Going Back, Part Nine: Green Street

We came toward the close of our year at Presidential Court and had decided we weren’t going to stay. The apartment was nice, but there was no real community and living across from the police station and very near the fire station was less than restful.

At that time, living downtown still made sense since we were both working there, and most of the things we did were there. But there were very few places to live in or near downtown in 1984. Armory Square was still mostly a hopeful concept – that block of shops between Walton and Jefferson was still just a rubble-strewn All-Right parking lot. There were a few scattered shops– Eureka Crafts had just opened, and there was I’ve Been Framed by Sandy Clark, a bakery, some odds and ends. The hip new restaurant Pastabilities was still over in the Sedgwick, Andrews & Kennedy building (later called City Hall Annex). The Labor Temple building on Franklin was under redevelopment, providing the first upscale apartments in the neighborhood, and they looked pretty good to us, so we signed on to be pioneers in the packing district.

Unfortunately, as our September 1 moving day approached, the building was not going to be ready for occupancy, so we had to scramble for another place to live. We couldn’t extend for any time at Presidential Court, or even temporarily move elsewhere in the complex. We pored over the classifieds for apartments (that’s how it was done in those days) and found a place that looked pretty good over on Green Street. The owner, Joan Farrenkopf, lived just down the street and had been instrumental in renovating a number of properties in the neighborhood. The apartment she showed us was in a recently renovated Edwardian called the Driscoll House, which had been severely burned just two years before. The space was great, and the neighborhood was fine. It was a little bit out of the noise and traffic of downtown, but our jobs were just a quick bus ride away, or a short drive, and not even that long a walk. The only problem was that it wouldn’t be ready until October 1. We had to find somewhere to live for a month.

Thankfully, our very generous friend Mark offered to let us stay in his two-bedroom apartment in Liverpool for that month. Everything we didn’t absolutely need went into the U-Haul self-storage across from the bus station, and we had our first taste of suburban apartment complex life ever. We didn’t care for it. But we did learn that, as adults, we could just have ice cream any time we wanted, and walks across the street to Heid’s new ice cream parlor became a regular feature of that month.

The apartment we moved into was my favorite place we ever lived before getting our own house. Counting dorms, this would be the eighth or ninth place we’d lived in Syracuse inside of six years.

We entered on the second floor (up a grand staircase on those rare times we came in the front door), through our front door into a small foyer and pantry, then opening into a pretty, light kitchen. Beyond the kitchen were the stairs and a closet, and then a long living room with windows to the east and south. The heat was all electric and we relied on fans in the summer, but I don’t remember ever being unbearably uncomfortable.

Upstairs, on one end of the hall was a second bedroom that we filled with boxes of stuff, a filing cabinet, and a spare mattress for guests. On the other end, there was a small bathroom tucked in under the slanted roof – it was hard not to hit your head in the shower, and it was tricky to keep the curtain from sliding down the bent shower curtain rod. From the hall, there was a step up to our bedroom, higher than all the rest of that floor. It was a sweet, magical little bedroom, cozy, with just enough room for a double bed and a bit of furniture, with a little square window down near the floor and a skylight in the somewhat complicated ceiling. It was a lovely bedroom, my favorite we ever had, even if we did have a bit of a bat problem. Of course, adding to the magic was the fact that we were in our 20s, so beautiful and so in love. What a gift that was.

Late at night we could always hear our neighbors putting their dishes away in their kitchen below us; what they could hear, I am sure, was not dishes being put away. (They were a nice couple but never did we click socially – he was an associate professor of math at SU, and I remember that his attitude toward me changed considerably a couple of years in when he learned that I had been accepted into Maxwell. I have no time for people who judge based on that kind of status – I was the same person I’d been before being accepted into a challenging, top program, but suddenly he was more interested in talking to me.)

This lovely little apartment became the base for our lovely young married life for five years. Everything happened there: every bit of growth, of pain, of challenge, of joy – it all happened in that light apartment with its view of our elderly neighbor Cosmo’s grapevines and the traffic on Lodi Street, with its scent of lilacs in the spring and gingko all summer long.

It was there that I delved into CDs and classical music, there that we got all dressed up and perfumed to go out to the Syracuse Symphony (where we were among the youngest season ticket holders, always dragging down the average age) or to go out to some club or other trying to capture that dance floor magic.

It was also there that I learned my father had died, rather unexpectedly after a month in the hospital, and tried without success to sort through my feelings about that.

It was there that we kept a fun and wildly unreliable car, a Renault Fuego we bought for very little (but also too much, as it turned out) from Lee’s boss – and there that I learned to change out an alternator in my sleep, to wire up an ammeter, to not trust even good jack stands on hot pavement. It was also there that I learned that a plastic coffee cup can ride on a bumper all the way to the auto parts store, miraculously undisturbed.

