Memories of the Canal
Resident of Ransom Place for over forty years, Rita Orett, shares her memories of the Central Canal
“The best thing about growing up in our neighborhood was that it was a real neighborhood with neighbors that interacted with each other. There were alot of children, animals, older people. I don’t remember a lot of teenagers but thats because I was a kid. But, there were alot of children. And we even knew the people who carried the paper route, there was a paper station right across the street from our house and that brought new people into the neighborhood we had not seen before. We became friends with them also. Our neighborhood was a real neighborhood and my father owned the grocery store in the neighborhood, Bedford Variety Store ".
"The powers 'that be' have infiltrated the area and the area will never ever be the same; there are only a few originals left in the neighborhood. People say they’ve lived here for fifteen years, well i’ve lived here for forty years! My mother wasn’t born here, but she got married and lived here her whole life after that. We had relatives here and that’s why we moved to the neighborhood".
Rita crossed the Central Canal, everyday, on her route to IPS 40.
“The other side of the Canal was very different — once you got over to that part of the world, there was a junk yard and many other things. It was a bustling place. I remember asking my friend “why is this water here," “how come it looks like that,” and “do people ever go right up to the edge?" I saw people fish in the Canal, sometimes for dinner - (it was) their livelihood. This was before the Canal was developed now, as it is. There were no walkways, no concrete barriers. It was just land that went down to the water with many bushes and it was just natural".
She recalled playing around the Canal and saw children catch creatures. She wondered about why the water looked murky, pea green and was skeptical that things actually lived in it. Or "how" things lived in it. She thought, “water’s not that color, and on tv and in the cartoons it’s not that color, at home it’s not that color". She thought “this must really be something unique - a canal - water, this close”! But, she wondered, “what was the point of it and what was the purpose”? She said, “I didn’t want anyone to know that I didn't know. My friend was quiet about it, she acted like it was no big deal and wondered why I was going on about it all the time.”
Rita has limited interaction with the Central Canal nowadays.
“We don’t walk as much as we used to. My two children and my husband would walk the canal everyday or every other day. We would walk it rain or shine and we walked it before they extended it. Before that, watching the Canal change was not something I did up close. It was a lot of work going on…they moved out the junk yard, all those people and those houses.”
Rita recalls when development started:
“No sense of community. It was a sense of 'downtown is going to have their way' - period. The neighborhood organization and people mobilized; we knew this was going to change so much and that we needed to have a say in it because if we don’t have a say in it, we won't be here. And i remember it went on and on and on. But that’s exactly what happened, so many things happened that we didn’t have a say in. So many people are gone.”
She said “The community was lost. After I discovered the community across West Street, oh the friends we made and the things we’ve done. I’m still in contact with some of those people. You know, they would really like it; the Canal, the way it is now. It offers many things but a lot of those people could not come back because the neighborhood changed so much with all the other people coming in and buying the property for a nickel and a dime. A lot of the other owners were just trying to get rid of it because our neighborhood was deemed a “slum” — they built all these new houses and some of them are not even worth the wood that they’re made of. We don’t have community anymore and I miss that. Now, the Canal is 'so beautiful and so nice' and you can walk all a round down there. I think a lot of those people would have appreciated all of these improvements.