The 234 Apartment

We are looking back at what is now part of the “Entertainment District,” the 500 block of Third Street, so I will try to compare the then and now if I can as we take our walk on the east side which are the odd numbers. Starting at the corner which is now Wine on Third at 501 Third, which has taken over the next three individual store fronts at that address, we first find the McClure’s Drug Store owned by James McClure who lived in Lewiston with wife Janet. David Gleason, DDS occupied 503 Third and he and Lois lived at 808 Ashland Ave. In the same building was Joseph Puerner, MD who resided at 1235 Norwood Ave. with wife Annabelle. Next door at 505 Third we find Billings Mutual Insurance Agency and Remington Rand , Inc. William E. Billings, the manager, was well known for many years in the insurance business . Their advertising read: “Call Us Before You Need Us” which is very appropriate for this type of business. He and Thelma lived in LaSalle at 215 60th St. Remington Rand sold off...

Three of the four men charged with kidnapping and sexually assaulting the girl are also behind bars. The men are from Honduras, immigrants who found a home at the Heatherwood Apartments. The complex, near Peoria and Colfax in Aurora, is a racial melting pot , one that came to a boil on August 7, when a girl trying to leap to womanhood in a single summer got a very adult lesson. The violence bred more violence -- and more victims. News accounts the next day reported that a seventy-person mob had delivered street justice to one of the accused rapists. Although the reports weren't quite right -- nothing in this saga is -- street justice may be the only justice here. Anna grew up in the neighborhood and has a huge family of siblings and half-siblings. Anna has another daughter who was also taken away by Social Services when Anna went to prison. The girls have a baby brother, too, a child Anna gave birth to after she got out of prison two years ago. That baby has a different father w...

Along Florida's Turnpike in South Miami -Dade, where potato farms and fields of row crops stretched all the way to the visible horizon at the time when Hurricane Andrew struck , it’s virtually all rows of close-packed houses and townhomes today. Now the unavoidable noise walls are going up to forever block vistas once among the most beguiling in South Florida. Along South Dixie Highway , where scraggly lots, small farm fields and vegetable- and fruit-packing houses once mixed it up with used-car lots and budget motels, the landscape is a cornucopia of strip malls, Publix and Wal-Mart stores and fast- food chain restaurants . And everywhere there is traffic, backed up one way in the morning, when three-quarters of all employed adults in South Miami - Dade head north to downtown Miami , Coral Gables or even Doral to work, and the other way when they drive back home in the evening. Lightning struck as thunderstorms swept through the ruins of Homestead in the days after Hurricane...