Chapter 2 - The House on Gorham Street
Neighbors & Neighborhood
Gorham St was about three short blocks that ran between Clinton St and St Paul St, busy commercial streets. Gorham St was a quiet residential street about a block from the Bausch and Lomb optical factory. Two blocks past Bausch and Lomb was the Bond clothing factory. (Rochester at that time had quite a few well known men's clothing factories - Bond, Timely, Hickey-Freeman, Michaels Stern.) The buildings on Gorham and Martin Sts were all houses, some single family, some double and some four family - with a couple of exceptions. Across the street from us on Gorham St was the Jewish Children's Home, an orphan asylum. There were a couple of large wooden buildings associated with the home - the boys' and the girls' dormitories. The Home also had a small stucco synagogue. Farther down Gorham St, across the street and a few houses from Almira St was St Bridget's church. Associated with the church was a parochial school (behind the church, on Hand St) and the house where the teaching sisters lived.
The neighborhood was a mixture of Jews and Italians mostly, with some Germans and Ukrainians, many of them immigrants like Mom and Pop. The neighborhood is called Mount Allegro by Jerre Mangione and described in his book "Mount Allegro". The Mangiones were neighbors of ours, and Mitch and Lou went to school with Jerre. Mitch, in fact, is mentioned in the book. Just about all of the houses had children, and the Home had 30 or so children so there were plenty of young people around. With all the children in the neighborhood there was always somebody to walk to school with and to walk home with, and there would likely be somebody to check homework with. It was a quiet neighborhood, and the residents got along with each other, even if the they didn't love each other. The street could become noisy in the evenings when the children were out playing games that always seemed to involve shouting.
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