“Yonge Street, Yorkville, the hub of Toronto’s music scene in the 1960s, with A&A Records, Steel’s Tavern, and Sam’s Record Store.” Photo/caption included in Neil Young: The Definitive History by Mike Evans (2012 Sterling Publishing, NY).

For Christmas, Gail gave me the book from which the above image is included.  (Quite a Neil Young Christmas morning, as Jake had given me Waging Heavy Peace, his memoir, which I recently finished).  Flipping through the pages – the above image arrested me.  Taken in the 1960s when the LP was king, this image brings me back to the not-so-distant-past when record stores were so very important to me.  Through the years they might have lost their neon over-the-topness, but record stores always served as a place of refuge for me (I’m not exaggerating).  Oh, to have visited Toronto in the album’s heyday and to have visited A&A Records (“World’s Largest”) or Sam’s (“This is Sam the Record Man”). What undiscovered treasures would await?

Somewhat Necessary Information Leading Up To The Importance of Record Stores.

My first record purchases were at Garwood Mills in Atlantic City.  Then Two Guys in Atlantic City (kind of the KMart of its day).  I remember the record department in Two Guys, maybe five aisles (how accurate is this?) I do remember getting George Harrison’s All Things Must Have there, the three album boxed set.  How could one man, even if he is an ex-Beatle, have created so much music? Aside: Aunt Dora, Mom Mom Liz’s sister who lived in the pink apartments next door to our house on Atlantic Avenue in Margate, used to call it the “Three Guys.”  We used to laugh and kid her that she was always exaggerating, but she would go right on and call it that.  Family lore).  Other place of early record purchases: Ben Franklin 5&10 near Upland Road.

My record purchasing really took off once I started heading into Center City with dad on Saturdays.  I had accompanied him on some Saturdays growing up.  He’d bring me into his office on Rittenhouse Square and I’d kind of just hang out.  Play with the copy machine.  Meet some of his colleagues also working on a Saturday.  Eventually heading over to the YMHA on Broad Street where he’d exercise.  There was an elevated track over the gym, and if you would do 25 laps around it you’d have gone a mile.  The curves were banked, which was cool.  There was a sauna and a steam room, a big room for massages, and a big tanning room where you’d don these little plastic covers for your eyes and sit under all the light bulbs.  Lots of old guys walking/lying around with towels slipping off. Then there was the relaxing room – about 20 lounge chairs in a darkened room.  You lay down and watched the tv that hung from the wall.  The only time in my life I watched college football.  Dad used to get me a can of pineapple juice.  Man, I can remember the inside of the Y so clearly.

Back to Record Stores.  Philadelphia.

in sixth grade the Y no longer interested me, but the streets of center city Philly started beckoning.  And it was the record stores that really got me to explore. The first one I ever went in was probably on 20th Street or so, right near dad’s office, and it was like a new world.  I had only bought records in department stores or 5&10s, now here was a store completely and utterly devoted just to music!  And there was so much to explore, so many artists I’ve never heard of, so many incredible album covers.  It was as if a door to a whole new world suddenly opened and the possibilites were endless. The money I earned from allowance, from shoveling snow, from selling greeting cards or plant seeds, now had a purpose.  I could buy albums.

Taken fall 2012.  Okay – I’ve never been to this shop. I love the name of the store – the whole marquee.  This store, on 11th and Market St. in Philly, is representing all the records stores I did frequent growing up in and around Philadelphia. Funko-Mart is here.  Every store I ever bought records from is gone.

The first store was a small shop, but bigger shops soon lured me.  Chestnut Street.  Market Street.  Saturday’s my friends and I would take the 44 bus to center city to shop at the record stores.  I remember Listening Booth – other names are gone to me now.  But walking in you’d see this dazzling display of albums covering every inch of available wall space.  Sheer saturation.  And the music would always be cranking, and you would get dizzy with all the possibilities of what to buy.  There was so much!!!  So many new records you never knew about… so many older records you never knew about.  But you were starting to learn.

