Manchester Jaguars are neighborhood’s first youth football team in 50 years
Fall Guide + Maps Pg. 15-21 Local Marketplace Pg. 24 Real Estate Transactions Pg. 28 Education Pg. 30
August 2017 Est. 1985 Your Community Newspapper
The Northside Chronicle
Page 6
Volume 33 Issue 9 - FREE -
Photo by Neil Strebig
A boxer at Steel City Boxing gym in Spring Hill works on a heavy bag. Read more about the “Northside vs. Outside III” event on page 8.
Spring Hill mixing past and present for future By Victoria Stevans Eighteen years after its closing, remnants of the Workingman’s Beneficiary Union’s (WBU) history can still be found in its wide, empty rooms. On the building’s main floor, a sign that says “The Millennial Bash 1999” lays flat on the barren, wooden bar while a disco ball still hangs overhead. The room is empty. The partygoers who once counted down into a New Year are gone, replaced by freshly stripped floors, naked walls, and shavings of recently discarded paint curled on the floorboards.
By the time the confetti and plastic champagne glasses leftover from the WBU’s Millennial Bash were drank, swept up and discarded, the building itself closed down. The following years have left a film of dust on the room’s disco ball. The upper floors are muggy. Within them, the air is stagnant from the lack of fans, open windows, and activity. As a result, each room feels like it’s holding its breath. One of the rooms has tall stacks of framed photographs. The thin, antiqued frames have filagree roaming across them, flourishing at the
edges. Each of them hugs an identical picture of men standing in rows on the WBU’s front porch, some smiling and some straightlipped. In each snapshot the faces change, the facial hair changes, the suit fashions change, the years etched below the picture change: 1911-1912, 1920-1921, 1944-1945, but the building never changes. The porch in the picture is still there. Downstairs dayworkers buzz. They move from room to room with power tools and kick up a thin dust with their boots.
Natasha Dean is also working on the main floor. Plaster speckles her hands and clothes, she has just finished texturing a wall. Dean and her boyfriend, Bill Brittan, are co-owners of Rescue Street Farms, one of the two businesses that now exist on the former WBU property. In 2015, Brittan bought the land behind the old building for their farm and by proxy the WBU. “It was pretty much left as it was,” said Dean, gesturing to the building around her. See Spring Hill, Page 7