Where Aunt Mabel Lived

WHEN OUR DAY WAS FAIR
~ ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS ~

Bertha Mabel Lindsey (1880 - 1968)

The Voice

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.

By Thomas Hardy

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now, try reading this beautiful poem again,
this time replacing the word woman
with the word house:

"House much missed, how you call to me, call to me . . .
And the house calling."

Based on addresses and return addresses from old letters and envelopes, my cousin Linda F. D. and I have been tracking down the various apartments and houses inhabited by our Great-Aunt Mabel throughout the years.

1.
This seems to be one of earliest:
2704 Peery Avenue, built 1912
(the right - hand side is 2704)

2.
This is the return address on a stack of letters
that Mabel has written to her younger brother Paul
(my grandfather) when he was stationed in China in 1923:
107 Altman Building
I'm not sure if this would have been Mabel's residence;
it could have been the location of her Beauty Salon.

The Altman is just around the corner
from the big National Fidelity Life Building
shown on the stationery of Mabel's husband:

All of the World War I corespondence
concerning the death of Mabel's brother Sam
was sent to 1005 Walnut Street:

3.
Great-Grandmother Sarah's letters
from the 1920s are mailed from this address:
3426 E 62nd Street

Mabel's youngest sister, my Great-Aunt Gail
standing in front of #3426 -- early 1920s

#3426 Today

4.
At some point, possibly after Sarah's death in 1937,
Mabel & Jack moved to 4288 E 54th Street
Here is my Grandfather Paul Lindsey, Mabel's younger brother,
visiting them in 1944:

#4288 Today

5.

Based on a postmark, Mabel was living here in June 1967
— one year after my Grandpa Paul took me to visit her,
probably at this address:
4511 Independence Avenue, Apartment 1

Google Maps indicates that in the early 2000s the building was still all red brick (as shown above), which is how it must have looked when I visited. I wish I could remember being there, but the memory is just too hazy, beyond being on the train, riding an escalator for the first time when we got to Union Station, and getting on a bus to take us to Mabel’s. I was 9 years old.

Trying to piece it all together, Cousin Linda recalls "a narrow steep interior stair up to Aunt Mabel's apartment which was at the top to the right. She always had fudge for me. I can remember visiting her many times, and I know she lived with us for awhile."
#4511 Today

I have spent many hours pouring over the details, re-reading the letters, obsessing about all these old addresses, and wishing that we could travel back in time for a day or so! Independence Avenue seems an odd location for Mabel to end up for those last few years of her life, although Peery Avenue and even 1005 Walnut Street are not that far apart — and all on the north side; whereas the two big craftsman houses on 62nd and 54th were both far south, near Swope Park.

Trying to analyze Mabel's trajectory around the city, I hear the voice of Thomas Hardy's poem, the voice of the woman much missed -- so many women: Sarah, Mabel, Beatrice, Virginia, Gail. And the voice of the houses themselves, "Saying that now you are not as you were."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One of the best old house poems ever:

To My Old Addresses

Help! Get out of here! Go walking!
Forty-six (I think) Commerce Street, New York City
The Quai des Brumes nine thousand four hundred twenty-six, Paris
Georgia Tech University Department of Analogues
Jesus Freak Avenue No. 2, in Clattery, Michigan
George Washington Model Airplane School, Bisbee, Arizona
Wonderland, the stone font, Grimm’s Fairy Tales
Forty-eight Greenwich Avenue the landlady has a dog
She lets run loose in the courtyard seven
Charles Street which Stefan Volpe sublet to me
Hotel Des Fleurus in Paris, Via Convincularia in Rome
Where the motorcycles speed
Twelve Hamley Road in Southwest London O
My old addresses! O my addresses! Are you addresses still?
Or has the hand of Time roughed over you
And buffered and stuffed you with peels of lemons, limes, and shells
From old institutes? If I address you
It is mostly to know if you are well.
I am all right but I think I will never find
Sustenance as I found in you, oh old addresses
Numbers that sink into my soul
Forty-eight, nineteen, twenty-three, O worlds in which I was alive!

Kenneth Koch (1925 - 2002)

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