Once in high school, we used to explore Lancaster Avenue in Ardmore, and we discovered Mad’s Records.  And in my senior year Mad’s started to sell promo copies of new records at a very cheap price.  They had promo stickers on them warning the albums were not for sale, but Mad’s – and probably many other stores – was selling them anyway.  I started buying records by artists I hadn’t even heard on the radio – taking chances.  Getting three albums for the same price I would get one “new” one for.  My record collection started to really grow.

The top facade of the building housing Funko-Mart seems a good example of some terrible architectural decisions that took place in the 1960s that are still extant today.  I have no idea what those holes are for.  The letters spell out “Robinson” on the side – “Robinson” wins as the ugliest building I have ever seen, but this is kind of what Market street looks like  – and has looked like – in places

Record Stores in Boston.

I’ve always lived outside the center of a city, never in the center of a city.  But as a new student starting my sophomore year at Emerson, living in a dorm in Kenmore Square, I was completely in the thick of things.  I realized very quickly that this is where I always wanted to be. Within a few minutes walk from Fensgate (my dorm) was Music City and Strawberries (both record stores) and Nuggets a used record store.  What a minute… a used record store??  This was something I had never experienced before.  Mad’s had sold promo copies, but here was a place where people could sell or trade in records they didn’t want and Nuggets would resell them, sometimes for ridiculously low prices.

An interior shot of Nuggets circa Fall 2012.  On my recent trip purchased a Robin Lane and the Chartbusters Live ep from 1980, which I used to own but somehow got rid of it years ago.  Also, a Robert Fripp solo LP from the early 1980s.

And Nuggets still exists.   In November 2012 I was pretty well shocked to park on Commonwealth Avenue, a few blocks from the heart of Kenmore Square and see Nuggets huge clock on the sidewalk.  It’s not the same location – the Nuggets I knew

Nuggets still exists! The store has moved, and is a thriving business nearly 30 years since I last purchased an album there!

was a basement storefront.  You walked down about four steps to enter.  Since I left Boston they acquired a much more visible space.  I walked in feeling absolutely giddy, and I felt completely in touch with my old self fingering through the vinyl (now much more expensive) overflowing in their bins.  In my time in Boston, there were so many musical discoveries I credit Nuggets with.  So many artists I took a chance on because their albums were so cheap.  I’d visit Nuggets after class, before class, on the weekends.  Many times I’d have a few slices at Al Capone’s (now gone) before heading over to Nuggets.  Slices were 40 cents.  And they were big and great.  At Nuggets I’d trade in albums from my collection for other people’s stuff (though it was never easy to give up albums from one’s collection, no matter how ashamed or embarrassed about what one listened to earlier).  Walking into Nuggets I was always discovering something new, and coming home with something new.

Nuggets is above ground now, and still alive with lots and lots of vinyl.  Pricier now, and more-than-slightly retro, since almost all vinyl is 30 years old, or older.  It exists for the older music fan; I wonder if I were a 19-year-old today, would I still frequent the store? What would be my record store of choice? Would I even have one, content with listening to anything I want online rather than collecting?

What a van! What a face! Newbury Comics van kinda reminds me of the face of the Whooping Cranes and Zip Records.  This was parked near their store on Newbury St.  Unmistakable.  Just looking at it now makes me want to shop for music and spend money.  At the store, bought new cds from Calexico and Tame Impala (who weren’t even born yet when I lived in Boston).

For me, Newbury Comics is my current record store of choice.  There are a number of them in the Boston area, and all of them postdate me.  How I wish Newbury comics existed when I was there (but then again, my Boston years predated the cd).  Vast indie selection, and a good many used cds.And their vinyl selection seems to be growing now that vinyl is a niche products.  But it seems in the years that I’ve visited more and more of their inventory is non-musical: clothing and accessories, gag gifts, dvds/videos (now also decreasing).

Music City – Kenmore Square

Inside of City Convenience, former home of Music City.  Where all the merchandise is now stacked against the walls used to be rows and rows of album covers, floor to ceiling.  You’d walk in the store and immediately be dazzled by the visual display.  On the far right, employees would take turns sitting to keep an eye out for shoplifters.

