typical summer night was the kids riding bikes everywhere we were allowed and the moms sitting on each other’s front porches after their work was done for the day. To me honest, don’t remember the dads so much! My dad was probably attending to his garden or inside watching nightly news. We had fruit trees in the back yard and I have lots of memories of picking the cherry tree and my older brother getting to climb on the garage roof to get the high branches.
A winter memory is that we got so much snow that there was an empty lot at the end of the block and we made a big snow pit, hollow in the middle so you could climb up in and then slide down. Or lots of snow forts in the yard. As I got older I babysat for some people down the street often - it was probably only a block and a half away but I remember walking home in the dark (actually, RUNNING) after I was done (they would watch me go) and it seeming SO far!
We had a small house for our family of 6 - but my older sister and younger brother were like 12-13 years apart so she was largely gone as he was growing up. After I married my parents/brother moved and OF COURSE that house was a good bit bigger!
I grew up in Brooklyn on a street with all three family houses so there were lots of kids. Us kids hung out on the “stoop” and played on the stoop, the sidewalk, and in the street. A Spalding ball was your best friend. We loved when the Freezer Fresh Ice Cream truck or the King Kong Ride truck came down the street.
It was solidly Italian, lower middle class, and mostly 3 generations living together in the houses (my grandparents lived downstairs). Everybody walked everywhere - my mother never even had a driver’s license. Nobody went to camp, nobody went away to college (everybody commuted), and almost all of my generation got out when they got married (moved to Long Island, Staten Island, or NJ.)
It was especially wild on July 4th. Many blocks would have a large garbage can in the middle of the street filled with fire that they just tossed M80s into. They would melt the tar on the street from the heat. We sat outside on that night with a hose in our hands in case something landed on the roof so the house wouldn’t catch on fire!
I was close enough to be able to walk to a path along the shore, which we did many, many times. I have mentioned elsewhere that it was glorious for the tall ships on the bicentennial.
My time and place, as a teenager, was Saturday Night Fever and Welcome Back Kotter. Both filmed in my neighborhood and at places I frequented (my HS is in the opening credits of the TV show.)
I grew up on a corner, so had two streets. The busier of the two went the whole length of my tiny little town and through the small downtown area. A block west was the town park with a basketball court and baseball fields (no playground equipment) and a block east was the elementary school with the playground equipment. About 8 blocks east was the Mississippi River with a ferry boat in the summer time. Across the river was a state park and an ice cream shop.
My younger sister, cousin, and I had the paper routes for the whole town and so had some spending money. My parents did not pay attention to what we were doing in the summer time as long as we were home in time to do the afternoon paper routes. We rode our bikes down that road to that ferry boat, rode the ferry right on across the river several times a day. We bought ice cream when we were hungry.
My father worked for Boeing on the minuteman missile project, so we moved around a lot.
So I grew up on many streets.
Occasionally I recall my earliest memory ever. My family lived in an apartment in Seattle and I vividly remember playing on some concrete steps and coming across a caterpillar. I rushed in to tell my mother, who came out and identified it for me.
Last week I shared this memory with my older brother, and together we were able to deduce that I was 3 years old and it was an apartment in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood. Looking at Google Maps he was able to pinpoint the exact building, which I will soon be visiting.
From the time I was born until I finished 1st grade, we lived in a nice SMALLL rental house on a street that was fairly quiet. We had only 1 car and dad used it to get to & from work, so we walked. It was across the street from the beach, so we often walked to the beach and looked at the tide pools. We also had friends that lived up the street and they’d come over to our house and we’d go to theirs regularly. It was a very idyllic time.
The summer after I finished 1st grade, we moved to a larger house in the suburbs, much further from the beach. We lived there and my folks owned it until they died. My niece bought it and now lives there. It was a block from the elementary school we all attended, so that was very convenient. There was a shopping center with a wonderful supermarket right behind it. It also had lots of kids in the street and we played with them, in our front driveway (which was the only one with smooth concrete) or running among the houses. The shopping center had a lot of nice things, including a community swimming pool, where we all took lessons. Over the years, it was demolished and turned into the 1st McDonald’s in our state (and is still there). There’s also a public library, a church, a post office, one or more banks/savings and loans, and some restaurants. All in all, a nice little shopping center. It was a very convenient place to grow up.
