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The neighborhood used to be wealthy, and well-to-do families had lived in their grand city houses, sipping iced tea on their wrap-around porches and walking downtown to watch the boats glide down the canal.  Once traveling by boat on the canal was replaced first by trains and then by the thruway, the city had experienced an exodus of wealth.  The grand city houses became rundown apartments, chopped into bits with flimsy walls and crammed-in kitchens and baths.

It was easy to tell which were apartments without even counting the number of electric meters on the side.  The apartments were painted in whatever had been on sale in order to comply with housing codes that didn't want peeling.  The attics were often a different color because the ladders only went so high.  The carved porch balustrades and railings of old had rotted and were not replaced in kind, but rather with two-by-fours.  Porches sagged, chipboard patched, and windows shrunk, surrounded by unpainted, mismatched wood.  You could also tell by the strollers on the lawn, the upholstered furniture and rugs covering holes on the porch, and the small, cheap yard decorations clustered and broken near the cement replacement stairs.  Trash and mud clung to the yard.  Because inside doors leading to different apartments had been installed in what had used to be magnificent foyers, the front doors remained open to the elements.