A good question at this point would be “What is the above shot doing in a posting about records stores?”  The bones of City Convenience are what attracts me, not the current contents of the space.  That store, at 543 Commonwealth Avenue in Kenmore Square was once Music City, and I worked there during my first year at Emerson, my sophomore year in college.

Click on the image.  Magnify it.  I see myself almost 35 years ago working there.  See the sunlight streaming in? That’s the main entrance.  The vantage point I took the shot was from where the cash register used to be (pre scanner – I actually had to punch the prices).  The stuff in the store is colorful now – it was just as colorful back then, filled with vinyl albums not cans of shaving cream and bags of Reeses Pieces.

Life at Emerson College was in technicolor compared with the monochromatic world (for me) Connecticut College, and one huge difference is I was able to be part of and even start working in places that I enjoyed.  Places in

The corner store in Kenmore Square in Boston where Music City used to be.

the city proper (which made sense, because Emerson advertised that all of Boston was its “campus”).  At Emerson I took full advantage of the city (more so than the college itself, I’d say.  And the job at Music City, working nights during the week, just a few minute walk from Fensgate, was pretty tremendous.    I felt alive in a world I never felt existed in New London, CT.

It was at this store that I wasn’t just a shopper; I was an employee (and a shopper, of course.  Part of my pay check kept me in new records).  It probably helped getting the job that I had worked the summer going into my freshman year at Sam Goody in Ardmore selling stereos, so I was somewhat familiar with the retail record business.  At Music City I worked with folks older than me (how twerpy I must have been to them?)  Tony, one of the cashiers, had actually been to Woodstock (I learned that when once we were all talking about the famous festival, and I proudly stated that I saw the movie); Milo (who worked there briefly) also wrote for the Boston Phoenix; Barb Kitson, who always wore tight outfits befitting the lead singer in a band (outside the store she was the lead singer of Thrills, a Boston punk band who played at the Rat across the street).  During down times we’d talk of music, and I learned so much.  My ears started opening up more and more working there.  Barb would challenge me to listen to more aggressive music, more punk.  It was 1978 and 1979.  I started listening to punk rock and new wave, started going to shows.  My life felt continually saved by rock and roll.

Record stores in NYC.

In my adult life, shopping in record stores has always been a form of therapy for me. Gail and I moved to the Village in 1985, and it was just around the time the first NYC Tower Records opened at 4th and Broadway.  Up until that point, the record stores I frequented were small stores, mom-and-pop varieties, where I would slowly wander through the aisles (though I remember the record department of the Harvard Coop as being pretty massive, with new releases set up as columns, 200, maybe 300 albums tall.  The Coop had a tremendous selection of new records; it was always worth a trip to Harvard Square to go record shopping there). Tower Records was a different beast entirely.

Gail took this shot of Tower Records in San Fran (with the always dramatic Coit Tower in the distance) on a solo trip – one of her many – to the west coast in the late 80s.

Tower Records in the Village, then on the Upper West Side (near Lincoln Center), was a department store full of records.  Multiple floors.  Entire separate departments for Jazz, for Country and Folk, for Classical, for Soundtracks.  Walking into Tower Records not just the first time, but time after time felt as if I were on top of the world.  I am waxing on, I realize, but I felt like Holly Golightly did about Tiffany’s, that nothing bad in the world could ever happen there.  The selection was fucking incredible.  It started out just with vinyl, but as the eighties progressed the cds started taking up more and more floor space until it was nothing but cds (cassettes were for sale on the basement level for a while).  I knew rock, but they had everything.  Entire catalogs of bands, not just the few popular lps.  I could buy anything and everything.  For years, the Christmas present and birthday present Gail would get me would be records/cds and gift cards to Tower.  I had a Tower credit card, in which I would earn points to buy even more music.  If I had time to kill, there was no better place than Tower.  I didn’t need a bar, I didn’t need drugs, I could just walk the floors and let my fingers search the bins.  In these early days I could buy an album for six or seven bucks, or a cd for twice that.  I started saving to buy albums I truly wanted on cd, and records I was taking a chance on on lp.  I was balancing between two worlds.  I loved the old world and vinyl, but cds sounded so real and brilliant.  And they never scratched.  The future was the cd, but indie bands could only release vinyl.  Both of my collections were growing simultaneously.

