So, I forgot to tell you a couple of things that Poppi told me. When he was a child the house he lived in (North Vermont St, Vermont Ave., etc) did not have central heating. The heat was provided by a coal/wood burning stove in the kitchen and the heat rose upstairs through "at least two or more" flat iron grates/holes/vents in the floor. This method did "a pretty good job" of heating the house. Eventually radiators were installed and heating was centralized.
Water was heated in a "kettle of sorts" on the kitchen stove and then this heated water was carried upstairs to the bathroom and dumped into the tub for the weekly bath. There was no central hot water heater. Poppi did not have to use an "out house". As far back as Poppi can remember the house had indoor plumbing and a toilet that could be flushed by pulling a cord from an overhead water closet. Initially the lighting in the house was via gas. There were mantels that "glowed" placed over the gas jets. Poppi describes these mantels as "skinny, white, fragile substances". Poppi remembers getting in trouble on more than one occasion for jumping in the upstairs bedroom and breaking one or more of these very fragile gas mantels downstairs.
Poppi remembers that sometime when he was a little boy electricity was brought into the neighborhood via electric poles. At that point his Uncle Frank (husband of his Aunt Mae - Aunt Mae was my grandmother, Elizabeth Daniel Fries' sister - Aunt Mae and Uncle Frank were the parents of his cousin Flo Leuzzi who lived in Franklin Square) wired the house for electric lights. As an aside, Poppi's cousin Flo is still in touch with Poppi. Flo is in her 90's also and considers Charlie one of her favorite cousins.
In 1937, when the Interboro Parkway was constructed, the electric wires were placed underground. When he married and bought the house next door to his birth home ( # 62) Poppi accessed the underground electric cable, spliced into it and and changed the voltage coming into his house from the standard (110?) to 220 volts (sorry my knowledge of electricity is sorely lacking). Sounds scary to me. I'm glad he didn't electrocute himself. Currently, although the man is 97 years old, he is still supervising an electrical wiring job that Bob is doing on out new back porch. He know his electricity!
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Treasured stories....Judy P
ReplyDeleteYou know, MB, when we moved into a home (in 1971) in Baton Rouge built in 1934, the house was raised off the ground about 2.5 feet (on concrete piers) because of possible flooding from the Mississippi River a few miles away. Our heat was through gas "floor" and "wall" furnaces, below the level of the home, with iron grates in several strategic rooms. We instructed the kids never to walk across the grates since it would burn their feet if the heater was on. Of course, one day our daughter, age 2.5, walked onto a hot grate. The bottom of her foot looked like the grid on a hamburger cooked on a grill. She eventually recovered and walked again. Those inefficient furnaces stopped working in the 1980-90s period when no one living knew how to fix them. We didn't get central heat until the early 2000s, but then you don't have many days when you need heat in the deep south.
ReplyDeleteMy Poppi was an amazing man. Miss him all the time.
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