Basement on Greene Street

Some memories of our basement in the house on Greene St

The stairs to the basement were in the kitchen behind a door next to the dryer. The rec room was at the bottom of the stairs. It had a nice wooden floor, wood paneled walls, groovy blue lights along the wall just below the ceiling, a couple of couches, a table for board games and a small but adequate record player. A nice place to hang out except there was never a TV down there and in a way that was a good thing. It was a place to escape the never turned off TV set in the living room. For many years our great-grandparents also lived in the house so this was also a place to get away from the family stuff of six kids, two parents and the elders. I don’t have any pictures of the basement and I wish I did but I can recreate those spaces from memory. It’s been almost 53 years since I was there but I remember it like it was yesterday.

As teenagers we often had our friends over to our house and everyone loved to hangout in our basement. Our parents actually liked us to bring our friends home. They always entertained and they encouraged us to have people over too. It was also a way for them to get to know our friends which seemed to be important to both of them. Sometimes I went down there by myself just to read on the couch and have some quiet time.

We had lots of parties in that rec room and I developed my mix making skills with stacks of carefully selected and ordered 45’s placed on the turntable. There certainly was plenty of dancing going on down there under the blue lights. It was finger poppin’ time and we would dance the boogaloo to Motown and other soul music, garage rock and British Invasion songs with a little Frank Zappa thrown in to mix things up. Did those line dances too. I had a large collection of records by the time we moved from there in 1968 and they got plenty of use on that dance floor. There was a window high on one wall then opened into the side alley next to the house which we used to bring booze into the rec room parties.

There were other rooms in the basement. The room in the back of the house was the train room where Dad kept all his model railroading stuff including stacks of magazines on model railroading he’d been collecting since he was a teenager. I really liked going through them. He had boxes of old trains and railroad cars, tracks, transformers and related equipment. The old trains were in kits that needed to be assembled and were not at all like the trains that I saw sold in stores at the time.

The room also held the wood framework that provided the platform for the train setup. There wasn’t much built yet but some track was laid and there were other areas where you could see the outline of a town. There were places in the layout where there would be a hole that was designed as a lake next to the town where he could come up from under the platform and work on sections that would otherwise have been out of reach. He loved talking about the design and his plans and we were often down there just looking and then we would tell me his vision.  He was always happy then and I think he really looked forward to retiring some day with his trains.

However, at that time most of the room was the platform waiting for the model railroading wonderland. Dad often took me and Tom to see traveling model railroading displays when they came to town and we certainly knew what he had in mind for our basement. We moved in 1968 and the railroad platform and all the equipment was packed up and taken to the new house. The new basement had the stacks of wood, the boxes of trains and stacks of magazines but sadly, it didn’t happen as he planned and he never got to work again on his beloved trains.

One of the other things about that train room in our basement was the large number of gallon wine bottles filled with water stored under the train platform along the wall. There were at least twenty bottles, probably more but they never made the move to Harleysville. They had been collected there in the basement as part of a plan by our parents to deal with a possible aftermath of a nuclear war which of course was a common fear in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. We didn’t have a bomb shelter but they probably felt they needed to do something so we had these bottles of water just in case. Lots of people in the neighborhood had some bomb shelter things going on in their basements. A sign of the times.

There were two other rooms in the basement towards the front of the house. The first one was very small, had lots of shelves and was used for storage. I seemed to be the one always sent down there to find something for our Mom so I got to know about everything on those shelves. The other room next to the rec room was as large as that room but contained the gas furnace. There was also the remains of a coal bin and Dad’s rather extensive workbench area, tool box and tool collection. Dad was a machinist and handyman who could fix anything around the house. I was always fascinated sitting beside him as he worked on something. We never had a repair man around the house except to fix the television set. Everything else he did himself including constantly fixing the washer and dryer. He had all his tools in that basement room. When I was sixteen and began working as a machinist’s helper he took me to Sears to buy my own tool box full of essential tools. I still have that same tool box in my own basement today.

However, the best thing about that room was the bathroom it contained. It was actually very nice and functional with a door and a window into the alley. There was only one other toilet in the house so having this one was essential for this large family of ten people. Dad later expanded the bathroom and added a shower stall which greatly helped with all the fighting over the bathroom upstairs.

I almost exclusively used the basement shower through my teenage years. We also studied a lot on those couches and worked on papers at that table particularly while in high school. Tom often had friends over to study together down there and Betsy would also have girlfriends over to hangout down there. We played games at the table and had a carrom board setup which was a two sided game board that included a kind of miniature pool table plus lots of other games on it. The whole family used that basement space for all kinds of activities, well except for our mom who didn’t venture down there too often. I certainly spent a lot of time down in that basement on Greene Street and although I don’t have any pictures I do have some vivid memories.

 And here are a couple of pictures of a carrom board.