Withnell

This is the abandoned school across the street. There's a ballroom on the top floor, and sometimes the people who run the adjoining church, St. Agatha's, have dances. I know this because they own a set of these and use them until midnight. They shine on through the bedroom window, rotating green, purple, blue. Given the small congregation and the financial problems I'm sure they have, sometimes I wonder if there will be an "everyone drink the punch" ending to one of these dances. I'll wake up one morning to see the globe rotating in silence.

We've been dying to explore the building ever since we signed the lease. Last fall, the people who own the property had a junk sale in a few classrooms and what used to be the cafeteria. We went in on the pretense of being junk-lovers just to see (and smell) the school. (The school smells as elementary schools should--of oppression and decades of sweat due to lack of air conditioning.) There is an old-fashioned wheelchair lift on the side of the steps, and a stilled windsock hanging from a light fixture in the hallway. The people running the sale, who also own the property, told us the school has been empty since the 1970s. What used to be a German-Catholic parish is now Polish-Catholic. (Insert WWII metaphor now.)

Once we walked around the outside of the school and looked through all the windows. Into the basement, we saw a chalkboard with a hangman game. It probably hadn't been there as long as we'd have liked, given our romantic ideas of "abandoned school" and "the way things were." The blanks were filled in with "Forgiveness," even though the man was hung. Indeed.

The people who owned our house probably sent their kids to that school. They were probably members of the church, and they all lived in community with the other houses on concrete and brick, surrounded by iron fences. They were probably uneasy with how the city was changing (and how their close-knit community was getting smaller) and with the school's closing, they began to feel queasy and probably migrated to the suburbs sometime in the 1980s.

I had wondered if the proximity of such a large, abandoned building would be cause for paranoia when doing things like exiting my car late at night, but that hasn't been the case. The school is a friendly presence, and the streetlamp is a comforting reminder of civilization. The only unexpected knocks at our door has been pizza delivery for the house behind us.

Once in a while, it's nice to look up at night.