Larger rooms, smaller perspective

By Kevin Lee

The years unfurl from east to west in our town. The bay on one side, Mobile expanded like its nation, chasing the setting sun.

So as you move through the neighborhoods, time flows past in the architecture and historic city limits. Cross Broad Street and the War of 1812 has ended. The cotton gin has worked its magic and Mobile is reaping the rewards. Past Lafayette Street and the Old South has come to ruinous end. Over Houston Street and Reconstruction’s shadow has lifted and the Gilded Age is in bloom.

When you get close to Murphy High School, World War I is done and the Jazz Age is rising to a fever. By the time you get to Florida Street, the first part of the Great Depression is underway.

It’s the spirits of those times, the ghosts walking that Midtown area that haunt me most. Everywhere I go there, I can see my foundation and how the framework of who I am rests in those brick bungalows and modest homes.

The era that laid that mortar is narrated by the voices of now-gone grandparents, their brothers and sisters and a few of their own parents. I hear their stories of the poverty in those years.

I hear a grandfather tell of how lucky he was to have lived on a Georgia farm, of the access they had to resources, to plants and game that eluded the newly poor masses in the urban soup kitchens and relief lines. I hear him talk about the frequent travelers ambling down dusty rural roads, who knocked on doors with hat in hand, looking for work, anything in exchange for food.

I recall stories of another grandfather’s childhood on a tenant farm in the sandy and scathing Alabama wiregrass. They were so poor, the Depression couldn’t knock them back as far as others. Lucky, huh?

A grandmother’s father died of pneumonia in the midst of the economic trauma. Her widowed mother managed to open a small restaurant on Birmingham’s West Side and put all four kids to work inside. They struggled through but emerged intact.

Their stories of those times and years, of what they endured, stayed with me. So did their ways. “Don’t throw that out just yet” was common. They weren’t given to luxury and often found value in what we overlooked.

When I recently heard the houses in the Murphy District called “starter homes,” I was curious. My grandparents lived in houses that size for the last 35 years I knew them. So did their siblings. What were they “starting?” Lower insurance premiums? Blood pressure meds?

They raised families in houses like that. They retired in houses like that. They didn’t care about the size of their homes as much as their maintenance and cleanliness. Roof? Check. Clothes? Check? Food? Check. Job? Check. Everything else was gravy.

That mindset draws scoffing these days but few of us endured what they had in their youth. To them, a color TV with three channels and an electric refrigerator were marvels, not throwaway items. Now, we have people whining about stone countertops and ever more closet space in the steady march to the McMansion.

It looks like the recession has put it to a halt because recent reports indicate single-family house sizes are reversing course. In 1974, the average home was 1,695 square feet and by 2004 that rose to 2,349 square feet. Now the overall average is shrinking again, falling to 2,135 square feet in 2009.

Bad news? Depends on your perspective. As dreadful as it was, one of the few good things that emerged from the Depression was the value system many survivors forged in its fires. It was hardly surprising that those who endured it were capable of making the sacrifices needed to face the Second World War.

Falling into a nostalgic trap can be seductively destructive. Broad brushes and all, people being the same from place to place and time to time, yeah, yeah, yeah. But even the pieces of the Americana sideshow give heft to contentions of these cultural changes.

For instance, there’s a classic Norman Rockwell homecoming piece of the Post-War era: a gangly kid in military uniform arriving home to widespread jubilation. Typical Schlockwell, right? An idyllic depiction of life in the U.S. then, showing us not what necessarily was, but what we wished.

Maybe so but look closer. So, here’s this kid back from war and you see it all, parents, siblings, pet, girlfriend, neighbors and their kids, even the handyman working on the roof. These were selected by the artist because they were what mattered most, what made coming home worthwhile. That’s where the artist’s emotional center rests.

And the neighborhood? An apartment building, not a tenement but certainly “lived in.” I know contemporaries who would call it a “slum” and sum them all “poor.” Of course, those characters could echo the same for a lot of us on this side of the painting since the wealth found in community should be available to anyone.

I guess ultimately “poverty” depends on the measure in use, doesn’t it?