23a - The Old Neighborhood: The Microcosm of our Apartment Block (A Dark Basement)

The main entrance to the building, a low-cost minimalist design devoid of superfluous features, was through a transparent glass panel door with a pale-green metal frame that opened to the U-turn landing of the staircase. Its left side led to a dark basement comprising two apartments, whose windows, the only source of light and air, opened level with a minuscule pavement. The narrowness of the alley in front did not lend itself for daring architectural interventions at and around the entrance of the building -at the time of its construction, and for decades after.

During our stay none of the basement apartments had I seen occupied. They were abandoned by the builders at their poor original states: undecorated and unfinished, dark and cold, forsaken. At a time when local and state authorities, in the name of growth and development, were sweeping under the carpet the last remnants of postwar poverty, most basements were not designed for humane occupation in their darkness and dampness; in our childhood imagination they were habitats of ghosts and monsters. Decades later, around the turn of the millennium, on the first wave of immigration from Albania and Eastern Europe, in one of my rare walks by our old street, I saw for a first the shutters of the two basement apartments open and curtains hanging from behind the window panes: human beings, immigrants or homeless or a gang of delinquents made it home -I thought. Later in the history of the city, after several booms and busts in the construction industry, on another visit to the old neighbourhood, the two basement apartments had their shutters firmly closed. They were left deserted again, as they were half a century ago, abandoned by their tenants, whoever they might be, or, less likely, after police having enforced eviction of any squatters.

What looked like a long corridor separated the two basement apartments. Pitch-black and suffocating by its dampness and frightening ended to a concrete wall dead-end. The light from the central lighting system was too weak to illuminate more than a few steps down the flight of stairs to the basement. Neither the builder, nor any of the permanent residents bothered to install some lighting that would alleviate our childish fears in the long winter evenings by the entrance, I spent with my friend discussing horror and ghost stories. Towards its dead-end, that corridor opened through a permanently locked iron door to the main light duct on the side of the building, not visible by passers-by, where skylight and open air conflicted with the darkness and stale odor of the unventilated basement. Occasionally, one of the residents would go downstairs to the duct through the basement corridor and its door, to pick up clothes fallen from the balcony airer or a children’s toy thrown through the railings.

The only life in that dirty and neglected space consisted of mice and rats, seen from our balconies scurrying across from one corner of the duct to another, and the occasional stray cat wandering aimlessly or in search of food. There had been occasions when mice overcame their fears of humans and climbed the drainpipes, in daring wanderings for food in the kitchens and toilets of the apartments of the first and even the second floor -our floor! The sight of them, even the idea of their presence in our apartment, triggered a sense of panic mixed with disgust in Mother and the child in me -and it still does. Father was brave enough to chase them away or even try to kill them with a broomstick.