His previous FARS story was titled “How the West Was Lost” and revolved around a toy he’d coveted and briefly owned, a Johnny West cowboy action figure. Today, he returns and invites you to join him as he takes us back to McIntyre Shelter and explores the memory of things lost in Pittsburgh.
This is “How the Rest is Remembered” by Marcel Lamont Walker.
ANIMISM: noun 1) The belief that natural objects, natural phenomena, and the universe itself possess souls. 2) The belief that natural objects have souls that may exist apart from their natural bodies.
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I OFTEN CONSIDER the possibility that the inanimate objects we surround ourselves with are alive, in some way, shape, or form. Do they process the world around them as we humans do? I doubt it. But I’m preoccupied with the notion that, as we interact with the material world, a portion of our essence is left impressed upon the things around us. It’s a crazy notion, I’m well aware of this, but it persists nonetheless.
It would explain the tendency to hoard, right? You can’t just throw away an object that’s sentient without some repercussion to the universe. We owe something to the things we’ve brought into our lives, into our homes…even the homes themselves. We can’t just discard something that’s imbued with life without expecting to be discarded in turn. So we keep things and, if those things are now filled with some essence of our own souls, those things keep us. At the worst end of things, we end up locked into a Stockholm Syndrome of codependency with our stuff, unable to move on without bringing our physical and emotional baggage with us.
And I know I’m not alone in these thoughts. Every story that's ever been told about a haunted house is working off of the same notion -- ghosts are just memories that live inside of walls. But I think there’s actual value in considering that maybe, just maybe, those ghosts clatter around for a reason. We’re not supposed to consider the places and spaces we travel through and live in to be disposable. We should take the occasional beat and think about where we’re at, how we got here, and what we’ll leave behind.
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I’M A CHILD of Pittsburgh, a city obsessed with things that aren’t there anymore. We find our way around by directions based on not just places and landmarks, but also by places and landmarks that no longer exist. We’re shocked when we discover this or that isn’t there anymore, but we’re also thrilled to watch it all go away in a flash.
I remember traveling to the Point back in February, 2001 to watch the implosion of Three Rivers Stadium. A group of people gathered to witness the spectacle, which seemed to take forever before it happened. When it did, the thundercrash of decades of cheers, victories and losses crumbling into history was impressive…but what surprised the crowd most was the immense pulse of smoke that broke free from the debris like an angry poltergeist and headed our way across the river. Suddenly fervor turned to mild concern as those dusty memories threatened to envelop the crowd. It’s a funny thing to watch the faces of people when they realize that the removal of memories isn’t a clean process, and the debris can make even distant witnesses dirty.
Years prior, in the late 1970s, I’d often watch from the attic window of my family’s rented house on the North Side as fireworks were deployed from Three Rivers Stadium. We’d moved there immediately following our painfully abrupt displacement from a house in East Liberty. My two younger sisters and I had been forcibly removed from our mother’s custody and placed at McIntyre Shelter, a youth compound which existed off of McKnight Road. We stayed there for several months until being unceremoniously allowed to stay with our parents again following a weekend visit to our new home on Armandale Street on the North Side.
It’s hard for me to convey how weird and shocking it was for my siblings and me to be yanked from our lives, as tumultuous as they were beforehand, and placed at McIntyre Shelter. It was a world unto itself, completely different from what we were used to. Prior to that, we hadn’t interacted with other kids much, only infrequently visiting relatives or neighborhood children. But at the Shelter? There were kids everywhere, from babies to teenagers. Also, we got separated and placed in different cottages, forcing us to learn social skills literally overnight. It was an overwhelming experience to say the least.
I was six years old, but I remember the physical layout of the compound pretty well, even all these years later. The school building, the main building, Hutchinson Hall, where there was also an infirmary and large visitation room. The playground area. All of the boys’ cottages, odd numbered, and aligned on one side, and the girls’ cottages, even numbered, directly across the way. Babies stayed in Cottage One, and I visited my youngest sister there. I’d see my middle sister, who was in Cottage Two, from time to time when all the kids got out to play, or at the school. I associate each building with very specific memories, some of them sad, some of them hilarious. I suppose, on the whole, my collection of stories could be regarded as bittersweet.
I remember the other boys I lived with in Cottage Three, and the counselors. It was November when we arrived, back in the days when Winter came loud and early to Western Pennsylvania, then overstayed its welcome. As kids, we made the best of it. We trod to school there, layered in snowsuits and lace-up boots, then back to the cottages for lunch, then back to school, then back to the cottages. Sometimes we’d play inside, other times outside. We went sledding and raced and played tag. Sometimes we fought and misbehaved. Back then, there was still corporal punishment, and the way it was often dished out at Cottage Three was if one boy got lashes across their hand, we all did. It wasn’t all fun and games at McIntyre Shelter, but we made it through together, one step through the snow at a time.
