Preservation of American Hellenic History
Preservation of American Hellenic History
by Jason C. Mavrovitis
A set of wooden steps led from the entry hall on the first floor down to the cellar. The bottom step faced Ovington Avenue. The electric service panel that held fuses to protect house circuits from an overload was on the wall three or four feet directly ahead. Papou thwarted this safety feature by inserting pennies between the base of a fuse socket and the fuse. We were lucky not to have gone up in flames.
To the right of the electric service panel, high up in the ceiling next to the foundation wall that bordered the street side of the house, was a covered access to the courtyard. This had been used to deliver coal to the storage bins in the room directly to the right; it later became a delivery port for grapes and a way to lift heavy items out of the cellar without going up the narrow steps.
The entire twenty-foot-wide and fifty-foot-long cellar was visible from the electric panel. Running down its middle were seven black steel posts that supported the floor above. Mom ran clothes lines between these posts to dry clothing in the winter and at other times to hang sausage to cure and herbs to dry.
To the left, after the wine storage room, was an open space where luggage, sea trunks, earthenware crocks, and other items were neatly arranged. All three sides of this alcove area had shelves that contained preserved food of all kinds.
Next, there was a three by five foot pantry-like shelved room that held old bolts, screws, nuts, wire, nails, tools, other hardware, paint, thinner, shellac, varnish, and assorted plumbing supplies.
Finally, on the left was a service room with a second, small kitchen and washtubs. Mom washed clothing there by hand, and used the 1920s vintage range and oven as an extra cooking facility on holidays. She never had a washing machine because Dad did not want her to do heavy laundry. Sheets, shirts, tablecloths, and such went to the Chinese laundry across the street.
The room was large enough to serve as my retreat. I experimented there with my Gilbert chemistry set on an old white enamel topped table that had a blue patterned decoration at its rectangular edge. I mixed chemicals haphazardly and boiled noxious blends in test tubes over an alcohol lamp. It was a miracle that I survived the fumes. A shoulder-high window opened into a grated well in the garden and provided lifesaving fresh air. In my teens, the room served as the meeting place for my Boy Scout Patrol.
On the right side of the cellar looking down its length from the electrical panel, under the cellar steps and against the wall, there was a long, narrow table on which Mom stored her winter carpets in the summer and her summer carpets in the winter. Assorted lumber was stacked under the carpets. Almost at the end of the cellar, the oil-burning furnace that kept us warm in the winter hummed ominously, its flame visible through a small peephole when it was on. Behind it, against the wall, stood a fifty-gallon gas hot water heater and tank. And, behind the tank was a door that opened to the concrete steps that led up through cellar trapdoors to the garden.
A lot happened in our cellar.
[Skip the navigation links: Jump to the Citation Guidelines.]
[Skip the citation guidelines: Jump to the Bottom of the Page.]
(This is the bottom of the page.)