Where the sun sets on Grant Avenue

This is a view across the street behind the homes and up the hill where the sun sets on Grant Avenue, and has set in just this way for as many lifetimes as have begun and ended on our side of the street.



The homes go back a couple generations. The tree line goes back a hundred years or more. The sun and clouds and stars go back millions.

I took these pictures the evening before Dad died, which turned out to be a matter of hours before he died. This is what he saw from his bed in the evenings during the few times he was able to open his eyes.

This was a typical sunset, one of thousands just like it that I watched for years. I heard as a kid that Erie was voted by someone at some time as having some of the best sunsets in the world. I don't know how you judge such things, but if it is possible, I can believe it is true.

(Erie has been an industrial town for many years; it is difficult, knowing what we know about pollution and the affects of certain minerals in the atmosphere, not to make the connection with refraction and pretty colors. To this day, if I smell roofing tar, I smell the Public Dock - not road pavement, but roofing tar, they are different; I always presumed Erie had manufactured roofing tar because the smell was so similar, but it could have been something else; there were always barges lined up with gravel and heaps of rocky substances when I was a kid; that may have been iron ore, as there was iron processed in Erie.

I don't think that is true anymore; the bay front has become developed with a convention center, the dock has been renamed and a tower built at the end of the pier, an attractive roadway has been built that gives a nice ride along the bay where yachts are docked, and there are other things, and they are all nice, but I miss the old days: the barges, old guys fishing off the dock, the popcorn and peanuts and toys, the waves slopping against the Flagship Niagara moored alongside the dock opposite the Li'l Toot, which was a dark and tubby tugboat.

Having grown up around the lake and ships and seen and heard and smelled the water and things that happen on and around it, I developed youthful fantasies of joining the merchant marine or stowing away on a tramp steamer. The charm remains with me still.)

Old Erie Public Dock


Some more pictures of Old Erie:
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~paerie/oldphotos/OldtimeEriePics.htm ➚