I grew up one block away from Oak Park Park off of 10 mile and Kenosha for those in the know. In Michigan. Having the park was heaven. We got into all types of trouble in that park from first kisses, first smokes, etc etc. We were so independent and carefree. Don’t remember ever coming home before like 9:00 pm. We ate somewhere. It could be my house or usually a neighbor’s. We all looked out for each other and I mean the families also. All lower class /blue collar. I guess. We all worked and had great work ethic. Mowed grass etc. I rememver we made bike jumps and attempted tricks on them. We played daredevil and would go as fast as we can towards each other to play chicken but no one budged. We just crashed into each other, fell to the ground and well…. Did it again . Of course no helmet.. We wrestled in the grass. Played tackle football with no gear and just had fun. My BF mother would ring a bell and that meant food. Lol. Kid’s would come from all around sometimes. Everyone got fed. All the houses were small. 3 bed 1 bath with 3 older sisters and my mother. My joke is that I didn’t see the bathroom till I was 16. Someone was always in there. We gave money to my mother for help when needed. I paid water bills and gas for the car if I was going to use it. We were not privledged at all like my kid’s. We walked just about everywhere and hitched a bit. We took chances. We weren’t guarded like kid’s now a days.
Just talking to a friend from those day’s. We speed down a road with the car jacked and headers and sounded loud. We were flying. The police stopped us. Told the driver to get out the car. We were nervous. Then he proceed to tell the driver to pop the hood and we talked about the engine/car’s for 15 minutes. Of course he told us to slow down. But things were handled in such a different way back then.
I grew up in a Downriver town and all your Michigan stories describe my experience as well. You know, “The Wonder Years.” We weren’t rich (at all), but my dad was the town banker so the kids thought we were, like he got to take home samples or something?
We lived in apartments. None of the apartment buildings I lived in growing up are currently apartment buildings. Two have been torn down, and one is being extensively rehabbed now.
We lived above some stores way before “mixed use” was an in thing. Our place was on a main road, and we lived there from grade 6-12. Terrific school district was the reason. It was a nice suburban neighborhood, and we lived very close to the town recreation park, which was terrific. I could walk just about anywhere I needed to go.
And that’s about it. Nothing exciting to describe or talk about.
Sadly the street I lived in across from the beach has become very LOUD with cars speeding up & down it with loud radios and some problems with overcrowding. A Board member rented a house near where I had lived and found it so unpleasant, they moved to a very nice, quiet rental right on the beach. They had a holiday party there that I enjoyed attending.
We are all happy niece bought my folks home & loves it & is making it hers/theirs. They know many of the neighbors we grew up with, as many of the “kids” are now living in the houses and niece & her H & D’s and dogs walk the neighborhood frequently.
Wanted to add that this thread prompted me to call my brother, who is eight years older than me and so has a great recollection of that house, which I left when I was 7. So glad I called as we had a fun chat and filled in the blanks for each other on some things that I didn’t know and that he misremembered. Good times.
We live in the house my family moved into when I was almost 10. The house the fam moved from was the one we’d moved into a few weeks after I was born. We moved from one cul-de-sac to another, through a pathway cut through a wire fence.
H and I bought the house from my mom 33 years ago and raised our two daughters here.
Our street(s) look much the same. Fewer kids running around; over the past several years more have moved in, but nothing like the hordes of kids back in the 1960s-70s.
Ramblers and two-story houses built between the late 50’s to the early 70s. Now the light rail station is 1/2mile away and zoning is changing, and existing houses are being torn down and multiple townhomes are being built on the lots.
Still no sidewalks. A small business street up the hill, and a library a few blocks away. Pretty typical suburbia, IMO.
My dad’s childhood home has shown up on FB because his parents ran a corner store from it and people have fond memories of it.
My mom’s house was torn down, along with much of the neighborhood of Victorian terraces where she grew up. When we did a tour (it’s a city with some famous people who grew up there & tours are a thing), we saw all her childhood haunts, but it’s just desolate nothing where the homes were.
I’m so glad we had sidewalks and a dead-end street. There wasn’t much traffic. so we & the neighbors played in the street. When it rained, we’d float little sticks and paper boats down the gutters along the sidewalk, into the storm drain. Once in awhile, we’d have to open the storm drain to retrieve a baseball or softball. Sometimes we’d have to climb on the roof to retrieve a basketball. I played with the neighbors & boys. My older sister didn’t.
We were fairly free range and didn’t get into trouble and rarely needed medical attention.
Both of my childhood homes (ages 0-10, then 11-college) were on corner lots. My parents seem to love corner lots. Not so cool when you have to shovel the sidewalks, lol.
