Roots too deep to run away...

My high school friend, Mike, recently wrote an article about the town we grew up in, Easton, Pennsylvania. I had made a comment to him that he had left out the part of the city I grew up in which was South Side. He told me that he would leave it up to me to write about South Side. Easton is an old industrial town that sits on the Leigh and Delaware Rivers and sits right across from New Jersey. It sits almost perfectly (mileage wise) between New York City and Philadelphia. The town served as a key point in the Revolutionary War and is rich in National history. It was a service center for the steel industry in later years and serviced three canals and later five railroads. The city is broken down into four sections. The Historic Downtown, The West Ward, College Hill and South Side. The Historic Downtown is pretty much what it says it is. It has shops and businesses and mostly apartments as well as office buildings. The West Ward is more of the working class area with corner stores and row houses. College Hill is home to Lafayette College and is the more affluent part of the city. Then there was South Side. It is where the poor people are and most of the crime and minorities reside. Not to say that the area didn't have its nice parts but the majority of the area was what people would consider "the other side of the tracks".

Although the population has mostly stayed the same since the 1970's or so, the city has seemed to have sprawled over the last few years and has gotten bigger. More businesses and it has seemed to become more and more modern everywhere you look. I haven't lived in Easton for years now but when I go to visit family and drive through, so much has seemed to change. Even the main drive through South Side has a glossier look to it but behind the new store fronts and back allies, the area still looks the same.

My mom and step father moved to Easton when I was 5. We lived on the eastern most part of the area, away from the projects. Not that it was planned like that, but it was the first house in my mom's price range that she "liked". My grandmother had died earlier that year and had left my mom some money. She used it to put a down payment on a house so we could move out of the trailer park and hopefully start a better life. Now that I am over ten years removed from that half a double we lived in, it was a shit hole but my mom and step father did a good amount of work on the house to try to make it into something respectable to live in while the rest of the neighborhood seemed to slowly fall apart. The dining room had this splinter filled wood that was replaced a year or so later. The carpet in the upstairs was an ugly nightmare of brown and orange. The basement reminds me of the Blair Witch Project. The windows rattled everytime a storm came through. The attic had exposed nails and always smelt bad and had exposed patches of insulation you could (and my step father did) fall through. The wood would creek all night long. The neighbors were dirty and when they left, dirtier ones moved it. I always felt the house had a creepy feel to it but it could have just been my disorder.

The part of South Side we lived on was a melting pot. It was completely African American area like the western side of South Side. There were some upper middle class people right down the road from our house and some families barely making it up the road. We were probably about in the middle although when you are a kid and don't know wealthy, you can't really gauge your own standing. The Farina's were the only family that I knew of that had a pool. This guy Ron sat out on his porch each night and drank beer and listened to the Phillies game. Whenever I would walk by, we always talked. He was very nice but probably just drunk. The Young's lived next door. They were very old and probably lived in that house for 40 years or more. They were very nice but far from clean. The Nicholason's lived in the other half of the house. They were nice but dirty. Their house smelt bad. When they moved out, a very ugly family moved in. They were the poster family for White Trash. The father would physically abuse his daughters (and I can only assume sexually) and we had to call the police a number of times. We also had to call the CPA just because of the conditions of their house. The yard always had pointless shit in it. When they finally moved out, a nicer and cleaner family moved in. They were African American and their son was a up and coming athlete in the local high school. He later got into drugs and ruined it all. The Decker's lived across the street and were the nicest people on the block. My Aunt moved in next door to the Decker's a few years after we moved in. Her husband beat her and they always fought. There was a small mom and pop store between some of the houses on my street. One of them was a crack house and as the years went on, more and more violence grew from that house. The store was robbed more than once. There was a drive by near that house. There were always late night comings and goings from that house. I always felt bad for the store. They always had cheap candy and baseball cards. One day, the owner snapped and started throwing money and merchandise into the street. It closed and opened back up a few years later and sold sandwiches and hoagies. I don't know if it's still there.

South Side has a million stories just like any other town. I could keep spilling stories of the rusted porches and burnt out houses but the stories always seem to have the same ending and it's never happy. South Side is where you go to stay. South Side was built on the side of a giant hill and all the dreams seemed to roll downhill and into the brown river at the bottom of that hill and washed away. I always relish a story of someone who got out and did good things and just didn't repeat the cycle or someone who just did something different. Someone who didn't end up with three kids before they were twenty or in jail or shot or working some dead end job living between Grant and Wilkes Barre Street. There was always a stigma attached to living in South Side, in Easton anyway. If someone asked you where you lived and you said "I live in South Side." you would get the clenched teeth with a half smile or the "Ohhhh..." response. You weren't up and coming or working towards something, you were fucking down and out.