The street I grew up on has become almost unrecognizable since I moved away in the 90’s. Very sad as it used to be a quiet street where everyone knew each other and neighbors were friendly and helped each other out and looked out for us kids. Politics, religion, racial and ethnic backgrounds seemed to not matter quite as much back then even though we were very diverse in all of the above.
We were in the third subdivision built in our Minneapolis/St. Paul suburb. Our house was right across from a cul-de-sac, filled with kids, which was a great place to play “kick the can”. My dad claimed to be “cul-de-sac mayor”, when he sat out in his lawn chair. We walked to our public elementary and junior high schools and had a park in back of the cul-de-sac. When we got older, we rode bikes to the store, which was almost two miles away. I give credit to my mother, who was on the zoning commission in those early days. She was tough, fighting for low sign heights and building/business requirements. This suburb is now one of the nicest in the Twin Cities, and I think she had a lot do with it.
I grew up on a suburban style street in a Big 10 university town. My parents moved to Chicago maybe 20 years ago. As far as I know, it’s still much the same. It wasn’t right next to the town or campus but walkable to both. We could hear cheers from the stadium every Saturday morning. There was a fraternity on the end of the block so we could hear their parties too, although it never really got that bad. One year they sent their pledges out to shovel the circumference of the entire block, which was twice as long as a regular block.
I grew up a town over from @Knowsstuff, and I was a mile outside of Detroit. I lived on a nice, tree-lined street where the parents worked blue collar and non-managerial white collar jobs. We walked to school, to all of the stores in the bustling downtown, to the library, to the high school for summer swim lessons, to the park down the street (where we played without adult supervision). It was a perfect childhood.
However … we were within earshot of the shootings that marked that time period. We left town to stay with my grandma up north during the ‘67 riots. We heard about book burnings (Black Like Me and similar books upset some parents in our district, where neighborhood schools - yes, neighborhoods were segregated in the 60’s - meant that the white and black students didn’t attend the same school until junior high). It was a time of social struggle, and we were very much aware of that fact.
I mean, maybe we were lower middle class - it was all I knew back then! And I was in southeastern Michigan but outside of Detroit and outside of “downriver”.
We moved every couple of years, so I had a lot of different streets where I grew up but probably my most formative/favorite was in a suburb outside of Philly when I was 9 and 10. I was raised pretty free-range back then and I walked to my elementary school (about 15 minutes away) and would ride my bike to the nearby creek where I would catch frogs and crayfish (and bring them home in buckets where sadly they never survived). There were a handful of kids in the neighborhood to hang out with and a community pool that I biked to in the summer.
But the longest I lived anywhere as a kid was four years — and now as an adult I’ve been in my current house for almost 30 years, so my kids have had a very different experience than I did in this regard.
The first house I remember was in off-base housing while my dad finished his Air Force career. That neighborhood felt so safe – tons of kids and lots of freedom to roam in and out of everyone’s tidy little homes. We lived on the corner of a cul-de-sac so lots of action. On Saturdays, we’d gather in someone’s one-car garage and tell ghost stories in the dark. Families were always moving in and out so there was a perpetual turnover in friends, which was both good and bad. Different ethnicities and races, but everyone in that kind of housing were roughly of the same socio-economic background. I don’t remember everyone’s homes, but some families had several kids so their houses had to have been a lot bigger than our 3-1, I would think. Oh, and we lived right on the flight line so it could be LOUD, but for us it became background noise.
The only negative I can remember is when the MPs were on patrol, which lent both a sense of safety and fear – fear that they would stop at your house.
It’s funny you posted this, because I thought of this house last week when the flyovers were in the news. I got buzzed like that all the time in my back yard! The Blue Angels were like Santa – I knew I’d see them the same time every year, when the base had its open house and air show.
I grew up on a tree lined suburban town near the beach and walk to town. Everyone rode their bikes or walked to friends houses. It was a pretty sheltered childhood!
And I was in southeastern Michigan but outside of Detroit and outside of “downriver”.
