Going home again, but little remains

Jules Rabin peeks through a black fence at the Henry Lee Higginson Elementary School on Harrishof Street, where kids in an outdoor gym class have shed their winter coats for a January kickball game.

The children, mostly black and Hispanic, scream with excitement, booting every ball their teacher rolls to them. Rabin, on the other hand, is silent. Rabin, 81, used to wait for the clang of a brass bell to usher him into school on these same grounds, seven decades ago. He can't hold it in anymore.

''I went to this school 75 years ago!" Rabin yells to the kids in line waiting for their turn at the plate.

Blank stares and shrugs greet him in return. Rabin breaks into a shaky smile. He startles the gym teacher, who jogs to the fence to ask what's going on.

Rabin repeats himself, that he used to go here, and draws a smile from the teacher. He was hoping for a connection with the class, perhaps to tell a story or two. Indeed, he is hoping for a reconnection with the whole neighborhood.

Rabin, a retired college anthropology teacher now living in Vermont, has returned to visit the neighborhood he grew up in after not visiting for 60 years. Knowing that the landscape had changed, he asked a City Weekly correspondent to go along.

I accepted the invitation to show him around the neighborhood, now a proud and often misunderstood village that is essential to understanding the black experience in Boston. He ended up showing me around, too.

As Rabin walks down Harold Street, something quickly becomes clear: Virtually nothing remains from what was once the tightly knit neighborhood that Rabin remembers so well. The street that he would cross when he was sent for milk or a sack of potatoes -- or for treats like penny candy and sherbet -- still remains. But today, there is neither a store nor house on either side.

This is the plot of land where his childhood home once stood. He seems undaunted that it is now part of a large grassy lot sprinkled with spare tires, cigarette butts, and discarded potato chip bags. He recites an old adage: Do not tear down memorials that your ancestors have put before you.

''I never believed it would be just as I remember, but I thought there might be a housing development there or something," he recalled in an e-mail after the visit. ''Where there had been that block of houses, there is just grass and rubble. It was astonishing."

So many of the businesses, banks, and synagogues he knew are gone, replaced with buildings such as the shopping center in Grove Hall and the YMCA on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Other buildings he knows well -- like the Charles Street AME church and an old theater he tried to sneak into on Blue Hill Avenue across from Franklin Park Zoo. Once a magnet for mischief among Rabin and his friends, it is now the sanctuary of the New Fellowship Baptist Church.

''This could be Indianapolis, Indiana, for all I know," he says.

Behind the gate of a house his family moved to on Townsend Street, he points at a cement support, remembering when he cracked the foundation there with his uncle's 1924 Buick during his first driving lesson. With permission to wander into the backyard, he walks down the driveway, passing a Buick, of course, and stares at the cracks in the pyramid-shaped base. Still there.

Rabin's parents, Minnie and Philip, arrived from Russia in 1910. His father escaped the Russian draft, Rabin said. They were part of a Jewish immigration to Boston that by the 1940s had brought the Jewish population in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan to about 50,000, the largest Jewish community in the Northeast outside of New York. Over the decades, as black and Latino arrivals moved in, nearly the entire Jewish population moved out, largely to the suburbs.

When Rabin went to the Higginson, Hoover was in office, a ride down Blue Hill Avenue cost 5 cents, and Rabin and his family were knee-deep in the Depression.

It's for this reason that his afternoon stroll this day is bittersweet. He is not exactly nostalgic; his family suffered through the Depression here, and Rabin is in no rush to relive those days.

But despite the difficult times, and the disappearance of so many landmarks, he is still elated to make the visit, if only to remember what being an 8-year-old is like.

When he was a kid, every once in a while a plane would soar through the sky, and suddenly the world that Rabin and his classmates had read about in books and heard on the radio was up in the air for them to see.

With the teacher's permission, he and his classmates would rush to the windows to see the aircraft. If they were really lucky, they would be outdoors for such an event.

As he gets ready to leave the kickball game, a plane's engines roar overhead. Rabin looks up, his hands gripping the black fence. He looks at the kids, and then back at the sky as if he's seeing a plane for the first time.

The children never interrupt their kickball game.

But Rabin is in awe, again.

Darren Sands can be reached at ciweek@Globe.com.