They stand like sentinels, bold haunting, angled and jutting up from sidewalks, stroking the skyline with horizontal interruptions.. They heave their square frames and wrap themselves around street corners. They pockmark this city of seven hills, cascading down and rolling –like flotsam from some distant immigrant sea onto Route 290. They sit above fish and chips stores, aside fire houses, across from haggard ball fields, near churches and parking lots, adjacent to stores, hair salons and butcher shops, and nestled within their shadowy side-walked streets are families and things.
One, as the story goes, somersaulted down Vernon Hill fell across the Blackstone River and its roof ended up half way across Fitton Field. Close to the thirty yard line.
Against the skyline, the roof tops are knitted together, stitched like a grandfather wool sock. Apex points shutter along the run. From a quick glance along 290, they amble and bump like some grand child’s game. They rumble to the heavy gage steel rods that support a hundred rail line cars.
Plot to plot, roof to roof and an occasional surprise. Windows, porches, trees shade the view. Rising streets, cartways and the usual red taillights worming along compressed , compacted roadways forcing cars to wedge themselves against some imaginary demarcation point.
They box themselves into corners, and step backward into wedges of ground that can barely support a pup tent. They seem to cling tenaciously to inclines and defy the compass points. North or south they hunker down. They give cover to auto body shops, used car sales floors, old, smothered and tattered “Sale” flags with their red and white colors fading into a muted pink. They collect and coddle beauty salons, lock repair shops and pizza parlors on the first floor, residences above.
They open their doors to tap rooms and on Park Avenue, they have more taps than Aliquippa, PA per linear feet. Sort of an Edwardian thing..
They are hoisted around squares, circles, corners, and odd blunt- shaped dead ends. Their stoic angular shapes often are hidden . There is an occasional house kicked and settled at the rear and between two houses.
You have to stand at the perfect angle to see them. Necks and heads bobbing for a look- like standing before MoMA ‘s Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie”. Right angles, let’s go! We are after all pedestrians at heart.
These are given a street address such as of ½ like 83 ½ Florence street. Tall buildings nestled aside each other with little room for breathing suck in strange bedfellows. Compressing air flows is ok when you r flying a jet, but in Worcester, when you compress air, the result is chaotic.! On a windy day with clothes lines whirling the vortex’s are startling and underwear and towels fly through the air .
Welcome to the world of wood, windows and three deckers
Some sit gracious, southern plantation style on warm sunny evenings expecting a horse drawn buggy whipping its way to the front door. They sit at street level, on a small grades just above the curb top. Often they are heaved up and onto embankments that bring their building ‘s front to a level of graciousness. Some have concrete front steps that require heavy railing from the top landing to the cart way. In an odd, healthy way, all these shenanigans says: welcome.
The hallways have a smudged old wood smell, dark wood that seems to absorb all lamp light. The horsehair plaster walls are cracking, fissures run along imaginary fault lines and they bear the wrath of countless nails and screws which were intended to hold a picture or a like. Don’t they know that horsehair plaster is for comfort and practicality and not culture?
They support front porches, boxy and shadowy. Two doors , the left to the second and third floors; the right to the first floor. Ownership had its structure. Hard wooden planks nailed together to introduce. It’s a Worcester introduction, don’t you know. I guess a heavy wind and foresight shook the bedrooms to the rear.
If a tree grows in Brooklyn , will it grow in Worcester? I’m not sure. Now my father wasn’t a frail, boozing Bartender, but does that matter? Trees, shrubbery, bushes the entire genus of green thing s that grow under the watch and command of humans are suspect in Worcester.
This is not a case of the Beaver street wind that roils the purple
Blackstone river seeking unknown things ( although a case could be made and will be in this tirade I’m about to unleash, what
Streets follow a path, not a plan.
And there was no master plan for the three deckers. None.
And away from the street, the hum and the constant rhythmical waves of an old industrial city on the waning side of change.
They hold court over all that passes before, beneath and below. They often swagger amongst themselves, maybe when a new window treatment is applied.
They obscure the Byzantine alleys of short sighted planners, long, long ago sweltering at the distaste of the City’s powerful elite.
They slap away rain, screen hold rainwater, small compact garages. Aged street trees that have long ago gasped the finale. They have edges, curves, drab colors and an occasional burst of firecracker. They have seen a multitude of generations, lst floors, second floors and on those horrendous, steamy late August nights a third floor that has collected and hold tightly the soggy hot air.
Welcome to Worcester. Well, my Worcester as I remember and if memory fails, I’ll make it up.
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