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Halloween on Mulberry Street
Thursday, October 31 2024
location: Mulberry Street, Rochester, NY
Gretchen and I got up a little early so we could meet a realtor at the house we're buying on Alliance Avenue for quick half-hour walk-through. We arrived on Alliance as a large team of city employees were using leaf blowers and garbage trucks to haul away a thick accumulation of leaves. Gretchen had paid just enough attention to sports news to know that the Yankees had lost the World Series, which gave her something to briefly commisserate with one of the workers about. (New York City is a long way from Rochester, but apparently it's close enough for baseball fandom.) The realtor today wasn't the one we'd worked with, but a younger, plumper, dumber woman from the same office. The realtor we'd worked with had taken a vacation, her replacement said, somewhere in Europe where good chocolate comes from. "Switzerland?" Gretchen asked. "Yeah, that's the one!" We entered the house through a sticky front door, and somehow the house was even better than we'd expected. Everything was in perfect shape, nothing needed renovation, and it was all presented beautifully because the residents (who'd left long enough for us to do the walk through) had excellent taste. I was mostly looking for signs of problems, so after being wowed by the large communal spaces on the first floor, I was particularly interested in the basement. It had a concrete floor with concrete block walls. I looked these over for signs of widening cracks and recent repairs. It wasn't perfect, and there had been repairs here and there. But it looked sound and stable. There was a sump pump, suggesting occasional problems with flooding, but, being on the side of a hill, I had doubts water was a common problem. The basement didn't look like it had flooded any time recently. I would've preferred that the paint on the basement walls not be so fresh, since that indicated something bad might lurk beneath it. But most of the paint was on the original blocks, which hadn't been covered with any sort of stucco. The circuit breaker box revealed the service to only be 100 amps, which is probably sufficient in a house whose heating (for air, water, and food) happens entirely via natural gas. We'd opted not to get an inspection for this house, since mostly all inspectors do is point out that there are rectangular holes where breakers should be in the circuit breaker box.
The upstairs had four bedrooms around a central square hall around the stairway. One even included its own greenhouse as a separate room reachable only from that one room on the southeast side of the house, facing the back yard.
The attic was unfinished, but it had a walkable floor and the rafters overhead were gorgeous in their intricacy as they framed the complicated roof structure, which was pyramidal with three dormers and that amazing cupola directly overhead. The light switch for the attic was a long string running through various eye-screws with a little plastic Bart Simpson dangling at the end. There was some exposed some wiring of the knob & tube variety being fed by some modern romex, but that doesn't freak me out at all. (The house was built in 1911.)
Finally, we walked around the back to investigate how fenced the yard was (answer: partially) and the state of the garage (answer: so immaculate we're considering making it into granny flat for when we visit Rochester). There were also lots of gorgeous flowers, some of which were still blooming. The next yard behind this one's is atop a terrace, and I was little concerned about how runoff flowed from that direction. But the landscaping looked like it prevented water from impacting the foundation.
After we'd said goodbye to the dumb realtor, we drove to the Swillburg Neighborhood to try the vegan options at yet another non-vegan place, this time Book Eater, a coffee shop that is also a bookstore. I wanted the avocado toast (with tofu instead of a fried egg) but they were out of tofu, so I ordered a bánh mi sandwich instead, which was a bit more food that I was in the mood for. Distressingly, the tofu in the bánh mi sandwich had been colored as if it might be egg, which is really not something that someone like me wants to see. But I ate it anyway, and it wasn't terrible. I've been so spoiled by vegan-only brunch places that I'd forgotten about the eggy grossness of most other such places, where sometimes (as I did today at Book Eater) I find myself breathing through my mouth so as not to have to smell that eggy smell. And, as for the coffee, it was only mediocre at best. And there was an upcharge on the no-mammals-were-harmed oat milk. But Gretchen was wearing her "This childless cat lady is voting Kamala" teeshirt, and it was getting approving comments. (Rochester is so deeply blue that the few Republicans in it are peer-pressured into only putting out yard signs for unfamiliar local candidates.)
At some point Gretchen showed me a photo she'd taken of a close-up of the wallpaper in the Alliance Avenue house. It looked like a ho-hum black-and-white depiction of pine trees on an imprecise plane. But then you notice an alien standing there amid the trees. Or hiding in the bushes. Then in one place a UFO is hovering while beaming up a reluctant human hiker. The house's awesomeness is fractal in nature.