I started working at John Jay College in winter 1991, and shortly thereafter a Tower opened up in Lincoln Center, about a ten minute walk away.  Though my world – being a dad, supporting a family –  wasn’t as carefree as it was living in the village, playing in bands, I could take a vacation from the stresses of life and lose myself among all the cds for sale (by this time the changeover was pretty much complete and cds reigned supreme).  I’d hit Tower at least once a week, many times not buying anything, but flipping through the cds, fantasizing about my eventual purchases.  Then at some point they (whoever “they” is) instituted listening stations, where customers could listen to chosen albums via headphones in stations throughout the store.  Now I could spend longer and longer in the store, and get turned on to music I never might have taken a chance on.  And like anyone who buys a lot of music, I purchased some amazing records, and some that clearly disappointed.  But each trip there was going to be something new to discover, something newly released (or rereleased).

Walking in the present but thinking of the past (part 1).  WHERE IS THE RECORD STORE???   I look at this shot, and all I see is Tower Records that anchored this corner of 66th Str. and Broadway in NYC (as far as I’m concerned). Taken fall 2012. 

Walking in the present but thinking of the past (part 2).  WHERE IS THE RECORD STORE???? 4th St. and Broadway in the Village was the former site of Tower Records. Taken fall 2012.

And as the century came to a close, another big record store launched in NYC: Virgin Music.  First in Times Square, then Union Square.  Massive.  Bigger even than Tower.  More listening stations.  The one I spent a lot of time in was in Times Square (near Pop Photo, so I could head over there for a quick shot of therapy if I needed it).  They even had a book department and a movie theater on one of their levels!  They didn’t even have front doors – you could walk right in from the sidewalks of Times Square.

Sounds on St. marks Place was a fixture in my life while living on 10th St. in the 1980s. Walking by it in the fall 2012 – the facade is still there, but it’s closed. As in permanently. I bet it’s gone by now.

Living on E. 10th Street in the mid to late 80s, I was a frequent shopper at Sounds.  Sounds filled the empty space left by Nuggets eight or so years earlier.  Where Nuggets was in a basement, Sounds occupied a second floor.  You had to walk up the outdoor stairs to get in (as you can see by the above shot).  All the new indie music was there in the racks, on the walls, and playing out the speakers.  Vinyl.  I’d by new there, and used, and sell some stuff as well.  A short walk from our apartment.  There were other small stores around, but I had a loyalty to Sounds, and even though I  no longer frequented it, it was a fixture for many years after Gail and I moved away from the neighborhood to raise our family in Teaneck. Sounds opened a branch right next door that sold just cds, and as my collection was growing in cds, that’s where I would shop went visiting.  The cd store closed years ago – the original store started selling both cds and vinyl.  And as of my visit this past fall, all that’s left is the facade and all the remnants of glory days past in the windows.

Fifteen years ago, I would never have imagined a time when record stores would disappear.  And, largely, they have.  A few remain, which I enjoy visiting, but the time in my life in which I would literally spend hours in record stores is a memory.  A solid-gold memory, but a memory just the same.  The world has changed, and our music buying habits have changed.  The way we listen to music has changed.  In some ways, no, in many ways it is for the better.  As I’m crafting this I’m listening to Ennio Morricone’s Ultimo – L’Ollchio del Falco on Spotify, one of hundreds of Morricone albums I can now stream online – then to my stereo – through my laptop.  I own about half a dozen Morricone albums, but I now have access to an entire world that would take me over a year to listen to! I don’t need to buy anything.  As long as I’m online I can play music.  I still buy cds – largely through Amazon.com, but how much longer will that last.  Our cds and lps still surround us (though much of our lps are behind doors of the big cabinet in the living room or stacked in the basement), but will they all be needed in the future when all of music is available either via the cloud or computer/pad/phone?  I have realized that places and spaces necessarily change, and I know that other aspects of the life we have taken for granted change as well.  But, damn, I truly miss record stores and the worlds that they represented.

