That's interesting. The number among us who have been around long enough to remember such wars is diminishing, and it's difficult for the rest of us to even visualize the signs of war in the places we see on a regular basis. It has an effect, I think, that inability to even conceive of a war at home, to even be able to imagine what it might look like.
Last week I was at the beach in Delaware, standing on a wooden deck outside a snack bar, waiting for my girlfriend, and I'm looking at this weird concrete structure under the boarded walkway to the beach, it was semi-circular in shape and had a rail that looked like a train track around the perimeter. It eventually dawned on me that it was an artillery mount from WWII. They just took the gun away, and built the snack bar on top of it.
-harry
I rented a place some years back, and got evicted six months later (with a full refund of my rent), because it turned out the apartment was illegal. The landlord hadn't known that when he rented it to me. Unfortunately, another tenant he evicted (in the other tenant's case for non-payment of rent) apparently
did know it and reported him to the city, and they made him tear the apartment out.
In the process of researching it, however, we learned some interesting history.
The apartment was built in what would have been the attic of a walk-up when it was built. It was a huge, open, airy place with many windows, but most of them in the "rear" of the apartment (meaning that part opposite the side that faced the street). Other than the bedrooms and the spartan bath / shower room, everything else was just one huge room.
The kitchen was not a "room," but an area where the ancient stove and sink (and the slightly-less ancient refrigerator) were. The dining area was the area adjacent to the kitchen area. And so forth. All one big room, but oddly enough, divided -- yet without walls -- into areas that just seemed to logically serve as "rooms," even before the furniture was arranged. I loved the place. It was basically a huge loft, except without the high ceilings. And it was only a grand a month -- dirt cheap by NYC standards.
There also was a terrace, of sorts, in the back that could be reached by climbing through the rear windows -- kind of an odd arrangement that I wondered about at first. And there was evidence of various things that had been mounted on the rear terrace at some point in time, but which had since been removed. I assumed that they were remnants of various TV or radio antennae mounts.
As it turned out, the apartment was actually built as an observation post during the years leading up to WWII. There was a notation in the Building Department records of a "temporary" apartment being built there for use by the War Department. The rear of the house faced the East River, and apparently lookouts were stationed there.
The apartment was used throughout the war, and afterward was pretty much continually rented as a residential unit. Apparently there were quite a few of these places scattered throughout the city, which I hadn't known until then.
But there was a deadline and process for these apartments to be legalized for civilian use, which the previous landlord never bothered with. Basically, papers had to be filed and important things like fire escapes had to be up to code. The Army Engineers' existing statements that the additions didn't compromise the structural safety of the building would suffice for the rest. After that date, however, the process of legalizing the apartments would be much more complex, requiring architects, engineers, and so forth, which would make the process much more expensive.
The landlord was mightily annoyed, of course, not in the least because the city had been taxing him on the apartment ever since he bought the building. But under NYC law, the fact that the City is collecting tax on a place doesn't make it legal. I learned some new cuss words from Eddie when he found that out.
He was more than honorable to me, though. He refunded all of the rent I'd paid, and even helped me schlep my stuff to the new place I found a few blocks away.
It was humbling to think of the history of the place, and how history affects us in so many ways we never think about. Where I slept, people once stood watch for threats to our nation's continued existence, diligently standing their watches on the same "terrace" that I used to soak up rays and burn steaks. Very humbling indeed.
It also reminded me of when I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, and large portions of the extensive underground civil defense shelters were still accessible, if you looked for them. All of the basements on my block, for example, had doors and passageways connecting them, some locked, others not.
Air raid shelter signs were still tacked to the exteriors of the buildings, and it's within the realm of possibility that certain curious children may have, on occasion, found ways to bypass the locked doors, get into these old shelters, and explore. It's also theoretically possible that
we those children came across all sorts of items dating back to the war, ranging from emergency water and rations, to blankets, to huge old radio sets, to the occasional firearm, and most valuable of all, maps of the underground network of civil defense tunnels and basements, to fuel even more exploration.
I think that's where
my those childrens' love of history was born.
-Rich
