The Other Side of the Tracks

#182: Then & Now, Lillian Pitt, Karen Margolis, Six Artists on Substack, Tim Bernardes, Julien Cohen, Natalia Lafourcade

Feb 24, 2025

THEN

We had secured our dream house in the new “suburbia.” Santa Cruz was already a resort town, thanks to its location on Monterey Bay. But as it turned out, our side of town was on the “other side of the tracks.” I’ve seen many industrial neighborhoods, and the one bordering our street1 was small and far from the worst. After the dust cleared from construction and the asphalt had been laid, I remember it as a clean neighborhood, occupied mostly by working-class veterans and their families, people who were ready to bootstrap their way to the American Dream.

God knows what kind of post-war PTSD2 dramas took place in those houses, but everyone seemed to be producing babies, and everyone worked hard. That working class mindset was the air we breathed. All the lawns were fastidiously mowed by neighborhood boys saving up coins for a new bike. Babysitters were everywhere, because they were needed. Dads drove milk or ice trucks and worked in gas stations3; moms worked in locals factories or became “housewives”—a challenging job in itself.

If the neighborhood that we called “the west side” became too confining, we could at least walk, bike, or drive the ten blocks to the ocean, with its fresh breezes and sandy beaches.

Still, we couldn’t escape the smells and noise of industry. Our backyards bordered a warehouse where metal items were fabricated, the Santa Cruz Shirt factory,4 and further down the street a factory that I couldn’t quite identify. It distinguished itself from the other factories by the pools of steaming red liquid pooled in the yard behind the building. The pools were surrounded by piles of what looked like salt crystals—visible only from the railroad tracks I traversed on my way to school. Diagonally across the street from our house was the Birds Eye Cannery, conveniently located alongside the railroad. The cannery sorted and canned produce from the “vegetable basket of America”—the Pajaro and Salinas Valleys.

Four years after purchasing the house, it still had that prefabricated white stucco look, but we had a lawn, flowers planted by my mom, and I had my first bike—a Schwinn with training wheels. The Shirt Factory building can be seen behind me. Photo: Trinidad G. Vengua, 1957.

The rotting Brussels sprouts stink from Birds Eye was famous on the west side. It seemed to emanate from a single conveyor belt leading out of the cannery and up to a tall metal structure right next to the street. Discarded sprouts traveled up the conveyor belt and into the structure, then dropped down into a large watery cistern. Sometimes, on my way to school, I would stop and stare at the sprouts plopping into the water. I could smell the vegetable rot at my elementary school, nearly a mile away from the cannery. Even worse, I could smell the sprouts on my mother’s apron when she arrived home from work.

Mom must’ve taken my father’s budgetary worries to heart. His merchant marine or military transport paychecks covered the mortgage and kept us fed, but that was about it. Our plain, white stucco house looked bare, and Mom desperately wanted to buy furniture, plants, and appliances. She decided she had to get a job. I hadn’t started school, yet, and this was my introduction to babysitters. Fortunately, they were plentiful.

Although Mom had worked in a Manila bank, and later attended secretarial school in San Francisco, the only job she could find near our neighborhood—we didn’t have a car in those days—was in the factories. Because she had an associate degree in home economics, and loved designing dresses, she applied to the Santa Cruz Shirt Factory next door, and got the job.

That didn’t last long, though, and I don’t recall Mom ever explaining why. Her next job was more challenging; she took a job at the Birds Eye Cannery. Thus began my career as a latchkey kid.

Old 1950s Birds Eye Orange Juice Commercial, from Vintage Fanatic:

NOW

I realize that I don’t have much to say about the “Now” in my “Then & Now” report, mostly because so much has been happening in the US during the last few weeks that is unusual and disturbing that I feel I’m still getting my bearings. However, I met up with a few artists today, and that helped. Sometimes the art you make is the best expression of that which you don’t yet have words for.

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