It looks like a great big house, especially after Sorrento Road, and it was. Except this house is actually two. It’s a twin. 218 Upland Road is what you see here – it was connected to the house next door where the Goldmans lived. My bedroom was on the third floor – you can see my window below the roof line overlooking the driveway we shared with the Krasnoffs.

We moved into this house at 218 Upland Rd. in Merion a few weeks before Robin was born in June 1965.   Though there were many houses (34; I counted) crammed into the short block (which didn’t seem so short nor so crammed back then), it felt like a different world.  Lots of trees lined the block (and still do).  Even though the front yards were tiny, every house had one so there was a sense of deep green all around.   218 had a big covered porch, which a few years later Pop Pop Henry would convert to an enclosed den (the room you now see in the front of the house).

The Krasnoffs house right next door. We shared the driveway.

Two houses would share a long driveway, and these driveways would become our playgrounds.  But unfortunately we lived next door to the Krasnoffs, a couple who seemed to be even older than our grandparents.  Mr. and Mrs. Krassnoff had a

The driveway we shared with the Krasnoffs. Our garage, on the right, never had a door and still doesn’t.

Lincoln Continental and a chauffer! How did that happen on Upland Road?  He would sit in the car during the day in the front of the driveway by the Krassnoff’s front door waiting for them to appear.  And their Continental had those back doors that hinged toward the back, so the doors all opened like the Continental on the opening credits of “Entourage.”  It was kind of frustrating as a kid, so I remember using the Markowitz’s driveway across the street more than ours as a place to play.

The distinct quality of these twin homes is that you shared a wall with your neighbors.  Your house was actually half a house.  The houses on Upland Road were kind of narrow in comparison to freestanding homes, but were complete in their verticalness.  218 had a basement and three floors, and I had the finished attic all to myself.  My first night up there was on moving day.  I was five, soon to be six, and not only did I have my own room, but my own floor.  There was a staircase the curved (to accomodate the narrowness of the house). You walked up the stairs and faced a window.  You turned the corner and on your right was a full bathroom with a tub; on the left was a banister overlooking the stairs you just walked up.  Continuing down the hall there was a storage closet on your right next to the bathroom and then directly in front of you a door.  And in through that door my bedroom.

The first night I was terrified.  On Sorrento Road we lived in a cozy row home in which the three bedrooms were all right next to another.  If I needed something, or woke up in night, I just had to barely whisper “mommy” and she would be there.  On Upland Road, there was no way.  I could be attacked by monsters and no would know.  Mine wasn’t just a separate room, and it wasn’t just down the hall; my room was up and away from everyone else’s on a whole separate floor.  And there was a door at the landing and a door in front of my room.  I was very excited for my new room during the day, but at night – at that first night especially – there was much to be afraid of.  There was so much separation, how could I possibly survive the night?  No body would no about me up there, all alone and terrified in my big-boy independence and my big-boy room.

But I would survive that night, and the night after and the night after.  I would realize that having not just my room, but my room on a separate floor was really cool.  I could make things my own.  No one really ventured up unless they had to; no one could just walk by my bedroom, they would have to head up a whole flight of stairs to visit me.  Early on I was in charge of keeping my room clean, and in charge of the bathroom.  And I did keep them all neat.  As I got older and started buying records, the records would all be organized (according to when I acquired them).  First only Beatle albums, starting when I turned seven.  But from there things ventured widely and wildly as I became a fifth and sixth grader: Carole King’s Tapestry.  James Taylor’s Mud Slide Slim.  The Doors L.A. Woman.  As I got older and started reading magazines, I would keep them all in piles, almost as a librarian would, in their chronological dates.  First Mad Magazine (or which my entire collection is still with me), then Hot Rod, Car Craft, National Lampoon (as a seventh grader).  Rolling Stone when it was a tabloid-like  newspaper (I threw them all away save for one; I wish I still had them), Zap comics (and boy I wish I still had those).  I had a big desk that Pop Pop Henry built for me – actually a a big formica top with two dressers on either side to house my toys/games.  And my bed was to the left as you walked in the door, and Pop Pop built a loft area on top where I housed the “B.Lazaroff Motor Speedway (Under Construction).”  Of course, as all slot car or model train enthusiasts would understand, it was always under construction.  By the time we moved out of Upland Road when I as 15, it was still in chronic disrepair, and my interest in that model car world would not be reignited.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Just bought a house! Mom, Dale and I on Upland Road in spring 1965.