Then, suddenly, my sisters and I were back with our parents, living on the North Side and experiencing a whole new kind of cultural whiplash. They enrolled my middle sister and I in Saint Matthews Lutheran School practically overnight, and we were the only Black kids in the classes. Yes, it was very weird, but relocating to new neighborhoods would eventually become our familial way of life.
Both the house we lived in on the North Side and McIntyre Shelter in the North Hills are long gone. A decade or so ago, I was walking along Armandale Street to visit a friend and passed by where our old house used to stand. It was now just a vacant, paved lot. Similarly, McIntyre Shelter was demolished years ago to make way for a shopping complex that is likewise gone now. I don’t expect many people to remember our little, nondescript house. But what bothers me most about Mcintyre Shelter being gone is that it’s not just the buildings and land that were razed; there’s almost nothing in the public record to be found about it. I’ve checked. Any references to it are in passing and there are no personal histories, just an occasional docket or news story about youths who were detained there, or who’d run away and been returned.
It bothers me on a lot of levels. I work at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. I know there are people who actively deny that moment of historic suffering, and the damage that took place. I’ve listened to the survivors of concentration camps and ghettos tell their stories, sometimes at great personal cost. I understand how we are all damaged when we don’t remember our pasts.
Is Pittsburgh actively trying to purge this specific memory of McIntyre Shelter from its walls? I tend to think so. It doesn’t make sense to me how a facility that housed thousands of local youths across decades in this city can be made to vanish so entirely from the public record. Where’s that information at? Why is there no public record of these stories?
We can attempt to demolish the buildings and dispose of the material possessions that house our more painful memories, but the earth itself never forgets. We might individually be nothing more than a dust mote in the Earth’s soul memory, but even a speck of dust deserves the dignity of its story being preserved.
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A FEW NIGHTS ago, I sat bleary eyed while working at my computer, when a social media message from someone I didn’t know appeared in my inbox. It was a very direct inquiry, and one that took me a little bit by surprise. It read, “I was searching for any information about McIntyre Shelter. A friend of mine found your story. My sister worked there and I am curious if you remember her?” The messenger gave the sister’s name, and it wasn’t familiar, even after I sat quietly with it for a handful of minutes.
I mulled over whether or not to reply right away. It had been a draining day, and I wasn’t looking to engage in a long dialogue about this subject. A response could get something started that I didn’t have the energy for. But, I realized that I’d posted my story to leave something tangible out there for others like me to find and be acknowledged by. In doing so, I’d left the door open for this person to walk through. The least I could do was be a gracious host now.
I replied that I couldn’t recall the messenger’s sister’s name, but was so young back then that I also didn’t remember the names of most folks I’d encountered there. I then volunteered a little more information about my stay at McIntyre Shelter as a means of honing in on when and where their sister had been there and if we might have crossed paths.
The messenger gave some more information, revealing that the time frame of their sister’s employment at the compound overlapped with my stay there. However, the descriptions of their sister, which were very affectionate, didn’t unlock any specific memory. The messenger said they too were very young at the time, and their sister used to occasionally take them along when she worked at the Shelter on weekend night shifts. They remembered how their sister adored the children, and referred to them all as “her kids.”
The thought of one of our counselors coming in at night to watch over us, full of affection for her young charges, and with her own younger sibling in tow, painted a very vivid and comforting picture for me. Had I been one of them? It was impossible to know. I found out that the older sister had gone on to become a psychologist to help children and their families, and spent her life looking after kids before taking her own life fifteen years ago.
“Your story is sad and touching,” the messenger wrote. “I am sorry for all of your suffering.”
It was strange hearing that word - “suffering” - used to describe my history. It was such a heavy descriptor, more apt for Holocaust survivors than me. But the sympathy was welcome, and I let the messenger know things turned out well in the end.
“Your story is the only reference to McIntyre Shelter that I have ever found,” they added, then said how my story had made an impact on them, and they asked to share it. I gave them my blessing, said I was glad it had moved them, and told them to stay well and take care of themself.
There was something softly reassuring in knowing that an adult who’d walked the same grounds as I had, at the same time as I had, had done so with compassion. All these decades later, after the squeals and screams of children and teenagers and counselors and visiting parents have long since dissolved like snowflakes in sunlight, does the earth that rested beneath McIntyre Shelter remember the footsteps that walked and ran across it back then? Does it remember the laughter of cottage mates who went sledding, and watched HAPPY DAYS and THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN? Are the tears of kids who wanted to go home still embedded in the soil? Does it remember the night shifts of young adult counselors studying to become psychologists, or older adult counselors looking to retire?
I suspect that it does. But even if it doesn’t, I do and that’s enough. By sharing my story, a stranger got a slightly wider window into the world of their loved one. Hopefully they could see that their sister’s work and life supported kids who weren’t able to leave the compound, but slept under watchful, caring eyes.
We can’t always find the missing history we search for, no matter how much we plead with the ghosts in the earth to tell us, but sometimes how the rest is remembered is all that matters.
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