Upstreet

Gin

In the blog Boston and Pittsfield, The Distance Between Us, Bill and I wrote about our connections with each other’s cities. I shared the little I knew about Boston before meeting Bill.  What I knew of Pittsfield was, of course, much richer. For me Pittsfield was North Street. For Bill, the main part of downtown Boston was Washington Street.  But Boston had a number of other main streets, Tremont Street, Boylston Street, Newbury Street.  North Street, Pittsfield was the only main street, both the shopping and commercial center. 

In the 50's and 60's, North Street was the location of small specialty shops, two department stores, four movie theaters, two five and dimes, four imposing banks with marble entries, a number of restaurants, a library (called an Athenaeum for some reason) and a museum.  Okay.  Technically the library was on Park Square, a circle where North, East, West and South Streets all meet and the museum was really at the beginning of South Street.  One block east of North Street was the post office and police and fire stations. To me, though, they were all "upstreet".

Whenever anyone was going to North Street, or any of the city buildings nearby, we never said, "I'm going to North Street." or even "We're going uptown." It was always "up street" or "downtown".   

North Street did have everything.  The focal point was the local department store, England Brothers. There really were two brothers surnamed England who owned and operated it.  England’s, as we locals called it, was a multi-story building which filled up the entire block.   The first floor had cosmetics, jewelry and men’s dress clothes, the second and third floor were devoted to women’s wear, the fourth floor was toys and kitchen, totally devoted to toys come November and December. The fifth floor held furniture and business offices.  It was only much later, after I visited Jordan Marsh in Boston with my college roommate, that I realized the England Brother’s layout was a traditional one for department stores.

Fascinating to me as a child were the two elevators at England's,
each with a somberly dressed and very quiet elderly man as operator.  I loved how the main doors would slide open revealing a metal latticed door which folded like an accordion as the operator pushed it to one side. Many of my friends preferred the escalator to the second and third floors.  Added in the late 40's, this moving stairway was the only one of its kind in the city.  Some of my friends would ride it up and down over and over again as if it were some sort of carnival attraction.

I would always opt to take the elevator just so I could watch the man operating it. While waiting for the doors to open I'd keep an eye on the arrow on the semi-circular indicator above the door which pointed to the floor numbers. The arrow would slowly move across as the elevator travelled from floor to floor.  The symmetry of this dial interested me.  It wasn't circular like a clock, yet it served its function perfectly. I had no idea this was typical of most elevators.  Like the layout of England Brothers itself, I thought such features were unique to Pittsfield.   

Each person would call out the floor they wanted. Some would call out the department they wanted leaving it to the operator to stop at the appropriate floor. Not that there was any need. The elevator was always crowded so regardless he basically stopped at every floor. I loved watching the man running the elevator, selecting the floors, opening and then closing the gate.  I thought it required great expertise and seriousness. 

When I was out with my friends or taking my younger brother and sister up street for a few hours, it was more likely the five and dime we'd spend time at.  Even when I went there as a kid, there wasn’t much you could buy for a nickel or a dime, but the name stuck. In Pittsfield the five and dimes were a Newberry’s and a Woolworth’s. Newberry's featured a soda fountain where you could get French fries, a real treat before they became common with the arrival of a McDonald’s.

Downstairs, in the far back, there was a pet section.  We would stroll among the birds and the fish and the turtles---no puppies or kittens in sight, now that I think about it.  No one ever bothered us as we chirped at the birds, pressed our faces against the fish tanks or tapped the glass to get the turtles to move.  Every few years, one of us would prevail upon our parents to buy us something.  I remember pointing to the particular goldfish I just had to have. I wonder now if it lasted more than two or maybe three days!  We kept fish, replacing them as they died. We didn't have a tank, just a little glass bowl which required us to change the water often to aerate it.  Likely why the goldfish didn't last long. After too many fish burials, we decided to switch to birds, the chirping parakeets.

Naturally, both my sister and I swore we would take care of the parakeet by keeping its cage clean, but as so often happens, my mother did that job.  We had two different parakeets, one at a time; we couldn’t seem to keep them alive either. The first bird was actually a house pet.  The bird would fly around the house while my mother cleaned the cage.  It would light on my father’s newspaper as he read. As my father turned the page, the bird would flutter its wings flying above the paper before settling back on the new page. This made my father laugh. It made me feel the bird was part of our household.

