Audio File
Transcript
My name is Samuel Auman. I am 13 years old.
My name is Marquis Carter. I’m 17 years old.
We interviewed Justin Peeks on June 13th, 2018.
I grew up on Almeda St., right by Burgwin Elementary. My momma still lives on Renova St. Matter of fact, half the people in this neighborhood still know my momma. I went to Burgwin Elementary. I lived in this neighborhood all my life and the only time we ever came to Saint Stephens was in the parking lot behind here, they used to have a carnival every year. There was like a bouncy house and, like, games and stuff like that. And of course, the neighborhood kids, this was like, this was our time to shine. We came down here looking good. We was dressed all nice, trying to see what girls was here and stuff like that. But Burgwin Elementary right up the hill, which is now the Propel Hazelwood. That’s the school I went to. When we were kids, we literally walked everywhere in Hazelwood. If we didn’t walk, we rode a bike. And we went through every street, every alley. We knew every part of Hazelwood. If you’ve ever been at the Burgwin field, right, there used to be a hole in the fence, and they fixed it since then. But there’s a path that goes from Burgwin field down to Renova Street. It’s called the Woody Way. Everybody knows the Woody Way. We were the kids that you could run down the Woody Way in the middle of the night, with no lights whatsoever and not fall because we walked it and we ran it so many times, I’ve seen people fall down the Woody Way and it’s not cute. It’s definitely bad if you fall down the Woody Way, cause you’re gonna hit everything and you’re gonna get balled up.
We grew up before technology took over, like there was no e-mail. There was no text messages. You know, we had pagers, and that was like late in the 90s where we got pagers, but if we wanted to know if someone was home, we had to walk to their house, knock on the door and say, “Hey, is Fred home? Can he come out?” And then they’re like, “No, he’s up at, you know, he was up top.” “Alright, cool. We’ll walk up there,” like we would walk around the neighborhood till we found people. We used to go down to Dairy Mart and we’d get our little candy and we would go down below the tracks and we’d hit up Uncle Larry’s and get a wedgie. We would go down to the shoe store, get some penny candy. We’d go down below the tracks to the baseball field if there was a game. We used to do stupid stuff though, all the time. Like, there’s always that one person in the group… we’ll be walking past a house that has, like, a dog, and the dog’s barking at us, and then they will stay behind and then open the gate and let the dog out. And then now we gotta run from the dog, like, we were those kids. We used to do stupid stuff like that.
I seen enough to say that Hazelwood has changed, but not enough to where I think it’s better. It’s getting there, but there’s so much more that we can do as a neighborhood and as a community. I know that the biggest problem that we have in Hazelwood is our attitude towards change and people who come from outside of Hazelwood to present change. One of my goals is to establish a community center for neighborhoods similar to the one that I grew up in. In my ideal mind, the community center will have a number of things going for itself. It will have a free clinic to provide health and dietary aids to those in the neighborhood. It will also have like a farmers’ market and entrepreneurs where, you know, everyone from the neighborhood will have the opportunity to come and, you know, advertise whatever skill sets they may have, you know. We’ll have credit building classes, wealth building classes, something that most community centers don’t have right now. Just a way to establish a more stable community that allows for people to grow and to reach out from where they think they’re at and how far they can go.
From being in college, I literally traveled up and down the East Coast. I joined a fraternity when I was in college, and I was on the step team. And again, that’s something I-I would have never even known about it had I not left Hazelwood and gone to college. I would have never learned about fraternities. I would have never learned about being on the step team, what it is to be a part of a brotherhood. I was on a championship competing step team and we traveled up and down the East Coast. We went from Florida all the way up to New York. I’ve traveled out Midwest to as far as, like Kentucky, and I’ve been out of the country. I’ve been to Mexico. I’ve been to the Dominican Republic. Ever since I got my passport, I’ve never stopped looking for places to go.
The thing that’s most important is that I came from this neighborhood. I grew up around drugs. I grew up around violence. The things that a lot of people try to make that it’s a cool thing, and I can assure you from first hand experience, it’s not… It’s not a cool thing. It’s a thing that will change you, though. I left Hazelwood. I actually left the state, and I went and I discovered a whole new world beyond Hazelwood. There’s a much bigger world out there besides Pittsburgh, and I can assure you that the best thing I ever did was leave Hazelwood. And the reason why I can say that is because when I left Hazelwood, I left with very little. I left with cousins and family members who I looked up to who I come back home and they’re not doing anything with their lives. But I left, and I discovered way more outside of this place, and that’s why I’m back in Hazelwood, to show the youth, to show the guys, to show them that we are much more than this neighborhood, and the best part about it is that you go into the world being from this neighborhood, but that doesn’t mean you can’t bring the world into this neighborhood.