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It was a wonderful old house, once, looking down over Main Street, and beyond that to the railroad and the river from the heights of Elk Hill Avenue.

But that was back when Main Street was something you would want to see from your house.  I guess it was during the Depression that the rich folks started to see those squat red brick buildings, and the neon signs that were newly flashing in gaudy colors, as something less than beautiful.  And those shuttered factories along the river must have also started to look like a collection of liabilities being put on display, instead of as steaming and clanking objects of pride.

Same thing happened to all those houses on Elk Hill.  They're still there, but their faded beauty looks like something that used to be, and nobody much looks at them now.

This one was the centerpiece, though, facing a little triangular park where Reservoir Street came in.  I remember that the trolleys stopped there, and people would wait on the benches along the fence of the park.  People came and went in groups, like platoons of soldiers; the men going off to their jobs, the maids and housekeepers coming in to trade places with them. A tide of white men in black suits going out, a wave of black women wearing white dresses coming in. And in the afternoon, the reverse.  These days it's all black people and old people around that part of town, and nobody seems to be going much of anywhere.

The park back then was the kind of thing you don't see anymore.  It was the first thing in my life that I thought of as beautiful.  It wasn't real big, maybe 100 by 150 feet along the legs of the triangle, but somehow that seemed bigger back then - and it was just enough to make this spot into the best address in town.  With its fence, the little park was like a ship, moored in the big harbor of asphalt where Elk Hill Avenue and Reservoir Street came together.  Instead of a ship's smokestack, though, there was a tall fountain that cascaded down through three layered trays of water, finally spilling out into a big round basin that you could sit on the edge of.  That fountain brought birds to the park all through the warm months of the year.

The whole outside of the park had a fence back then, that sat on a low stone wall. The wall was made up out of those small, round stones that people used to collect from river beds, and when they were all piled up into the wall it had a knobby surface like goose bumps.  There were granite coping stones along the top of the wall, in an unusual quarter-round shape and with a uniformly-chiseled surface that showed every hammer stroke that some guy, probably just arrived from Italy or Lithuania, put into his work. The fence was made from plain old 4" screwed iron pipe - the same pipe you would see in a boiler room, but the fittings where the pipes were screwed together were hand-cast  spheres that made something as mundane as boiler pipe seem like a natural for a fence on the best street in town.

The stone wall surrounding the park was actually a low retaining wall, making the park about a foot and a half higher than the surrounding streets.  Maybe that's why it sticks in my memory as being like a ship; it stood up, free of its surroundings, with its pointed prow looking down Elk Hill like it was going to embark down the hill to the river and points beyond.  It never left its harbor, but I did, and although I have occasionally looked back, I never went back.  I've never stayed overnight in that tired town since that day when I set out to see what else the world had to offer.

The house itself was at one time considered beautiful - but it was an ungainly beauty.  Today people who like these Queen Anne confections call them Painted Ladies, but when I did my remembering, they mostly had been painted grey, or brown, or dark green, like women whose faded beauty still attracts attention, but they no longer want the attention and are embarrassed by their out-of-style wardrobe.  Back in the fifties, the new houses had low ceilings and big windows and were filled with sunlight, while this house and its neighbors had rooms of lofty height with a chiaroscuro sense of light that darkened into the corners and seemed indeterminate.  And there was a vast catalog of decorative detail.  You wouldn't use a word like "elegance" to describe the house's crazy-quilt of jigsawed decoration, and yet there was something close to elegance in the kind of life that could be lived there.  More than a hundred years after these houses saw their glory, we're still searching for what we embarrassed them into grey silence and then saw them pass from the scene.