MOON OVER PARKCHESTER

MOON OVER PARKCHESTER*

KENNETH E. HALL       MAY 2, 2015        HOUSTON

I was laughed at when I first told people I lived in PARKCHESTER Apartments on Paris Ave.  It wasn't a place that one bragged about living in - even when it was nice.

The truth is, the place actually wasn't bad in the mid-Sixties.

It was very well-maintained and fully-renovated. Then the City of New Orleans took it over for low-income, and they declared the place "below poverty standards." (Funny, WE didn't know we were poor!)

No, they did not lower OUR rent in compensation for us living in "sub-standard housing." What was annoying was that most other tenants paid far less rent than we did. Low-income people moved in, and they wasted no time bringing the place down to their standards:

They first broke up all of the playground equipment - ALL OF IT! Stuff I played on during the past several years and managed not to mess up - was torn to pieces. In one week it was all gone! Then they vandalized the washers and dryers in the little laundromats located throughout the complex.. Then they popped the nice, newly-installed window screens out of the apartment windows —throwing them down to the ground.

(This was not the work of one or two people.) PARKCHESTER now had about a hundred perfectly good, brand-new window screens strewn about all over the place.

Then, the real litter came. Trash and garbage was thrown everywhere. When it was picked up by maintenance one day, more was deposited the very next day. It was a losing battle.

Those were in the good, early days.

Then the grass started dying - all over. Where once nicely-manicured lawns thrived, only dirt showed through in many places.

The next round came as a warning: at night, and for several consecutive nights, girls would hang around the Time-Saver convenience store just down Paris Avenue and, around 11pm, they began to let out blood-curdling screams that scared the Bejeesus out of us holdout tenants.

It was intended to.

They would scream - some four or five girls in unison - to the top of their lungs. It sounded like the gates of Hell had opened..... They'd scream for perhaps a half hour. This went on for four or five days straight...

Then, the screaming stopped, and the place got quiet - too quiet.

The next scream I heard came early one morning from a lady on the sidewalk. I went out to help - and found out she had her purse stolen. By this time, I had lived in PARKCHESTER for over eight years, and never heard of a single purse-snatching. Now, one happened right in front of my door.

One SATURDAY morning, I awoke to a rattling coming from downstairs. I quickly ran down to find a kid stealing my bike. I ran behind him quicker than he could peddle away pulling my bike behind him. When I yanked it away, he asked:"Oh, dis YO bike?"

Well, I had no place else to keep it, except for in the back, and, soon enough, padlock or not, they eventually stole my bike - the one I bought with my own hard-earned money from picking up bottles at two cents apiece.

Coming home from a jazz concert one evening, I was confronted by a young kid with a nice, sharp bayonet, which he put, point-first, underneath my jaw, and demanded my watch. He had a good power of persuasion, I must admit, and I let him have it. It was my very first wristwatch - an inexpensive Timex that my Aunt Marie and Uncle Johnny gave me for my birthday two years before.

Maybe the robber got $2.°° for it at a flea market.

All this time, television programming was switching over to color, and we puttered by on an aging B&W Silvertone portable TV with a missing antenna and a broken-off channel tuner I had to use pliers to turn.

We couldn't afford a new one.

My mother saved up her hard-earned cash and put some money down on a nice COLOR set. FINALLY we saw programs in color! We did so only for a short time. We came home one day to find the TV GONE - as well as a few small items like my mother's wedding ring taken. But, in their defense, the thieves were nice: They left my mom with the monthly PAYMENTS for the set they stole.

Thanks, guys!

One night, I got up to go to the bathroom and heard a noise outside. I opened the bathroom window to see two cars double-parked in front of the door, and several men transferring a dozen or so rifles from the trunk of one car to the trunk of the other. The two cars then sped off. Thank God those guys didn't see me watching them. I was smart: I kept my mouth shut. Living in New Orleans, you learn that that is the best way to stay healthy.

It got so bad that we could not go outside alone, and never at night. Our next-door neighbors noticed men hiding in the bushes by the entrance. I myself saw a guy hiding, and we had to wait to go inside until he left the bushes. When my mother would come home from work later in the evening, she'd call the neighbors across the hall, and all three would go outside, walking their big dog with them.

The final straw came when someone fired a high-powered rifle bullet from the street level of Owens Blvd. into our neighbor's apartment across the hall The trajectory of the bullet was such that, had Mr. Hugh been sitting in his recliner where he usually sat, he would most certainly had been killed!

That was it.
This was a warning we would've been foolish to ignore.
We moved within two weeks.

This is MY story. The events mentioned here are 100% true, and not embellished whatsoever.
I know some will not like it.
I know I did not like living it.
I think it is a story that needed to be told.


*A cult-singer of parodies and comedy songs came out with a cassette tape album which featured several very funny songs. One song which got my best friend's attention was one entitled: "Moon Over Parkchester" - sung to the melody of "Moon Over Miami". I would dearly love to post a link to this song, but unfortunately this tape has disappeared and no further copies apparently can be located.