There are distinct memories of moving day to Upland Road in Merion (though not of posing for the picture to the left) beyond the initial night terrors of realizing I would be sleeping a floor away from the rest of my family.  Mom Mom Ruth was with us that day to aid in the transition, and she walked Dale and I the few blocks to the stores on City Line (the same City Line that was a few blocks away from our house on Sorrento Road, but in that course we were walking a few blocks west toward the “city line” that separated city and suburb; now we were walking a few blocks east, from the suburbs, to the same city line).  Those few blocks to City Line would be a defining walk for most of our childhood.

It was great to be in walking distance of… so much.  We would quickly learn that our street had wonderous treasures of its own (lots of houses on the block meant lots of

Like so much else throughout America, once beloved landmarks have become Starbucks. In this case, this storefront on the corner of Old Lancaster Road and City Line was once my beloved Dake’s Drugs (Dake’s Pharmacy – a true pharmacy – is now across the street). But the years disappear when I gaze at this image.

neighbors whom we would get to know), but the best part was that City Line existed just two blocks away.  There we would discover Dake’s Drugs, which sold a tremendous assortment of candy (in my memory of it), and a tremendous assortment of comic books and magazines (in my memory of it).  It was in Dake’s that I first purchased Mad magazine, then a few years later car magazines and Rolling Stone which would completely pique my interest then my “career” goals.

And just a few storefronts down would be Ben Franklin 5&10, which had everything.  A few key purchases I remember: buying my dad a shoe horn set with horse heads as handles (huh?), and a purchase I’ll always remember, in late spring 1970 standing in front of their record rack (very limited, but they sold albums), and feeling torn between

The sign over the storefront in the image reads “Saint Joseph University.” The sign over the storefront in my memory will always read “Ben Franklin 5 & 10.”

the brand new Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers (the working zipper) and the Doors L.A. Woman.  I’d pick up one.  Stare at the cover.  Put it back.  Then pick up the other.  Stare at the cover.  Put it back.  Which one should I get (I only had money for one).  The winner: The Doors.  I don’t remember how I got there, but I do know that record would greatly impact me because Jim Morrison would die a few weeks later, and my fascination with him and the band would keep growing and growing (and the woman I would marry would have her own Doors story: as a nine-year-old her folks took her and Nancy to seem live at the Filmore East in NYC… but that’s another story).

Finally at the end of this long block of City Line would be our car wash.  The pronoun “our” is deceiving: we were much to young to drive, and we spent not a dime in there.  But it would be yet another City Line destination.  The car wash was the type in which you would get out of your car at the entrance.  There was a walkway with huge windows.

This shot looks like nothing. A four lane major road with a car zooming by and a Wendy’s in the background. Where the Wendy’s is now (along with the Pep Boys nearby – out of the shot) is where the car wash used to be. Maybe the former owners incurred such extraordinary orange-ade bills they were forced to sell?

The idea was you walked along the walkway keeping pace with your car while it was being scrubbed, brushed, waxed, and rinsed by all the brushes, rollers, and sprayers along the automatic car-wash line.  As kids we would walk the walk, watching other people’s cars geting cleaned, but most importantly we would hang out there because they had an orange-ade dispenser for customer use that would dispense ice-cold orange-ade.  Free.  FREE!!!  Dale and I both remember the joy of the car wash and the unabashed drinking that went on there (we never remember getting kicked out either).  What joy!!  Everyone’s childhood is different, and I know mine has its own unique stamp when one of my most pleasurable memories is of walking a few blocks from home after school to a nearby car wash to watch the cars and drink orange-ade. Not quite unique: Dale shares it with me.

Wait a second… that hill used to be monstrously big! This is the hill by Saint Joseph’s University, right across City Line from the car wash. After every snowstorm we would head here to sled down the hill.