We got so used to the bird flying around the house that one day the inevitable occurred.  I was lingering by the open front door casually looking through the mail when the bird flew out.  It was never seen again.  April weather in Massachusetts wouldn't have been ideal for a tropical bird. 

So back to Newberry’s to get another. This one we didn’t allow out of its cage. While Petey was cage-bound, he had a real personality.  His cage toys included a small plastic mirror.  He would cock his head, look at his reflection and trill to this “other” good-looking bird.  Petey lasted a few months until one sad Saturday morning we found it lying dead on the bottom of its cage.  My father nodded in a learned way as he told us birds were very susceptible to drafts. We all assumed a chilly night had done this one in. Years later I found out my older brother, coming home from a night of carousing and feeling sad the poor little bird didn’t know the joys of alcohol, had added gin to the bird's water container. Petey had died in a drunken stupor.

Once I hit junior high age, my friend Carole introduced me to the listening booths at Sammy Vincent's, a local music store on North Street.  She told me to pretend we were going to buy a 45 but wanted to hear them all first so we could choose.  We would take four or five records into a listening booth and play them.  I thought that was amazing.  We did buy records there, and we did know from the radio what they sounded like, but still it was fun having a booth to yourself to check them out.

I don’t know how they monitored those booths. My friend Carole and I never felt pressured to leave as we listened to record after record Saturday mornings before making our big purchase, one 45. I'm talking about 50's pop music. "How Much Is that Doggie in the Window?” was a favorite.  “Silhouettes on the Shade” and “Tammy” were some of our other picks.  Rock 'n' Roll had arrived but Carole and I were still stuck in the world of Debbie Reynolds and Patti Page.  

All of these wonders were on the west side of North Street.  On the east side were the stores I considered ritzy.  Small specialty shops were each devoted to a particular aspect of apparel: woman’s dresses, nylons, fancy underthings, suits.  I was always a little intimidated by these shops.  Even when I was older and shopping on my own, I was concerned they wouldn’t take me seriously as a customer, somehow knowing I didn’t have enough money for their more expensive items.  I used to like it when I purchased something somewhere else so I had a bag in hand as I went into one of those shops. An England’s bag was a good marker.  This announced I was capable of purchasing something.  I did consider keeping an England Brothers bag with me just for this purpose but I never did succumb to this ruse.

The main exception to this collection of small shops was Holden and Stone, a large department store based in Albany.  I used to love to go in there, not necessarily to shop but because they had a cool system of pneumatic tubes which transported sale slips and cash between the main floor and the accounting department on the second level.  No cash registers on the floor.  After the sales clerk wrote up your order, she'd place the slip and your cash in a cylindrical container. With the press of a button this cartridge would speed through the tubes along the ceiling into the accounting room.  The clerk at the other end would make change, place it back in the cartridge and send it back to the sales floor. I never understood how the people handling the cash would know which sales clerk to return the receipt to.  I didn't care.  I just loved hearing the whooshing sound as these cartridges travelled about the store.

Going upstreet didn’t always mean shopping.  At the edge of North Street where it met South, East and West Streets is a grassy area known as Park Square. I always wondered why it was called a square when it was round.  Years later, in another connection with Boston, I realized Park Square Pittsfield and Park Square Boston were connected by same state road, Route 9.

Adjacent to Park Square was the Berkshire Athenaeum, the city library.  I loved books.  This massive building with its large dark first floor reading room was a great place for me to spend time  The stacks were situated along both sides of the main floor with a section for newspapers and magazines along the back. One front corner was the reference area.  I spent a lot of time there in high school writing paper about things I didn't know anything about.  The reading room consisted of rows and rows of long wooden tables with attached light fixtures, a classical design for a library, the green-shaded lamps directing the light so it just fell on the book below it.  It was always dark and quiet there. 

