Where have all the laneways gone?
ALLAN SCHWARTZ
As some of us attain a certain age, there is a tendency to reflect back on our life experiences as opposed to looking forward. This was very much the case as I strolled through my childhood neighbourhood the other day. Talk about the apple not falling far from the tree – here it is some 70 years later and my wife and I now live in a condo that is less than half a mile from where I grew up!
Many memories flooded back to mind as I walked through the streets of my childhood. Flipping back the years, my mind harkened back to a time time when radio serial programs such as Amos’n Andy, Fibber McGee and Molly and the Great Gildersleeve captured our imagination, before the infamous television test pattern brought with it programs like Howdy Doody, The Plouffe Family and I Love Lucy.
Growing up in a neighbourhood that developed just after the end of World War II, supermarkets, superstores and wholesale food clubs did not exist as we know them today. Instead, there were small grocery stores consisting of five or six aisles of basics and staples, and there were specialty stores – butcher shops, fish mongers, fruit and vegetable vendors, and even some higher-end pastry shops.
Usually three to four times a week we had a horse-drawn wagon come right up our laneway to deliver fresh milk, and on alternate days, I could swear it was the same horse, the same wagon but the driver in a different uniform, complete with hat, delivering bread, again to our side door. Rarely did the horse fail to leave evidence of his attendance.
These were simpler times and the honour system prevailed – money for milk purchases was left in empty milk bottles, and the bread deliveryman ran a tab for the week. There were always corner stores for any last minute requirements, and often my grandfather who lived next door would send me on an errand to pick up his filter-less, Sweet Caps cigarettes which were selling for 25 cents a package. No-one asked to see my proof of age.
Other deliveries made directly to our house included blocks of ice for our pre-refrigerator ice-box. Two to three times a week a very muscular delivery person with a huge set of tongs would lug into our home the square blocks of ice, each of which were about a cubic foot in size and weighed some 60 pounds. Never saw this man again once we acquired our very first electric refrigerator.
Most of our homes in the early 1950’s were heated with coal which was delivered by truck to the front of our house and shovelled down a chute through an access door leading into our basement coal storage room. The coal dust was everywhere. How our family escaped black lung disease is beyond me. As kids, it was our job to take a wheelbarrow load of coal every day to the furnace and throw it in. Of course, the next morning, us kids collected the ashes which had cooled by then and hauled them up to the garbage shed. No-one complained about child labour, especially if we wanted to stay warm.
Continuing down memory lane, how could I forget about our Inglis wringer-washer? After going through the wringer to eliminate excess water, all the clothes were hung out to air dry on a unique system called a clothesline, consisting of a wire cable strung between two pulleys about sixty feet apart with the clothes suspended from the cable by funny little hinged wooden pegs called clothes pins. These very same clothes pins were used by us kids to secure the cardboard dividers found in egg cartons to our bicycles to simulate an engine sound when the dividers flapped repeatedly against the spokes of the bicycle wheels.
There were no communications “devices” in those days, other than a Northern Electric rotary landline telephone. No smart phones, no flip-phones, no I-pads, and no laptops. We children had to generate our own fun and excitement. Parents would often send us off to the park or playground with the simple admonition to come home – when it got dark.
Saturday afternoons were special. My mother would give me a quarter and send me off to the neighbourhood movie theatre, sometimes accompanied by friends, or even with my sisters. Admission cost 15 cents and the remaining 10 cents were used to buy popcorn and a drink. Entering the theatre around noon, we would exit, bleary-eyed around six in the evening after having watched four films, a News of the World clip, a Fitzgibbons travelogue and two cartoons.
Arriving home just in time for dinner, I could visualize the predecessor to Swanson’s TV dinners. The plate put down in front of me was tastefully arranged with peas in one sector; mashed potatoes in another; chicken or beef in the third area; and perhaps corn on the cob or niblets to fill up the balance of the plate. No foodstuffs could touch or mix with each other, heaven forbid.
There were a number of other memories that skittered across my mind as I continued my walk. Mail delivery came twice a day and on Saturdays as well. Streetcar fare for kids my age was five tickets for 25 cents and transfers were valid for the entire day. Sometimes we would simply get on the streetcar to see where it went, and we watched in awe as the conductor manually rotated the streetcar using some sort of geared-crank device at the end of the track so it could return the same way it had come.
As my stroll took me past the house in which I was raised, I looked for the laneway. In our “hood” there had been numerous easements and service lanes intersecting the streets behind our houses, presumably used by the utilities to service water, hydro and gas. But now, decades later, there was no laneway to be seen. In their wisdom, the City fathers and mothers, had, over the years, no doubt sold off or gifted the laneway property to the adjacent homeowners.
The laneway’s disappearance probably had the most telling impact on me as I returned from my walk. Once a laneway is gone, it’s gone – as are, over time, all the memories associated with it.