American Brewery

American Brewery

My father owned a small grocery store in Greek Town, specializing in olive oil and feta cheese. He supplied local restaurants as well as families, and he worked long hours. He drove a fat Cadillac, a honey-colored monster of which he was foolishly proud. On Saturday evenings he rubbed it down with a rag so that on Sundays when we drove to church it would look its best. Sometimes, when all the lights were green on Eastern Avenue, he would gun the engine and let the car accelerate, its heavy weight pouring down the road like an ocean liner. I loved the way my body felt pinned to the seat, the luxurious cream interior. When it idled, the Cadillac purred like a kitten, and you could barely hear it. 

It’s hotter than Hades at seven in the morning and I’m covered from head to foot in work clothes. Pigeons carry all kinds of contagion. It isn’t the heat that makes me dizzy, but the prospect of entering the Brewery. Lewis expects me to assess the scope of the project, but I’ve avoided Baltimore for twenty-five years. There’s more on my mind than I let him know. I could have wriggled out of it, I suppose, but places draw you back in their own time. Anyway, it isn’t the Brewery that marks me.

They call this neighborhood, the most blighted area of Baltimore, East Broadway. The American Brewery dominates the streets with its massive cupola and boarded windows. The houses in East Broadway are destitute, the concrete stoops crumbling, trapping scraps of trash in their crevices. The wooden eaves are rotting, black and wet beneath flaking paint. Plywood nails up doorways in a random quilt design, like crazy squares stitched into an otherwise sensible plan. My old house is one of those, but I haven’t sought it out.  

When I was young the American Brewery was the center of our lives. In games we called it the witch’s mansion, and our mothers told us never to ride our bikes beyond it. Church bells rang in the evening, and fathers came ambling home from out its doors, slow and companionable in the fading light. The Brewery shut down in 1973, and everything changed.

In 1973 I was nine years old and as happy as I’ve ever been. We had been in the house on Linwood for three years, and even Mama, who wanted to live in Greek town where she knew people, had grown used to things. Costa was old enough to ride his bike to the Greek neighborhood, and he spent his free time with friends. I was younger and a girl and therefore not allowed off the block. At first I was lonely, watching the kids play in the alley and not knowing how to join them. My black hair seemed a horrible blight against their blondness, and I was sure it was this difference – my Greekness, their Germaness – that kept me apart. But it was summer and Mama made a batch of popsicles with vysina, sour cherries soaked in syrup. These were so popular that kids started coming up our back steps, shyly asking if Mrs. Dimitsanis had any more cherry pops, and asking me if I wanted to play. 

    Two small boys in particular became my friends. Frank and Joe Whener lived half way down the block, and soon I was in their house as much as my own. Frank was nine months younger than me and Joe was a year younger than him. We were a close threesome and spent as much time as possible outdoors. The rooms in our homes were small, and we were always under foot and made to know it. We didn’t mind the cold. On winter days when the sun caught the light off the ice hanging in long fingers from every ledge, Frank and Joe and I would drag a Red Rider up and down our street, breaking the icicles and loading them into a pile in the wagon. We sucked the longest ones until they slithered from our mittened hands to shatter on the street. 

    On rainy afternoons we were allowed to watch television at the Whener’s house. We sat on the floor, riveted to the rabbit-eared black and white. Mrs. Whener served us Ritz crackers with peanut butter, and we watched Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched, Hogan’s Heros, MASH. I would return home in the evening, full of crackers and peanut butter and a vision of the real America and try to eat my dinner to my mother’s satisfaction.

Huge windows that once overlooked the beer vats span the second and third floors of the Brewery. They are paned with small, thick squares of opaque glass and only a few have been broken since the building was abandoned. Light filters down from them to the first floor. I feel safe in the wide yellow light, held in a space where nothing has happened for decades. The scars of time barely penetrate the heavy walls.

I breathe deeply, both to invite and dispel this awareness of time. What if I could go back through the years and change one thing? What if just one thing in the past was different? This mind game is an old habit of mine, a bad one. I turn on my flashlight and enter a narrow hall.

    There is loose rubble at the base of stairs, and in one small, dark room – a manager’s office, perhaps – a worn armchair. The electric panels are corroded, and on metal pipes flakes of rust have the organic beauty of lichen or stalactites. Thick paint peals from iron rails like frost on a window.  

In the sixties and early seventies, East Broadway was a solid, working class neighborhood, a mixed community of European immigrants and blacks entering the world of home ownership for the first time. Maybe East Broadway could have survived the closing of the Brewery if more of the homes had been owner occupied, but in 1973 when the Brewery closed, half the houses were owned by landlords, people with no incentive beyond profit to improve the properties they owned. Jodie Rockland and slum lords like him had bought up the properties a couple at a time, more every year. Now there are over two hundred abandoned houses within a twenty block radius.