For some reason we left our car near Book Eater and walked back to Mulberry Street. There we told Maryann all about how amazing our Alliance Avenue house is, including the wacky wallpaper. Maryann had accidentally dropped her little deaf & blind dog Lulu last night, and now she was favoring one of her paws, so now she had to set up a vet appointment for her. "She'll probably be fine by the time you take her to that," I said.
Gretchen wanted to go hang out in Highland Park, but as we walked there I started feeling more and more uneasy about having left our unlocked Bolt on the street at Book Eater. Rochester is not Kingston, and there are a lot of tweakers walking around looking for any possible way to get a few dollars. I'd left a box with sixteen feet of minisplit line in the back of the Bolt (having taken it to Hurley so I could know its measurements when planning the cabin minisplit installation), and I was worried someone would steal it. Initially I kept silent about it, but Gretchen could tell something was bothering me. So when we got to Highland Park, I admitted that this was the thing that was troubling me. She asked "why didn't you tell me before?" I admitted that I thought she would think I was being ridiculous. She said that wasn't the case, and that it didn't really matter whether or not my fears were rational; if they were easy to dispell, then we should do that. So we walked back to the car and then looked for a sunny place to sit where Gretchen could eat the leftovers she'd brought. I-480 was right there, and it had a patch of grass and even a community garden near it. But in the end we drove back to Highland Park and sat beneath a tree northeast of the reservoir, watching various single women try to use a water fountain that wasn't working. We also fucked around with our respective phones. It was yet another unseasonably gorgeous day.
But then it was time to "mosey." Gretchen had scheduled a tour of the Susan B. Anthony house over on the west side of the Genesee River. We drove through some marginal neighborhoods on the way there, some fairly close to Anthony's house. But around a nearby square featuring a statue of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, the houses looked a bit less run-down.
New York isn't a state where it's been easy to vote early, though that is changing. Today, for example, there was a long line of people who had come to vote early at Susan B. Anthony's house, which has been made one of the early voting locations in honor of America's best-known advocate of female suffrage. As we approached the line, people we knew were standing in it: Moore and Jasmin, though I think Jasmin might've also been there to work on a national NPR story about voting at Susan B. Anthony's house. As we approached, we realized that Gretchen's Kamala-supporting teeshirt might've been in violation of electioneering rules, so she folded the bottom of the shirt to make the last line ("Kamala") invisible. Nearby in line was a woman with another awesome teeshirt, this one less obviously partisan. It read, "My broomstick runs on the tears of mediocre white men." Everyone there was probably there to vote for Kamala Harris.
The Susan B. Anthony house is actually two houses, with an additional one next door added to provide for a gift shop, administrative offices, and fun services like early voting. We waited in the gift shop for our two-o'clock tour in case there were any walk-ins. But there weren't any, so we had the tour just for ourselves. The woman who led it was a slender 60-something who occasionally had senior moments but nevertheless did an excellent job considering that she'd only started leading such tours a few days before. We saw the parlors and the bedrooms, learned about Anthony's fraught relationship with Douglass. They had a falling out over including women in the Reconstruction amendments, with Douglass fearing that including women would be a "poison pill" that would doom them. In the end, though, the amendments were worded ambiguously, referring to "persons" and not "men." So Anthony managed to register to vote and then actually voted, only to be arrested on federal charges. She was convicted by an asshole federal judge, but she never ended up paying her fine, and she was never sentenced, which meant she could never appeal her sentence. The young men who had registered her were also charged an imprisoned, but eventually Ulysses S. Grant gave them a pardon. These were among the things we learned. We also learned that the house was ultimately left to Susan B. Anthony's niece and the woman who was her "life partner." The tour ended on the third floor, which had been added in Anthony's time by jacking up the roof. It was a necessary addition to provide offices for the people working to bring voting rights to women, something that didn't happen until 14 years after she'd died.
Next we drove back to Meigs Street (near Book Eater) to get lupper at Swillburger, a quirky hamburger restaurant with a bar and lots of pinball machines in the crumbling remains of an old brick church. ("Very Portland," as Gretchen said.) The woman taking our order was had thick face paint as part of her Halloween costume, and she told us about our vegan options. The house veggie burger contained raisins, which is not something we would want in a burger, so we opted for Impossible Burgers, fries, and a milkshake for Gretchen. After all the mushroom and vegan upcharges, it came to something like $36. I then went to the bar and got a 12 oz glass of very strong double IPA, which I carried out onto the balcony despite signage saying alcoholic drinks were forbidden. (I'm at the age now where such rules can safely be ignored, and nobody says anything about it.) The burgers were pretty good, though probably not $36 good. After we'd eaten, I briefly considered playing a game of pinball, but when I learned that it cost $1 and not 25 cents, I said "no fucking way!"