As a teen I loved wandering the stacks, not looking for anything in particular, just seeing what there was.  Many very old books were right next to much newer ones, the newer books with shiny covers standing out from a book that may have been there fifty years.  One day I stumbled upon the Dewy Decimal 800's. Cartoon books! Humor! I was amazed. This staid and quiet place had books with jokes, funny drawings, and cartoons, not dished out once a day like in the newspaper, but whole collections.  Pages and pages of them.  I loved to go to that section, pull out a book and sit under one of the green-shaded lamps to read.  Thurber drawings.  Will Roger's sayings. Some were probably editorial cartoons and over my head, but that didn’t matter to me.

There was always a lot to do upstreet.  On a Saturday it wasn't unusual to spend a whole afternoon there.  Finding a bathroom, though, was sometimes a problem.  It wasn’t bad if you were at a movie or in the library. Those places had public facilities I felt comfortable using.  The library bathroom amazed me. It was tiny. The woman’s room was in the front of the building, just to the right as you entered the main floor.  You locked it as you went in, a one woman at a time situation with barely room to turn around.  The window was filled in with glass blocks, thick, heavy, and frosted for privacy. Very little light came in. I remember stacking my books on the window sill so I could use the sink.  I wondered why the facilities were so small when the library itself was so large.

If you weren’t near the library, there were two other choices, the ladies lounge at England Brothers or the public bathrooms in the municipal building a block to the east of North Street.  As far as I knew none of the other stores had public bathrooms for their customers.  If they did, there were no signs welcoming patrons to them, so they remained out of sight to me.

The ladies lounge in England's was not a euphemism. It really was a lounge.  The second floor featured woman’s clothes, not sportswear, but the serious stuff, fancy dresses, suits, outfits for traveling.  I'm talking cruise wear, things like that.  One corner had a discrete sign, Ladies Lounge. You went up a few steps, pushed open two heavy doors and found yourself in what looked like to me someone's living room.  Couches, large comfy chairs, small end tables with lamps.  It was a throwback to an earlier time when ladies would look for a place to sit and relax after a hard day of shopping.  I could just picture women carrying a pile of boxes tied with string, waltzing in there, collapsing in one of the big chairs, chatting with friends. Such a nice nostalgic scene, right out of a movie.

Then there was the matron, what we call now a restroom attendant.  As a  teenager, I always felt the matron was looking at me suspiciously.  She likely felt her job was making sure teenagers didn’t go in there and mess up the place. Intimidated, I felt I didn’t belong there.  No words ever passed between us but I knew as soon as I walked in there I was being watched.

A few more steps led the actual facilities.  Here there were two walls of stalls, probably five on each side.  Might seem like heaven to a teenager looking for relief, but the stalls cost money.  The doors only opened with a dime.  There were two options if you didn’t have a dime or didn’t want to pay. One was to stand in the area near enough to the stalls so that when one opened, you could reach the door to prevent it from closing.  Of course, there was always the matron lurking about. Would she yell at you? Would you get to the stall before it closed?  The other option was to wait for the one single free stall way at the end.  Somehow this felt more embarrassing than just catching one of the pay stall doors as it opened, an admittance you didn't even have a single dime to use the bathroom. You could always act like waiting for someone to exit the pay stall was just a coincidence.  Just as you reached for the door, it opened, you said excuse me and casually entered.

If you weren’t up to navigating the options at England Brothers, there was one more choice.  If you were willing to leave North Street, you could use the facilities in the municipal building a block behind the Aggie Bank just in front of the Post Office.  This building housed the police department along with some other city services. Most importantly, public bathrooms.  Like the facilities in England's, these seemed like a leftover from earlier times.  What I recall was a large room with a lot of marble. Marble sinks?  Maybe marble counters with sinks in them is more accurate.   Rows and rows of stalls, every one of them free.

There were cloth towels not paper.  These towels were on a revolving rack so after you used a portion, you rolled it so a clean section would be available for the next person.  There was a matron here as well, but she seemed friendlier, more like someone who was there to keep everything tidy rather than scrutinize every teenager who came in. 

Contemporary kids hang out at the mall for the same kinds of experiences I had on North Street. A place to meet friends.  A place to go to the movies. A place to shop. A place to walk around. A place to do nothing. In many ways North Street was an entire city on a single street.