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The house my father grew up in is also the house that I grew up in, through age 12. For a while after they married my father and mother lived in their own (rented) house, but soon after I was born they moved back in with his parents. I don’t know the reason, but I assume that, since both my parents worked full-time (when Daddy wasn’t in prison), they could rely on my grandmother to care for me and then, later, my sister. This she did, faithfully and lovingly, and her memory remains a blessing to me and to my sister.

My grandfather was an engineer for the Frisco railroad, and in many respects the railroad dominated my childhood. The freight yard from which he departed on his long runs across the country — the East Thomas Yard — was less than a mile from our house, and Grandma would always take me in her station wagon to drop him off and pick him up. Sometimes, for reasons unknown to me, we would have to drive to Carbon Hill, Alabama to pick him up. (I think crew changes happened there.) On rare occasions his train would rumble slowly into the yard, or depart slowly from it, along a track that ran just a few dozen yards from our house, and when that happened he played a special pattern on his whistle so I would know it was him. When he was disabled by a stroke and forced to retire from the Frisco, a good deal of magic disappeared from my life.

Our house was an old, beat-up, ramshackle thing with peeling wallpaper inside and watermarks on the ceilings, but when I was very young the yard featured a small fishpond and banks of flowers, especially zinnias, which my grandfather loved. He was the one who cared for the place, and after his stroke everything quickly went to pot. The flowers disappeared, and the fishpond was filled with dirt; the pecan trees, though, kept producing nuts, and it was always my job in the fall to scoop the fallen nuts into grocery bags and offer them to our neighbors. (As an adult I was shocked to learn than people paid for pecans.)

We moved out of that house in the summer of 1971, and not long afterward it burned down. My memory is shaky on this point, and there’s no one left to ask, but I believe the house was left empty and someone burned it down for fun.

When I was in Alabama for my mother’s funeral I went back to the site of that old house, and here’s what I saw:

A jungle. That old neighborhood is gone now; most of the lots look like ours, while a few feature small warehouses and machine shops. No houses remain. The only thing that looks just the same is the sand and gravel business on the other side of the railroad tracks:

On weekends we used to climb that fence and play king of the hill — preferably on the sand piles, because when we tumbled down the mountains of gravel we ended up with a good many bruises and cuts and holes in our jeans. (Our parents tolerated the bruises and cuts but not the holes: jeans were hardy with ordinary use, but were expensive.)

Those great piles of sand and gravel lie just to the north of our neighborhood; just to the south is College Hill, where the lovely tree-filled campus of Birmingham-Southern College (BSC) still stands — though the college, alas, has closed. When I was quite small, before I–65 separated East Thomas from College Hill, one could walk up the hill to BSC and then look down on our house, just visible between the pecan trees.

When we left that house we moved to the East Lake neighborhood of Birmingham; my parents lived in their house there until 1992, when the city of Birmingham declared that the area right next to the lake was flood-prone and ordered the removal of the residents and the demolition of the houses. The affected streets had never experienced any flooding, so everyone was mystified by the decision, though at least some residents, including my parents, were happy to get paid for leaving what they believed to be a declining part of town.

Here’s where our house was:

And if you were to turn 180º to view the rest of the neighborhood, this is what you would see:

All those old trees, still providing shade for houses and people who aren’t there any more. (You can just see the outline of sidewalks.) I hope the trees don’t miss us; I fear that the ones at BSC are lonely now, though that may change.

These stories are in many ways characteristic of Birmingham. When I was born the city had nearly 400,000 people; now it has fewer than 200,000. Most of those who have departed (like my parents) were white: in 1960 the population of Birmingham was 60% white, while now the figure is closer to 25%. The departed were not replaced, thus the empty or demolished houses — and schools also: the first school I attended, Gorgas Elementary, was demolished decades ago; the next, Elyton School has been abandoned; and Banks High School was first abandoned and then demolished. I don’t know about Gorgas or Elyton, but the explicit reason for the closing of Banks High School was declining enrollments: the neighborhoods around the school were slowly depopulating.

It’s a familiar story, quite a bit like that of a larger industrial city, Detroit. Birmingham’s central downtown, where many people still work, features high-level restaurants and bars and nice hotels, but outside the downtown area is a large Ring of Abandonment, and beyond that you find bustling, prosperous suburbs. (The actual city of Birmingham may hold 190,000 people, but the metropolitan area holds a million and a quarter.) A few days ago I was enjoying the best pizza I have ever had in my life — and I’ve eaten a lot of great pizza, in Italy and elsewhere — at Pizza Grace and reflecting that probably none of the other patrons in this wonderful downtown restaurant live in Birmingham: they almost certainly live in Mountain Brook and Vestavia and Hoover and maybe Trussville, though they may well work in the city.

So, a familiar story, the way of the world; but it’s odd and somewhat disorienting, especially in this season of my life, in which I have just buried my mother, to realize that I can revisit none of the foundational places of my life. They’re all gone.