This is another story about the fact that we as Pittsburghers make our homes mostly on hills or in valleys. This is another secret place that few, I’m sure, have seen–maybe it’s been seen but as children we took it for our own.
On Shady Avenue Extension there always was this one empty lot where nobody thought to build a house. It still is vacant and this is in between the Fields’ and Silvermans’ former homes.
When Arlene and Naomi and I played together and explored our tiny world we thought we had examined every rock, stone, plant, and the back alley. We knew who lived in every house. However, as we grew up–turning 11 and 12–we experienced something that Shel Silverstein says in his “Where The Sidewalk Ends.” We walked across the vacant lot and came up to the wire fence. We looked at each other. Then we found a gap in this fence and pushed our way through. What we saw made us speechless.
Once through the fence we saw that the land, in a dramatic way, sloped steeply down. If you fell and lost your balance or sat down on your behind and slid down, you’d go crashing down with nothing to stop your fall, all the way to one of the houses on Beechwood Boulevard, where you’d land in somebody’s back yard. And of course you’d be dead. We swallowed hard.
Placed on this terrifying steep hill were several HUGE boulders, the largest we’d ever seen. We couldn’t speak. We thought that they must have been there for centuries. But we discussed it and came up with the solution that when our area was being made ready to be cleared and houses built, these boulders were in the way and just got pushed over the hill.
We were curious risk-takers and couldn’t resist doing dangerous things. So in the summer of 1961 and 1962 we’d leave our homes, all very innocently, then went all the way down the street to the vacant lot. Sometimes a boy named Jeffrey came with us and we’d sit at the crest of the hill, just talking and enjoying the fact that yet again we were doing something bad.
lgmwriting 