Life in the Neighborhood
Oral histories about living in Alexandria show varied day-to-day life experiences. They reflect on how individuals have found satisfying community connections, and how communities can serve as extended families.
Courtesy of Brice Warthen.
Memories, from the Oral History Archive
Miguel Blancas, Alexandria City employee in the Emergency Operations Center during the COVID-19 pandemic; interviewed by Terilee Edwards-Hewitt, July 14, 2021:
And they say when there’s a problem we come together. Well, maybe nobody else saw it, but I did…We all worked together. We all put the hours, we all had very little sleep…but we were all on the same page, and that is something that later it will come in the newspapers saying when the COVID-19 happened we all came together.
…when I was at the POD [Point of Distribution for the COVID-19 vaccine], just seeing all these people from the City coming to help, because they weren’t there just because they were gonna get paid; they were there to help get people vaccinated…you had people from finance, you had people from the health department, you had people from everywhere coming to a place and helping the community.
Celeste Coakley, born 1918; interviewed by Laina Schneider, July 24, 2007:
The thing I remember most was hopscotch. We used to mark up the sidewalk. Do they still play hopscotch? Yes. Well, that’s the thing I remember the most.
Joseph Dodd, born circa 1935; interviewed by Clara Savage, August 7, 2004:
Well, she worked at the Five and Dime store. At that time it was Murphy’s on the six hundred block of King…so my mother, soon as I started school, went to work at Murphy’s, because where I attended school was on Washington Street, was about two blocks down from Murphy’s and I had to cut through Murphy’s, so my mother could see me…and then I’d go on home. But when I’d hit Cameron and Royal Street all of the mothers and grandmothers would be out on the doorsteps, because the kids would be coming home. I had twenty mothers. We all did.
Julia Maria Adams Bradby, born 1920, sharing memories of Woods Place/Seminary area; interviewed by Patricia Knock and Dr. Henry Mitchell, July 28, 1992:
I remember that we always had a nice neighborhood and the people were always kind and nice and they looked out for one another’s, you know, and the children and that we all lived it like one family. When it was an old neighborhood and we had pathways that we went to each other’s homes and we went to school, we’d go right down the path here, right on down my mother’s property and right to the school, cause our property joined…T.C. Williams [Alexandria City High School], where it is now.
Sarah O. Strother, born 1938; interviewed by Paula T. Whitacre, August 19, 2009:
He [my father] would give us 50 cents apiece and we would all go up to Murphy's on King Street, and we'd have piles of paper dolls and coloring books. Every Saturday we would buy some more.
Mary Sullivan, moved to Alexandria in 1946; interviewed by Mary Baumann, September 6, 2003:
The great thing was to go down on Saturday night and sit and just watch people on King Street. That was just the thing for people. Oh yes, everybody was watching. And we’d go to the train station and watch the trains go through on Saturday afternoon. The whole hillside of the train, of the station there people would come with their children and sit and watch the trains go through.
Charles “Buster” K. Williams, born 1908; interviewed by Mitch Weinschenk, February 5, 1999:
We played baseball because there was plenty of open spaces. We could build a baseball diamond any place. We played marbles in the street. Played spin tops in the street…There wasn’t houses; there was open lots for blocks and blocks.
We went to theaters. Go to theater: 10, 12 cent, 15 cent. Stay as long as you want.
They had speakeasies and after-hour places. Of course it was during prohibition. The river was lit up there for excursion boats, tub boats. And everything on the go in the 1920s…The Elks and different lodges would do an excursion. We had plenty of entertainment. We had a dance every week, especially Thursday night.
Dana Wedeles, discusses how her neighborhood coped with the COVID-19 pandemic; interviewed by Daniel Lee, August 20, 2020:
. . . there were twenty-two kids in our cul-de-sac. And six of them were either graduating from middle school or high school, and because graduations were cancelled, we put up pop-up tents in the cul-de-sac and held our own. Three of our neighbors are teachers at TC, so they orchestrated it, they gave speeches, and we all sat in our lawn chairs crying…we all went through the COVID scare ourselves in the cul-de-sac, there was a trust that came around…that our children would be playing together and we took those risks together. You know, I can’t imagine going through that with any other group of people. There was just an immense amount of trust and sense of community.
