Carissa Halton - Little Yellow House: Finding Community in a Changing Neighbourhood

The cover is yellow with wide-spaced, thin, black horizontal lines. It is reminiscent of painted wooden slats on a house. The title is written in the center. A small square photograph of the gables of a yellow house is placed between the words Little and Yellow of the title. The authors name is placed at the bottom of the cover. A quote from the book shows across the top of the cover: Maam, you sound like a very reasonable person. Can I advise you to just move?

Published by

The University of Alberta Press

Ring House 2

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E1

www.uap.ualberta.ca

Copyright 2018 Carissa Halton.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Halton, Carissa, 1979, author

Little yellow house : finding community in a changing neighbourhood / Carissa Halton.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 9781772123753 (softcover). ISBN 9781772124279 (EPUB). ISBN 9781772124286 (Kindle). ISBN 9781772124293 (PDF).

1. Halton, Carissa, 1979 . 2. Alberta Avenue (Edmonton, Alta.). 3. NeighborhoodsAlbertaEdmonton. 4. Community lifeAlbertaEdmonton. 5. Edmonton (Alta.) Social conditions. 6. Edmonton (Alta.) Economic conditions. I. Title.

FC3696.52.H35 2018 307.7609712334

C20189023929

C20189023937

First edition, 2018.

First electronic edition, 2018.

Digital conversion by Transforma Pvt. Ltd.

Copyediting and proofreading by Maya Fowler-Sutherland.

Cover design by Alan Brownoff.

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For Mat (to whom I promise someday I will write fiction).

It is to our great cities peril that we ignore the lessons contained in the cracked sidewalks, weedy yards, and dejected strip malls of our oldest neighbourhoods.

MY HUSBAND, MAT, AND I wanted to live closer to our work in the inner cityhe spent his days in three junior high schools supporting kids in government care and I managed programs at a soup kitchen. We wanted to better understand the neighbourhoods where so many of the people we served lived. Plus, we had very little money so we bought a house in Alberta Avenue, which one wealthy art dealer had described to me as the shitty part of town. It was the part of town where sixty years ago my grandmother had lived with her British mother in a well-run rooming house overlooking the community hall rink where players skates sliced after pucks. It was the part of town where my grandfather grew up, hanging out in his fathers appliance shop after school waiting to be handed an errand. When they heard wed bought a house in their old neighbourhood they said simply, You paid how much?

We were told, Youll move when you have kids. After Madi, Lily, and then Alistair were born we were told, Youll move when the kids go to school. About the time our oldest went to the community school, people stopped telling us when we would move from the century-old house that every year required another renovation. We had a bakery and a volunteer-run arts caf down the block, and within walking distance there were playgrounds, a library, school and bus stops to downtown. And while we wished there were fewer empty storefronts along the main avenue and fewer johns trolling to buy sex, the elm trees on the boulevard shaded the streets that led to the homes of many of our extended family: close enough that if, say, I went into sudden labour in the middle of the night a relative could literally run over. In short, we discovered shitty is how you see it.

A FEW YEARS AFTER WE MOVED TO the neighbourhood I typed where to eat on 118 Ave into my search engine and this review popped up:

118th Avenue in Edmonton stretches on for quite a long way, but the most dangerous part is from approximately 97th Street to 30th Street. [Its the stretch between 101st Street and 82nd Street that is known as Alberta Avenue.] A lot of the neighbourhoods that fall along the avenue are low income and very run down. There are prostitutes all over the place, with their pimps not far off Im sure. There are lots of drug dealers/gangsters, and their preferred mode of transportation is stolen bicycles. If you ever see a grown man on a bike that is way too small for him in this area, that is probably why. There are lots of pawn shops and seedy bars along this avenue as well.

I dont want to make it sound too too bad, because there are a few good restaurants and bakeries along here, but its a place you should definitely avoid at night.

118th Avenue-Hookers-Drugs and Thugs by Karlie85

Weve had our garage broken into a couple times over a decade and the first time, thieves with a massive truck broke the flimsy latch and stole an air compressor, leaving clear dually tire prints in the snow on the back cement pad. The second time our garage was hit by thieves they stole an air compressor, again.

Are air compressors used in some kind of drug operation? I asked Mat.

Its just a tool that gets good return when pawned, Mat said as he walked a couple of blocks to the closest pawn shop and bought a different one back. It was a heavy mother of a compressor. However, just to be safe, Mat bought a long length of chain and secured it to the garage wall. Whoever wanted this tool would need to have bolt cutters and a truck.

When we moved into the community, people always talked about the crime. Friends told me their realtors recommended they not look at homes in the area and, if one is a tourist, many website reviewers helpfully direct you to other parts of the city.

I dont walk very comfortably at night on 118th Avenue, but I havent felt comfortable walking at night in any of the neighbourhoods in which Ive lived. Even in the rural Rocky Mountain town where we grew up, Mat and I would walk along the dark gravel roads winding into the back-country and I never completely relaxed. There were always bears, and unknown stalkers in the occasional passing car. In the city, the threat is serial rapists or sadists and like bears, they can walk kilometres in a day and where they were last sighted is not always helpful because the next day they would be somewhere else.

IT WAS THAT SEASON AGAIN when the dark creeps into our evenings and steals the green from the trees. Mat folded laundry downstairs, the girls ran around our house naked, and I was washing the dinner dishes when I heard breaking glass from the alley. The sound came again through the open patio door. Into the near-dark backyard I moved as fast as my pregnant body would allow towards the alley and saw a white, older-model Caravan idling behind my neighbours lot. Stepping out further, I spotted the source of the sound.