When I drove in this morning the streets were empty except for a few congregants on steps, smoking wearily and squinting into the rising sun. I looked along the alleys, half expecting I would see some raucous childhood game in progress: kickball or tag or jumping rope. There was nothing, only the dense hull of the Brewery marooned on the top of the hill. 

Growing up, kids were everywhere. We owned the alleys and every evening after supper, as long as the light lasted and often until after dark, we held fantastic games of hide and seek. The number of hiding places in a city alley is remarkable: crawl beneath the Buick up on blocks, crouch behind a neighbor’s row of hollyhocks, lie flat on the topmost, narrow shelf of a tool shed. We played the version that involved running to base; you had to be caught as well as found. My mother dressed me in skirts and stockings and scolded me terribly about the filth until she finally caught on to the idea of play clothes. After that I wore Costa’s worn out trousers and tee shirts to play, and while both my parents frowned at the sight of me, my happiness pleased them. Only when friends or relatives came to visit was I forced in from the game, washed, and properly presented in a dress.

I had become my family’s ambassador in the neighborhood. Baba and Costa passed their days in Greek town, and people hardly knew them. Mama was shy, her Greek accent heavy as a rug, and she busied herself with cooking and cleaning, taking very little advantage of her success with the vysina popsicles. I, on the other hand, was welcome in every house, and broad German women, the mothers of my friends, would smile at me with indulgence, pinch my cheek and say, “What beautiful eyes you have, Nina.”

It must have been early in the summer of ‘73, around the time that the Brewery closed, that boys from McElderry wandered into our alley. We had been playing hide and seek, John Bartal’s back door serving as base. John was my next door neighbor, the oldest kid in the alley. He was a rough boy, the kind who would pick up a burning cigarette butt thrown from a car and smoke it down to the filter.

The boys that came weren’t looking for trouble. They were brothers, I think, the younger one about Frank’s age, and the older about the same as John Bartal. They leaned against the fence of John’s yard and watched us play. If they had been white boys perhaps they would have been invited to join the game, but as it was, John walked up to the older boy, shoved his shoulder and said, “Get off my fence.” The boy pushed back and soon John and the stranger were rolling on the ground, furiously kicking and punching at each other. We stood around and cheered for John, ignoring the other boy, the younger brother, who clung mutely to the chain link fence. 

It ended when my mother came out of the house with her broom and began beating the boys with it, shouting in Greek for them to stop. I can’t imagine those straw rushes hurt, my mother was never much for hitting, but the surprise of being beat with a broom quickly parted the boys. The black boy grabbed his brother’s arm and ran. John made as if to chase them, but one final wallop from my mother’s broom changed his mind.

Those black boys ran from us just as whites ran from East Broadway a few years later. My family ran too, though not because of the blacks moving in. But reasons don’t matter. The damage is done. 

The basement of the Brewery is cool as a cave, with vaulted brick ceilings and catacomb rooms, one leading into another. I was afraid to come down the stairs, into darkness so complete, afraid of rats and skeletons and the other terrors of childhood. But searching roots stretch and cling to surfaces like streamers at a party. It is peaceful here, with rows of metal tanks staring at one another like sentinels. Yet the beam of my flashlight is like the headlights of a car, casting wild shadows, and despite the beauty of these forgotten rooms I want to leave.

When Humanim bid on the project, offered to buy the building from the city for less than three thousand dollars and in exchange renovate the space as our Baltimore office, Lewis pulled me aside and said he wanted me to oversee the project.

“It’s a beautiful space, Nina, the way the light moves across the floors. And the exterior is to die for.”

“I know the place,” I told him. “I grew up close by.” 

His eyes widened in surprise. “You grew up there?”

“It was a long time ago,” I said. “I haven’t been back.”

In the spring Lewis and I drove together to the site, to check out the Brewery. We circled the blocks of the neighborhood: Chester, Washington, Lanvale, Patterson. Boards were nailed tight to every other door. 

“Do you know what a Quick Take Law is?” Lewis asked. I shook my head. “A Quick Take Law is where the city has the right to seize possession of an entire community if seventy percent of the properties are vacant. Right now, East Broadway is at fifty percent.” 

The city doesn’t want to invoke a Quick Take. That would require a lot of attention and money that the city doesn’t have. The city wants Humanim to make a difference. I don’t know if that will happen. 