On Upland Road we bordered many different worlds.  Our immediate neighborhood was crammed with homes and stores, adjacent to it was a seminary with tremendous open space that I remember riding my bike throughout (but getting kicked out by security guards).  And the Barnes Foundation, with its opulent grounds, was available by cutting through the Latches Lane apartments. I remember playing “Mannix,” (popular show in the late 60s of a private eye) with Freddie and Lee in the gardens of the Barnes before getting kicked out by security guards. All other kinds of huge private old mansions sat on big pieces of properties on North Latches Lane, nearby Upland Road, with our 34 homes (remember, I counted) on top of each other on one tight block.

Another world nearby was Saint Joseph’s University, which has come to dominate City Line.  I imagine some residents of Upland Road now work in or for the college.  Maybe students even live in some of the homes of Upland, Edgehill, or Stoneway Lane (all three are parallel, with homes on Stoneway backing onto the stores on City Line – you can see them behind the Wendy’s in the earlier shot). Growing up, I used to joke that I’d love to go to St. Joe’s – I wouldn’t have to move and I could even come home for lunch (and mom, I must say, loved that idea).  I think of that now as I commute 31 miles to my college, over multiple bridges, and stuck in traffic.  But Gail has that walk-to-school commute I fantasized as a young boy.

Back to St. Joe’s.  And the picture.  When significant snow would fall, I remember falling into action.  First I’d shovel our walkway, then I’d go house to house looking for shoveling work.  The houses were so close together that the work wasn’t that arduous. Each house had a limited sidewalk.  So I could make some money, then head down to St. Joe’s to sled with the other neighborhood kids.  We’d cross City Line to the school and its beckoning hill.  And the hill seemed huge.  We’d careen down the hill – no trees to hit – and it would level off where we come to a stop, then pick up and head back up the hill.  It was so big back then, and today it looks so puny.  And the fall-off of the hill has been shortened.  It now ends in a parking lot.  With cars.  I can’t see kids there sledding in the winter, but kids find their own joy.  St. Joe’s existed for us as active sledders in the late 60s and early 70s, maybe there are different destinations for kids today?

There are many places in my life I did not want to leave.  Leaving Upland Road at age 15 I felt a profound sense of loss.  Looking back, it wasn’t just the house and neighborhood I was leaving, I was more importantly leaving behind a sense of the world having permanence.  By the time I was15, three of my grandparents had died, and my parents had split up.  I didn’t want to leave Upland Road, but what I really wished for was for things not to change – for everyone to stay alive and to stay together. Leaving Upland Road challenged me to grow, to begin to learn to accept change.  And I would slowly learn that one didn’t have to give up what one loved and cared for in that change.  And one could discover new people and places to love and care for in the future –  though uncertain and unknown from the vantage point of the present – while still holding the people and places of the past as vital.

2609 Sorrento Road in West Philadelphia, where Dale and I were born (well, brought home from the hospital). We lived there from 1959 until spring of 1965.

“The past is never dead.  It’s not even the past.” – William Faulkner from Requiem for a Nun (1950).

Sorrento Road is part of a huge semicircle.  Dale and I park up on Lenape Road – up from Sorrento but part of the semicircle – because I want to walk to our old house

If we were walking from our house on Sorrento Rd. and up Lenape, this is the view (Conshohoken Ave. is the next insection). You can see our Honda Civic – we just left the car when this picture was taken.

from a certain vantage point.  I remember Lenape:  And on this beautiful early fall day the homes here are very well-maintained: distinguished-looking row homes and single family homes, close together.  It is a few weeks shy of the election, so there are lots of “Obama / Biden” signs posted on small front lawns or taped to casement windows.  I remember walking up this block

On the other side of Lenape, looking down toward Sorrento Rd.

many times in my childhood days, or maybe being strolled in a stroller.

Maybe because the sidewalk never ended – Sorrento just “became” Lenape as the semicircle bent – I possibly walked on my own as well.  I had some walking adventures living here when I was just a toddler.

