Getting to Know You

TALES FROM THE TERRACE

Hurray for a GPS. It helped me find my way in this complicated new town. After a week of unpacking and settling in I was ready to make sense of everything. Each day I went exploring, deciding where I wanted to go, putting in the address and following the directions. That’s how I found shops, coffee places, the library, grocery stores, banks and pharmacies. Everything I needed. So close.

Next, I wanted to get to know everything about this lovely building. From talking to people who’ve been here a long time and from the internet I learned that this building that was once a school has an interesting history.

Hawthorne Junior High School was built in 1931 (so says the cornerstone) and serviced seventh and eighth grade students until 1969 or so. Hawthorne and other junior high schools were becoming overcrowded so the city decided to build a second high school and a middle school. Once students enrolled in the new schools, Hawthorne closed.

It sat empty until 1987 when it was purchased by Reilly Joseph who owned and managed several senior living facilities. They reconfigured the building to hold 40 apartments with 23 different floor plans. A few years later, the owners decided to expand.

The school’s indoor swimming pool west of the building (the only public swimming pool in Wauwatosa) was demolished and replaced by a new addition that added apartments and an underground parking garage. The building now has one hundred apartments and twenty -seven different floor plans. The architect of the expansion project, Jack Shepherd, lived in the apartment next to mine.

In summer 2013, due to the many vacancies, the owners decided the building needed to become an inter-generational apartment building. This was about the time I moved in. Here’s where it gets interesting and where the residents of the building become part of the story.

The woman who was the building manager had been working there a long time. I heard many stories of how wonderful this place had been in its heyday. The dinners and cocktail hours were a great memory. The manger’s husband, a retired restaurant and bar owner, did the cooking. Yikes! The health department would have lots to say about that.

I’d met some residents who had never lived anywhere else but in their home, while married and raising children and then in this place mostly as widows. I met two who had been life-long friends since grade school. Another resident discovered a new man who’d moved in had been the best man in her wedding some fifty years ago.  It was a small world.

The building manager and her husband had for many years lived in the building. They thought of the residents as family and accommodated them in this way. So, any change would have been hard for them. For me, a newcomer, I thought it was nice that now families and children were being welcomed in.

Others thought it was terrible. The first year, we had four medical students move in. To me, they were the perfect neighbors. They were never around and when they were, they were studying. Management changed the long unused craft room to a study room to accommodate them.

This caused quite a fury and residents voiced concern that more drastic changes were coming. One resident feared this meant she could no longer walk the hallways as part of her exercise regime. So, she’s worried a medical student will assault her!  I also heard rumors that some residents had been unkind toward them. Hmm. I wonder if that has to do with the fact they were mostly Middle Eastern.

At first, I felt out of my element since I don’t’ have much in common with most who live here. When they hear of my divorced, childless by choice and non-religious attitude, there is stone cold silence. That’s okay because I’ve got plenty of friends who live nearby. In fact, I’ve reconnected with all the friends I’d left behind when I moved up north.

For me, I love this place. It has a quiet almost small-town feel with everything so close. I have the privacy I want but if I’m lonely I just walk down the hall to the library or the lobby. There’s always someone to chat with. I love sitting in my window to watch the soccer games in the park across the street.  I do a lot of reading while sitting on the patio. This has quickly become my home.