The morning Lewis and I drove around the neighborhood, cruising the blocks in his new model Toyota, we passed a make-shift shrine of teddy bears and Dixie cups filled with liquor. People stood a short distance away as a police officer emptied the cups into the gutter. Curious, Lewis drove slowly. I stared at my hands, ashamed, but still managed to glimpse the irregular brown stain of blood on the pavement. Liquor swirled in the blood, carrying bits of it away.

When I was a child, East Broadway hadn’t been so damaged. I wanted to tell Lewis that, but I knew what this would lead to. Lewis would ask, “What was it like, Nina?” Instead I said nothing.

Fathers worked when I was a child, and mothers stayed at home. Nobody shared domestic responsibilities, and the fathers I knew struck me as shadowy, quiet men who overlooked children. I knew them in a peripheral way. John Bartal’s father I avoided. He was narrow and hard-faced, his hands curled in red fists. Both John and his mother were like him, and aside from our games in the alley, I had little to do with them. Mr. Whener, I thought, was a kind man. He was thick, with large, sausage-like fingers that seemed surprisingly soft and gentle. He ruffled his boys’ hair, picked them up and shook them upside down. He never touched me, though I wished to have my hair ruffled too, and I would have liked being shaken upside down. Mr. Whener worked at the American Brewery, as did several other men on our street. He drank coffee at his kitchen table, his face a worried frown when the closing was announced, but he was the sort of man others helped, and he was soon employed at the National Brewery in Canton.

My own father could not have been more different. He was Greek, he was loud, and everything under our roof was his business. I was never overlooked, but rather held up regularly for inspection. Was I properly groomed, was I getting good grades, did I help my mother in the kitchen? When he was pleased with me he would wrap me in his arms, squeezing the breath out of me, and pinch my cheek with his long fingers, soft dark hairs between the knuckles. He was a critical man but not hard to please and he loved me very much. I felt guilty for wishing he were more like Mr. Whener, and loved him more fiercely for my guilt. He changed as I grew older. Quieter, less critical, he’d wait for me to touch him, as if he’d lost the right to a father’s embrace.

Three dark flights of stairs and a narrow metal ladder crusted with pigeon dung lead to the space beneath the eaves of the green-roofed cupola. Boards curve in a smooth arc above my head. Pigeons roost outside an open window. The rustle of their wings and their flute-like cooing vibrate the air. The air smells clean and bright, high above the humid streets. I look out the window hoping for something familiar: the Dominos Sugar sign, the spires of St. Wenceslaus, Johns Hopkins Hospital. But the view is uncompromising. All I see are brick row homes, worn asphalt, and the cracked concrete of old alley ways, twisted in a web of forgotten stories.

It was early October, an Indian summer, and though we were back in school and the light was fading fast, we kept our games of hide and seek going late into the evening. There was a lot of unease in East Broadway then, with the Brewery closed and families starting to move. You could hear shouting in the houses from time to time. We kids preferred to be outdoors.

It was early October and the sun had set and we played in the dark, a delicious silence descending on the game as I, the seeker, crept around cars in the hope of surprising the hiders, who were equally silent. Only when they broke cover and ran for base was there any noise, the grinding crunch of gravel as the worn treads of sneakers tore across the pavement. Two of my friends were safe at base, their knees drawn up to their chests as they sat and watched the rest of the game. Two of the smallest I had already caught, and they sat too, waiting to start the next round. I was approaching a tiny shed, suspecting a hider wedged behind the back wall and the fence. I was at an advantage because I was between base and the shed, and every step I took reduced the chance of getting safely past. 

There was a flurry of movement, and Joe erupted from behind the shed. He knew where I was, creeping toward him along the alley, and he had timed his escape perfectly. He was a small boy and fast and his plan was to dart to the opposite side of the alley and run past me before I could reach out my hand to tag him. He was sudden and I didn’t expect him and his plan would have worked if my father hadn’t come home just then. The prow of the Cadillac caught Joe as he leapt into its path. Joe’s small body was thrown forward, and he landed on a neighbor’s parking pad, his limbs sprawled on the concrete. His head, crushed above the left eye, came to rest beside the tire of the parked car.

I heard my father’s screams, mingled with those of children who had come out of hiding, and finally Joe’s father arrived. He moaned softly as he cradled his boy, rocking him back and forth until the ambulance arrived with its red lights flashing. 

I wonder if there is anyone left in the neighborhood who remembers Joe Whener. I suspect not. Joe’s story and mine have been written over by the broken world of East Broadway. Anyone who knew us – the Dimitsanis and the Wheners – is long gone.

The Wheners moved to Canton in December of 1973. My family moved to Greek town two months later. I don’t remember the year that followed. I don’t remember leaving Linwood Avenue or settling into the new house on Grundy. Such gaps are what happens, I suppose, when memories are sealed and boards nailed across the past.