First house was very middle class in Ohio. I don’t remember kids running around everywhere, but the family across the street had 5 girls, 4 of which were the ages between my sister, me, my brother. The last was just a toddler when we left. We were always together. Their Dad was a heart surgeon - just beginning when they moved in. And then they added on and on and on to their house. They had EVERYTHING, so we probably played more over there. My Mom credits them to getting us involved in all of our activities. My mom always wanted to do things, but wasn’t allowed being a girl. So she wanted it for us, but didn’t know exactly what to do. Our neighbor pulled us along. Softball, basketball, swimming, tennis, gymnastics, track, dance (I quit that), piano, guitar, trumpet, brownie’s/Girl Scouts… We did it all. There was also a family caddy corner to us that had a D my sister’s age, but the rest of the kids were much older (and boys!), so I didn’t know them as well. That was my sister’s best friend.
Second house was one of the first very large (2000+ homes?) subdivision in NOVA, where all of the houses look alike. I would call that more middle to upper class. We were on the low end of the spectrum. Lots of double retired military pensions plus two current private sector job incomes. Lots of kids everywhere, but we were all busy with our activities and such.
That made me laugh out loud! My grandpa was the town banker in a very small town up north. He passed away in the early 60’s, and after my grandma died, we found a file with Grandpa’s W-2’s. We knew our grandparents weren’t rich, but what a surprise to find out how little that “esteemed position” actually paid.
At age 5 moved to our permanent home in rural NJ. Dirt road and 4 miles to nearest town/stores. Mostly woods and farms with plenty of room to explore and ride bikes etc. Small house but we were outside much of the time. Nearby river for swimming and stuff. No complaints. Road is paved now but still rural with a scattering of newer homes.
A street in a less wealthy neighborhood in a fairly wealthy NJ suburb. Mostly 3 br/1 bath at that time, 1500 sq ft. My parents bought the house just before I was born and when my Mom passed away she’d lived in it 50 years, although had enclosed a porch to make a family room and added a half bath. Elementary school was up the road one direction and high school a couple of blocks the other; jr high was a mile away but we never rode a school bus and it was extremely rare that anyone drove us to school. Lots of neighborhood kids, played in everyone’s house or backyard. You knew if you did something wrong your parents would hear about it. Ice cream store and candy store were within easy walking distance, although we often biked there. It really was an idyllic time and place, at least for us.
Most of my childhood (ages 4-16) was spent in a trailer park on the semi-rural outskirts of a big city. While my dad always pointed out that ours was one of the nicer trailer parks around, this wasn’t saying much. It had all of the issues you would expect in low-income areas, including property crime, unruly neighbors, occasional domestic violence down the street, and so on. There were some wild stories - the time that two old men down the street got into a fight about a card game and one stabbed the other with a kitchen knife, with the wounded man eventually collapsing in our front yard (he survived and moved back in!), the time that our drug-addicted neighbor chased his wife out of the house while hallucinating, and the time that neighborhood kids tried to steal my dad’s old motorcycle and managed to get it stuck under the chain-link fence behind the house. AND, the whole thing was in the flood plain next to a large creek (hence the idea to put elevated trailer homes there), and it did indeed flood three times, once severely enough to require boat rescue by the fire department.
Fortunately, our life inside the house was far more stable than the surroundings would have suggested. I would guess that we were the most prosperous people who lived in the park, as my parents both had college degrees and my dad had a professional career (albeit with very modest compensation). But being devoutly religious, they were committed to (1) stay-at-home-motherhood, and (2) Christian education, so our financial resources were limited and went toward private religious schooling rather than improved housing. Most of our friends from work/church/school lived in nice suburban areas, and in many ways we lived lives similar to theirs and just pretended that we didn’t live where we lived.
I have often wondered if I would’ve made the same choice to raise my family in that environment, as opposed to using the private school money to live in a safer area farther out or becoming a two-income family. I doubt it, but then again, I have to say that most of my childhood memories are happy, and my sister and I received an excellent education. I did spend a lot of time trying not to seem too rich in my neighborhood and trying not to seem too poor everywhere else, which in hindsight is a strange way to grow up.
The trailer park closed down shortly after we moved away, likely due to yet another flood that finally proved you couldn’t safely live on that land. The last time I went by there a few years ago, the chain-link fencing was still mostly standing around the perimeter of the property after 30 years of neglect, the front entry gate was still padlocked, and thick vegetation had engulfed everything else. Our old lot near the back corner isn’t visible from the main road now.
Somehow the title of this thread reminds me of Freddy in My Fair Lady, “On the Street Where You Live,” where he takes up lurking and pining for Eliza outside her lodgings.
