It had been about ten years since I’d driven down West Flagler. Even when Jack and I moved to Orlando, the apartment complexes on both sides of the street were already in disrepair. I still remember them when my parents and I moved here in 1974. They stretched from about 47th Avenue to 67th, all built more or less in the 1950s. Some were never works of art, but I always liked the circular one right on 47th or the one with the impressive two-story colonnade around 60-something. They were all usually one-bedroom apartments, no doubt built with the steno pool in mind. Speaking of pools, they all originally had one in the center court. By the late ’70s, most of these had been filled in, paved over, turned into a grassy area, or—worst-case scenario—parking. There were rumors of a kid who’d been electrocuted during a thunderstorm. But the truth was less and more dramatic: with the wave of immigrants in the ’60s, the buildings had become slums, and pools were expensive to keep up. And for what? The people who lived there had no time to sit in the sun.
Such a shame. There used to be a time when you could be poor and still entitled to a decent life. If I looked closely, I could still see the outlines of the pools. Cement borders around the ones that were a mess of yellow grass and weeds or cracks in the ones that had been paved over. Parked on. Forgotten.
I convinced
