The only house my parents ever owned in Belleville was on Carpenter Street, a narrow, one-way north street, from Belleville Avenue to Continental Avenue, with houses on the left side and on the right, behind a barb-wire topped six-foot fence, grassy fields and a few rolling hills led to the iconic Isolation Hospital with the Vergdigris peaked roof visible from tall mountains far, far away, and the private golf course across the valley in Bloomfield.

 The south end of the street had a brick house on the right hand side, before the grounds swept up to the hospital. Then the fence started. On the right, came a few late model single family houses, then two sets of garden apartments on Carpenter Terrace South and then Carpenter Terrace North.

 We lived beyond the apartments, in the eighth house (at the time) on the left.

 Our immediate neighbor to the south lived in a house set back a long way from the street and had its front obscured by prize-winning mimosa trees and a thick, overgrown hedge. Most drivers who were looking for that house almost always drove by and had to back up against the one-way when they saw our house. That house was also the bane of mailmen as the two story bungalow was at the far end of a dirt driveway that turned to muddy troughs in inclement weather.

 Between the hidden bungalow next door and our red and gray house, we owned a long slender lot that stretched back more than two-hundred feet to our neighbors on Fairway, and added to the park-like setting of our Hermitage. When we looked across the street we saw the wide open field, then a distant copse of pine trees before the berm obliterating any sense of the busy cars rushing along Franklin Avenue.  

 That barb wire topped six-foot fence deterred most trespassers, but we kids dug a hole, here or there and scooted under the hard sharp wires whenever we wanted to play football, field hockey or homerun derby.

 At the far end of our yard, behind the oversized garage was an abandoned chicken coop. My dad tore down the wooden structure and left the old stone block foundation just in case he wanted to put up a pigeon coop at that site. But because our yard held the largest garage you ever saw in a private yard – it was big enough to store at least a dozen cars – it blocked any view of the coop that would have stood behind it had my carpenter dad decided to build there.

 My dad was big on birds. He loved his pedigree homing pigeons. On Carpenter Street, we always had two trays of water fresh and available for the wild birds. And mom always saved the bread loaf ends to toss out to the birds that gathered in our black walnut and mimosa trees, and the various rose and what-not bushes that ran along the property line between our house and the bungalow next door.

 From the time he was a whirling dervish and into young manhood, dad had homing pigeons. When he was overseas during World War Two and got leave in Australia, he walked the neighborhoods scouting out their pigeon coops. So, one of his main reasons for buying the home on Carpenter Street was it's location – for the homing pigeons. With two golf courses to the east and west and the hospital grounds across the street, his birds would have been hard-pressed to find a reason to miss their coop when coming home from a race.

 A corner of the garage was converted into a pigeon coop and the water troughs filled for the wild birds that gathered to eat our cast off bread, and we sat as specks on the giant lawn that took more than an hour to mow each week, enjoying the prettyish kind of wilderness. And one day in our first spring in that new home on Carpenter Street, under our giant walnut tree one day appeared a baby robin which is where this story begins.

Please stop back for Part Two

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About the author: Anthony Buccino has written several collections about life and growing up in and around Belleville, New Jersey.  He also created Old Belleville, a web site of local history.

 For more information, www.anthonybuccino.com

 Copyright 2011 by Anthony Buccino – used by permission.