After we moved...

I know I have said this already, but I am just fascinated with the mass exodus from the old neighborhood. Everyone who lived there has such fond memories of the neighborhood, yet within about ten years, just about everyone had moved out. If it was such a great place, why didn't people just stay there? Well it is easy for me to say, I was ten years old when we moved, I saw only the good and none of the bad.

Some time ago, I ran into one of my former classmates from St. David's on one of the social networking sites. We exchanged several emails and she gave me her perspective. I have taken out a lot of the identifying information but this gives some insight into what happened after we moved:

So Goodale [public elementary school] was not very "good" by 1974. We had fights in my classroom almost everyday and the police patrolled the school all the time. I'm sure you're glad that you moved out when you did. I was relieved when we moved. My grandma stayed at the house for about another 10 years or so after we moved out. She didn't want to move. She kicked us out but we eventually made up with her and would go back and forth, helping her take care of the house. Eventually the elderly man next door got mugged outside his house and the black family's (that had moved in next door on the other side) son got stabbed in the vacant lot between our houses. They were a nice family. I don't know what happened but I think the teenage boy got into a fight. He was ok, though. My grandma still rode the bus to the store until she was about 90. We finally sold the house and she moved in an apartment with my mom.

We moved from the neighborhood in 1975. It had already started to go downhill before then. Another time we were coming home from church at night ([sister], my grandma and me) in December. My grandma tried to open the front door of our house and it swung open by itself. Someone had broken into our house. I had never been so scared in my life. It took the Detroit police over an hour to respond. We had Christmas presents upstairs that hadn't been touched but my mom's and my grandma's bedrooms were ransacked. They even missed a bunch of cash that my grandma had stashed. They took things of little value so it must have been amateurs. The neighboorhood continued to go downhill. We moved. I was glad because I would have had to have gone to Denby for high school. [Sister] went to Domican for 9th grade and I went to Goodale for 8th grade since my mom couldn't afford to send us both to private school anymore. 8th grade was the worst year of my life.