Back at Maryann's house, Gretchen and Maryann chatted for awhile in the living room while I dozed off in the guest room. At some point I heard the Gretchen and Maryann preparing to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters, so I decided to come down to help out. It also seemed like the kind of cultural experience I might actually like. Maryann was dressed as a simple witch, wearing a black dress and a pointy black hat, and Gretchen was still wearing her childless cat lady teeshirt. At this point I was looking rather generic in my brown trousers and black long-sleeved shirt. Maryann had bought seven boxes of a sixty-count-per-box candy called "Airheads," a sort of sugar-and-color-and-fake-fruit-flavor vegan jerky that risks pulling out your fillings as you chew it. Gretchen and Maryann had tried part of one and found it completely inedible, but I didn't think they were so terrible and ate the rest of that one and another one as well, leaving us 418 of them to hand out to trick-or-treaters. We sat on the steps up to the porch so there wouldn't be anyone slipping and falling, as had happened on previous Halloweens.
There was still light in the sky, and already they were upon us. They sometimes came in groups or other times just one or two. This being the era of the helicopter parent, almost all the children were accompanied by adults, even some of the teenagers (and yes, there were teenagers). Back in the early 1970s when I was a trick-or-treater, my parents definitely weren't there (at least not the trick or treating I did that I can remember). Surpringly, most of the costumes were unique, though there were a great many little boys dressed in the same Spider Man outfit. The kids were mostly polite and well-behaved, though occasionally they tried to get more than one Airhead. Only one kid declined our candy, insisting on Reese's Pieces and nothing else. (They're not vegan.) Another kid tried to swap a small bag of Cheese Nips for an additional Airhead, but of course we didn't want that. Most of the banter was us saying "Happy Halloween" and the kids saying "Trick or treat!" Occasionally, though, I'd make a comment about an outfit, and usually this would cause the kid to say something, either to correct me or provide detail. One tiny girl looked like a princess, so I asked if she was maybe an earless or a baronness. She turned to her parents and said, somewhat correctly, "He's picking on me!" There were a couple Dorothys from the Wizard of Oz, though one wore green face paint and was, she made clear, a ghoul Dorothy. As for the teenagers, many of them looked like young adults and weren't even wearing costumes. But if they said "trick or treat," they got an Airhead.
I was amazed at how many trick-or-treaters I was seeing and also by the elaborate work put into Halloween displays by other houses on the street. (One actually had a full haunted tent set up.) Maryann said that Mulberry Street is famous as a Halloween destination in Rochester, and that many of these kids had been driven across town specifically to tick-or-treat here. She said that the activity wasn't anywhere near as frantic on any of the adjacent streets. At some point someone had some sort of emergency several doors down and a firetruck arrived.
At some point Jasmin showed up to hang out with us as we were doling out the candy, but then she had to run off to the public radio office for some radio emergency. Not long after that, we handed out our last Airhead and had to tell a little girl that we had no more candy. At that point we went into the house, turned off the porch light, and pulled down the shades. We'd occasionally hear thumps on the porch after that, but we didn't respond. It was a little like Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. (Another bird analogy had come to me earlier, when frantically handing out candy had felt like a mother bird feeding nestlings.) Jasmin eventually returned, and we talked for awhile in the living room while Lulu rolled around adorably in her dog bed and Fox the cat sampled our various petting techniques. When Jasmin decided to leave, she was actually worried about the possibility of being assaulted, so I walked with her out to her car. By that point trick-or-treating was over and Mulberry Street was empty.
While Gretchen and Maryann watched a dumb Disney movie, I went off to bed.
I don't know that this was the only time I'd ever doled out candy on Halloween, but it was definitely the longest I'd ever spent doing so. The experience was a strangely pleasant one, affirming the value of society and suggesting humankind isn't as monstrous as I often think it to be. Ironically, of course, many of the humans I'd dealt with tonight had been dressed up as various kinds of monsters.
Flowers in the backyard of our Alliance Avenue house today.
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A woman wearing a fun teeshirt waiting to vote at Susan B. Anthony's house today.
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The line of voters at Susan B. Anthony's house today.
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Gretchen in the small outdoor balcony area at Swillburger today.
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