It was there that we discovered our love of the outdoors, of the wilderness of upstate New York, of all the magical places there were within two hours (if we didn’t break down) of our home. It was there we first started wrangling a canoe around – a beat-up Old Town we’d traded a dorm fridge for, and quickly replaced with a $1000 beauty. Then, we had to figure out precisely how to angle our new 17′ Sawyer wilderness tripper through the back door, over a railing, and into the basement storage area. (That boat never lived outdoors until we moved to Phoenixville.)

What else? Farmers’ markets and hikes, old movies at the Syracuse Cinephile Society, lazy Sundays reading comic books, skating at Sunnycrest rink. Grinding fresh roasted coffee from Smith Restaurant Supply. Getting very into keeping up my kitchen knives, also from Smith. Trips to the Peter’s grocery store on Butternut –where several of the checkout girls shared a vest with the name “Antoniette.” Walking, driving, taking the bus downtown to shop and hit up the Dream Days comic book shop. Life in our 20s was idyllic in many ways – and yet so unsettling and uncertain.

It was there that I realized that the coming computer revolution didn’t bode well for typesetting as a career, and that I would need to make a plan for the future. That became a decision between getting more sophisticated in printing – meaning a move to Rochester for school, and a likely move to where the jobs were in the Midwest, which held no appeal – or going into public service, which had the added attraction of being a course of study I could pursue without changing cities. Some sense of civic duty had always been in me, and in fact drove my initial goal of being a newspaper reporter, and my extensive courses in political science and public affairs as an undergrad reinforced the idea that I could be one of the people who did things, instead of just writing about those people. That the best school in the country for that pursuit was right there in Syracuse certainly sealed the decision.

Although we were both working very busy jobs, we had a lot of time together, discovering each other – because whoever we were when we met at (almost) 18 wasn’t who we were when we got married at 23, and now, sober and growing, we were both becoming different still. The test of any relationship is that ability to grow, each as individuals, and yet keep coming back together. Even in those early years, there were strains, there was stretching. There were things I could have handled so much better if only I’d known then what I know now. But I was always grateful that we took our time before having children – we were married more than nine years before the first – and I think we were better parents because we’d already been through so much together and had a strong sense of how to support each other.

But that’s how it works – we’re each on our own path, and we just have to make sure those paths keep intertwining. First, our sobriety paths were completely different, and involved regretfully little communication about what we were going through. Then, we made the joint decision that I should go back to school, a short-term sacrifice for a very long-term gain – but a sacrifice of time and attention that was very challenging and created tensions we had to work through.

The grad school years happened in that apartment – first, an absolutely grueling first year as I worked from 6 am to 2 pm, then rode my Honda scooter up to campus for afternoon and Saturday classes. In the evenings, a flood of homework. The second year (of what was really designed as a single-year program, but when do I ever do things the standard way?) I was granted a graduate assistantship, which allowed me to leave my job and dedicate myself to study full-time, for the first time. That was amazing. I had an incredible year, but it was no less intense, as I was able to, and needed to, completely immerse myself in the experience – and was again a bit on my own path as a result. And that – for good or for bad – would lead to an even more solitary path before we would really come back together.

There wasn’t a moment I didn’t love living in that apartment, even though those were some of the most tumultuous years of our lives – years of figuring out who we were, and who we wanted to be, and how to be that together. And it was the first place I’d lived where I had never had a drunken moment, which meant a lot to me. Any mistakes I made, any regrets I had about things done or said in that home were all done sober. That was a huge accomplishment.

It came to an end, as things must, when I finished grad school and it was time to move on to the next phase. The problem was, we needed time to figure that next phase out, and in that time, we would need to change our living arrangements, which meant moving out of that lovely apartment after five years and into two separate places in two separate cities. More on that next time.

When we went back to visit in May, we drove through the old Green Street neighborhood. As with much of Syracuse, we found a lot had changed, and a lot had not. This is a neighborhood that has long gone through ups and downs. When we lived there, the neighborhood was safe-ish but you still kept an eye out while walking around. Other times we’ve visited, it seemed like things were falling more into disrepair, but on this visit the neighborhood seemed well-tended again. It was also busy, so we didn’t stop and get out of the car for any current pictures – it didn’t seem necessary. The building’s paint scheme has changed but is still lovely and well-kept.

And I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that Joan Farrenkopf, who was our best landlord ever, still owns this and several other Green Street properties! These were all familiar to us back then.

So how did it feel to go back there? Quite good. I have nothing but love for that place, for the years we spent there, and for the beautiful, loving young kids that we were. It was just the most magical time, and any time we get to even quickly drive by, I feel it all again. All of it. It’s enormous. It’s beautiful.