Because of the Bala Golf Course behind Sorrento Road and the surrounding streets and avenues, there are no intersecting roads.  As a three-year-old I wandered away from dad one day while he was “watching” me and Dale in the backyard.  I was gone a long time, walking what seemed like forever at the time. From Sorrento Road I took a right onto Conshohoken Avenue and then a left onto Belmont Avenue.  And I was able to keep walking, past the Inglis House for “the incurables” (now home for the “physically disabled.”) Past the Hayes Manor Retirement Home.  All because there were no intersecting streets to cross, just a sidewalk that seemed to stretch on and on.  I may have been three, but I knew I shouldn’t cross any streets.  I didn’t and I kept walking. Eventually I got scared, and somehow found my way into an apartment complex (probably Hayes Manor) where there was a nice lady (who gave me some cookies and probably called the cops).  The next thing I remember is being in the back of a police car with mom who was crying and hugging me.  She would retell the story throughout the years, and with say my disappearance, even if only for a few hours, was one of the most agonizing times of her life.   In our recent visit, Dale and I reconstruct the same walk I undertook as a three-year-old, and it was indeed far, and there were still no streets to cross. We were very impressed.  And disturbed.

Sorrento Road and its long sidewalk, stretches out. Our house would be toward the back of the row homes. October 2012.

Dale and I climbed the front steps of 2609 and took a chance: we knocked on the door. No one was home. We lingered for a few minutes on the front porch and took pictures.

Here’s dad standing in the same spot – in 1959. How similar it all looks. Looks like mom (I’m assuming she’s the photographer) cut off a bit of his right side (Maybe to include the telephone pole?)  But that pole (or a future generation of it) is there in the 2012 shot.

Standing on the front porch, looking up toward Conshohoken Avenue circa 2012.

The same spot, circa 1959. I’m assuming that’s dad’s black VW bug parked in front.

Looking at the above photos (and even more convincing: being there) so much of this block, of this neighborhood, seems impervious to change almost half-a-century later.  When I was young, my whole world was in this neighborhood, and the others nearby where my parents would take me and Dale (grandparents’ houses; Bala Cynwyd shopping center just over City Line, about three blocks away; and of course Atlantic City in the summer).  Dale and I had our friends, Richie (a few years younger) and Robin (Dale’s age)  Markowitz just two doors down, and in 1965 when we moved to Upland Rd., the Markowitz’s followed suit, left Sorrento Rd. and bought the house right across the street from us.

This house on Sorrento Rd. must have felt a continuation of sorts for my folks.  They were both raised in row homes, and they began their new family in a row home.  They were so close to the worlds that they knew: when they moved in, both of their homes in which they grew up were less than a mile away from here and for mom, the site of her grandparents home in Bala was only about four or five blocks away.  They must have still felt in the middle of it all.

Places imprint so strongly.  You were only five years old, yet you remember these streets and the way the houses look, the way that sunlight reflects off of surrounding surfaces.  Something about that Philly reflective sunlight that brings you right back.  You think of long days that seemed to stretch on and on.  Visits to parks, to people’s houses, to stores.  Yes, you remember those ghostly visits, but you also remember smells.  Not just the expected Philly smells of cheesteaks and soft pretzels, but your own family smells.  Mom Mom’s kitchen.  The pizza truck that parked in front of Har Zion Hebrew school in Wynnefield (slices were 25 cents).  And you remember the smell of walking into Lord & Taylor’s.

There was something about the smell of the vestibule of Lord & Taylor’s at the Bala Cynwyd Shopping Center that sticks with me to this day.  There was black rubber matting on the floor, and the smell that emanated I still identify with so strongly.  Mom was lucky enough to have an upscale department store so close to our home, we probably went there often.  I do remember a kind of puppet/variety show that they held there, maybe to placate the little terrors while their moms shopped.  But that smell still takes hold (though in our visit, the vestibule was under construction.  There were smells, but not MY smell).

Just a short walk from Sorrento Road to the Bala Cynwyd Shopping Center. Of course all the stores have been replaced (save Lord & Taylors). Where the Olive Garden now stands used to be Horn & Hardharts. I loved that place, and considered it a great treat to eat there. My favorite meal: Pancacks and potato chips. Though the neighborhood around Sorrento Road hasn’t much changed, City Line has.