by David Ferguson
When my family first moved to Detroit in 1952, we lived in the lower half of a brick duplex at 13101 Cherrylawn, in northwest Detroit.
Some time around fifth grade, I was learning the “proper format” for writing letters. My teacher insisted that we include “street” or “road” or “avenue” after the street name. I remember wondering with a little annoyance how anyone knew it was Cherrylawn Street rather than Cherrylawn Road, though I didn’t argue. The street signs around us only showed the names: Cherrylawn, Northlawn, Buena Vista, Fullerton.
When the Jeffries Freeway was built, and my former street was one of the few to cross over the freeway, I learned that I had lived on Cherrylawn Avenue.
Just across the street from our house was Littlefield, a city playground that took up most of an entire block. Walking from our house, you’d first pass some tennis course, then a large expanse of concrete with a thin metal pole, and finally come to the playground itself.
My brothers John, Art, and I had it pretty good, living across the street from a playground.
The playground had lots of room. There were areas with monkey bars, with swings (for little kids and older ones), a telephone pole on its side with a steel rail (as in railroad) attached to it (for balancing), another pile of telephone poles, stacked on their side in a pyramid. Sandboxes for little kids, fields for baseball and kickball, and open areas for simply running around.
One block over was the land belonging to the public elementary school. Since the playground was named Littlefield, we always called the school lot “Bigfield.”
In the center of the Littlefield playground was a building used as an office by the city Parks and Recreation staff who ran programs. I learned to make kites there, and big masks out of papier-mâche.
The expanse of concrete I mentioned earlier, with the metal pole, was known as “the showers.” In the summer, kids would arrive in swimsuits, and at scheduled times one of the parks people would turn a hidden valve, and water would gush out from the big shower head at the top of the pole.
So, yes, it was like a giant, outdoor shower, and we’d run around on the concrete, having a great time. It didn’t strike me as strange at the time, though later I realized I’d never seen another place like it.
Years later, after I’d married and moved to Virginia, I happened to meet a woman at a party. She’d grown up two or three blocks away from my house on Cherrylawn, and remembered the showers distinctly. Because she was a few years older than I am, she even knew how there came to be showers.
According to her, there had originally been a swimming pool at Littlefield. But in the late 1940s or early 1950s, because of the fear of spreading polio, the pool was filled in. Eventually, probably after polio vaccine had been developed, the parks department decided it would be too expensive to tear up the concrete, and instead came up with the idea of the giant shower head.
Polio was no idle fear. My brother John walked with a brace on his leg because of polio he’d contracted back in Nova Scotia. And every family in St. Brigid’s parish, where we lived in Detroit, knew about Patricia O’Brien, whose family lived a block from the church. She was twelve years old when she contracted polio. It left her paralyzed from the neck down for decades.
Pat was a vivacious, dynamic person. Despite behing unable to walk or even turn the pages of a book on her own, she joined discussion groups at church, and although she needed a portable respirator and a reclining wheelchair, loved going to events with friends.
I wonder whether her particular situation had anything to do with the filled-in pool that (after an effective polio vaccine) became the playground showers?