We moved to a classic 3 bdr ranch 4 block subdivision on a half acre backed by a creek when I was little. We lived in the middle of the block, so all arguments and scrapes were handled by my mom because she was closest. The big kids played foursquare in driveways; the little kids waited to be big. Every summer there was a huge game where you break into 3 teams and try to fill their garbage can with water; it ran for hours across everyone’s yards and the parents helped as well. I had piano lessons from our neighbor in exchange for my mom teaching her to knit. Family up the street had a bell mounted on their porch and would ring it late afternoon to send everyone back to their homes (or their friends, if they were “eating with”)
When I was in middle school we moved to what I realize now was my parents’ dream house – 8 acres of woods and fields, a house they oversaw the build of; we had 4th of july parties and family dinners that got so big we outgrew the kitchen. Our children had parades through the house, dressed in stuff they found in my mom’s sewing room. My dad taught us, and them, how to drive a riding lawnmower. We had 4 neighbors, all of whom rallied around my ailing parents. They planted trees we carried home from my grandparents’ in Maine.
We sold the house to a high school classmate of mine last year. Bittersweet, but it was also her family’s dream house so it’s okay. The street is paved now, not gravel.
This has brought up a lot of memories as I try to think about what to write. I lived in the same house from birth to 19. The neighborhood was a several block stretch of a miles-long road in a smallish city, where all of the small 3-bedroom 1-bath ramblers were built around the same time in 1953. The families next door and across the street both had girls my age and girls my older sister’s age, so we all played together as kids. Eventually another girl my age moved in a few houses away and the next door neighbors moved away, but the two remaining as well as 3 others we met in junior high have been lifelong friends. We all ended up moving to the same large metro area where we live now, so we get together several times a year. It’s hard to believe that I have been friends with one of them my entire life, so 70+ years! As kids, our street was pretty busy so there wasn’t much bike-riding. At some point, a road was put through on the vacant lot next to our house, so we could bike there and I remember playing baseball in the road, since it didn’t yet have any houses built on it. As pre-teens, I remember walking to the our elementary school to ice skate (but we were bussed to school), and also to the shopping center about a half mile away to get a cherry coke or something at the drug store soda fountain, and once a week picking up the printed “Top 40” from the dime store that the local radio station delivered to record stores. We were also within walking distance of the university branch in our city if we cut through the woods, so we used to walk there and use their tennis courts and go sliding down their ski hill. All in all, a very happy childhood. I think we were all pretty middle class, had what we needed but didn’t get everything we wanted. It wasn’t until high school where we came in contact with many kids from wealthy families. Kids from our high school were sometimes called “cake-eaters” or just “cakes”, but we certainly didn’t qualify!
My childhood best friend lived on my street. A lot of girls I grew up with got pregnant in high school, including my BF, whose S was born junior year. She married the father two years later; I went off to college & didn’t have my first child for many years. Even with our very different lives, we stayed in touch through the years. She died three months ago, and it felt like a piece of my happy childhood was gone forever. I appreciate the chance to remember the good times on this thread.
I view my childhood as having two streets. One street was in central CA farmland, near a sugar beet farm. I picked figs, got very itchy from fig trees, caught crawdads, played “restaurant” with the farmer’s beets, and roamed around in an old barn filled with junk and broken windows. We were a trashy hippy family (I am allowed to say that, because we were.) It was a lot of fun.
Then we moved our trashy selves up to the woods of the PNW. We had a very long driveway up a mountain. There was no name for our road. I think it had a route number. I roamed the woods and went fishing. I had a cute little nubian goat. We lived miles from anywhere. We swam in a swimming hole where a local farmer brought boxes of freshly picked cherries. We ate so many that we would feel sick. There were long journeys to and from school on a big yellow bus. I became interested in boys. I also loved that time.
I lived other places growing up too, but I think of these two phases of childhood with a lot of intense, special, and fun memories, albeit totally different. My kids had a much more conventional upbringing and I wouldn’t change that. My mom was a very eccentric lady and didn’t care about convention at all. In many ways, I wish I had been able to give my kids what I had growing up, but there were also downsides which I am happy they never had to experience.
Funny you mentioned having two streets. When I told dh about this post, he asked why I didn’t talk about the street that he knows from my childhood, where my parents lived and died and the only place he associates with me. I lived there from 7 on.
I didn’t consider that street, because so much of my childhood of that time didn’t happen on that street. I was old enough to wander the wider area so would walk to my bffs’ houses or to hang with my cousins or to hit tennis balls at the middle school. The physical street didn’t hold the same feeling as the street of my earlier years.
. Of course no helmet.. We wrestled in the grass. Played tackle football with no gear and just had fun. My BF mother would ring a bell and that meant food. Lol. Kid’s would come from all around sometimes. Everyone got fed. All the houses were small. 3 bed 1 bath with 3 older sisters and my mother. My joke is that I didn’t see the bathroom till I was 16. Someone was always in there. We gave money to my mother for help when needed. I paid water bills and gas for the car if I was going to use it. We were not privledged at all like my kid’s. We walked just about everywhere and hitched a bit. We took chances. We weren’t guarded like kid’s now a days.