Shirley Grimm Warthen, born 1933; interviewed by Mary Baumann and unidentified interviewer, October 18, 2003:
The Red Cross would come, like one day a week, and roll bandages, and fold things, and sew, and make quilts and things for the service people. I remember one summer, mother would pack my lunch…and I went over and I remember because I was sewing on a treadle sewing machine. We cut out squares…and we made quilts for the soldiers during the war.
In my teenage years, I lived at the skating rink...It was big. And it had a snack bar where you could get eats. And very loud music. But that was a real hangout…all organ music. Canned music, is what I call it now…Then they would have contests for dancing, skate dancing and stuff like that.
Edwin Bohlayer, born 1893, lived in what is now the Rosemont area; interviewed by Claudine Weatherford, February 19, 1982. About a well built before 1900 near family home:
...you had to put two buckets in the well to bring the water up. We didn’t have a bath. We had the room, but it didn’t have a bathroom because it didn’t have pressure up there...City pressure didn’t run up there. So we used to have a big “pantry” right next to the kitchen and the well. We had a big window there. We’d take the water out of the well and dump it in the bathtub, then heat the water on the stove, to take a bath.
Kathryn Collins, resident of Parkfairfax 1950-1968; interviewed by Barbara Murray, July 25, 2012:
So there was a lot in that circle…it’s quite a wide circle with a big grassy place in the middle. So we had a lot of socializing of that whole group…Well, like the Fourth of July and all that. We got together. And often we had buffets, you know, in the circle, and everybody brought food, and so on. There was a good deal of socializing.
Elizabeth Henry Douglas, born 1919, shared memories of her childhood in the Seminary neighborhood called Macedonia; interviewed by Patricia Knock, Dr. Henry Mitchell, and Bradford Henderlong, March 28, 1992:
We had a stable there for the horse and the cow. We had a chicken house. We had a pigeon house, which my father sold squab.
The first radio we had was in the [19]30s. I remember just as good. It was a standing one and we had it in the living room. You could only see it when they let you see it. You had to get your lessons…And you done your chores. You had your dinner, then your homework. At 9:00, you was to bed.
…let me tell you, you had to wash. Say, you had three dresses for school. The day you wear those stockings, you had two more other pairs of stockings, but you had to wash those stockings out to let those stockings dry. Every night, you would have to do that because you would have to have clean stockings. Now on Sunday, you had two dress-up dresses and your dress-up shoes.
Barbara Lunati, moved to Parkfairfax in the 1990s; interviewed by Krystyn Moon, April 2, 2015:
Well, I was flying over the World Trade Center--seeing the burning World Trade Center and I [the plane] landed. I heard that there had been an attack on the Pentagon [pause] and it kind of made us rethink the whole purpose of life…We said, family is more important than all the money in the world and you really only live once. So, it kind of changed our outlook on life. I applied for United States citizenship so that I could possibly get a position here. Then, by 2002 we had a really good friend that was in the process of adopting from China. So, she was telling me about the process and I was like, this is the perfect solution for us. We went through the process and we adopted Mia from China.
June Barry, attended George Washington High School; interviewed by Jennifer Landy and Chris Gagne, May 14, 2010:
On Mount Vernon Avenue ...There was Del Ray Drugstore, there was Bowman’s drugstore and Hayward Hamilton drugstore and then there was a place called Sugar Bowl right across from G-W later...Everybody would just stop on their way home from school and get a soda...Just go and meet your friends, have the juke box.
Back then it was right after the War, you had to wait a long time to get a telephone installed in your house. So, I used to stop in there [Bowman’s] to use the telephone to call my friends at the telephone booth inside the drugstore.
Buster Williams, born in 1908; interviewed by Mitch Weinschenk, February 5, 1999:
Every store, every corner in Alexandria had a store… They had a chain of stores called “DGS.” District Grocery Store…And then they had the store, the Piggly Wiggly. That was the first self-service store. You get your food and you gave it to the clerk. The Safeway was always a grocery store that sold meats.
Unalane Ablondi, recalls Alexandria during World War II; interviewed by Jennifer Hembree, June 30, 2007:
Alexandria and Washington both were filled with uniformed people…Army men, Navy people…and the women, who were WACs in the Army, who did all this and other work, the same as the Navy. They were called WAVES, and I admired them all so much, because they were so well-groomed, with neat hair and polished fingernails. Then the SPARRs, I believe, was the name of the women Marines…But the streets were crowded with people. I even remember seeing them here on King Street, in uniform. Well, it was crowded for those days…To me, it seemed to be populated, but not the way it is today.