Where The Cornfield Used to Be : A conversation with Tony Buba. Part 1.
January 2009, documentary filmmaker Tony Buba and creative jack-of-all-trades Jessica Fenlon sat down for a conversation at the Crazy Mocha on Liberty, the one with Dreaming Ant in the back. Jessica brought a digital recorder. What follows is some of their conversation.
You ended up moving to Braddock Hills because of the Mon Fayette expressway?
That was one of the reasons. They were supposed to start acquiring the properties ... We started the house back in ’98. We have five acres up there in Braddock Hills. If we didn’t have the property we never would have built the house.
The Mon-Fayette expressway was going to come ---
Was going to come, was going to come, yes (laughter). Yes it seemed real in ’98 that they were going to start buying - even if it was going to be 40 or 50 years before it came, it looked like they were going to buy all the property.
So, there’s a choice. What do we do, we could start this house, build this house, and, or, you know, fix the house up, put maybe sixty thou into it. You would never get back what you put into it, it would only pay back what the property value was, about 40 thousand for the house all together.
My mother still lives there though. My mother and my cousin Jarret and his wife Laurie.
Still live in Braddock --
Still live in that house. We just had it painted last summer. It looks really nice now. Laurie, she did it, it looks like a house in San Francisco.
Like a painted lady?
Yeah, twelve different colors, it looks great.
Where in Braddock is the house?
You come down Braddock avenue on fifth street below the hospital, when it becomes fifth when you are heading down towards the mill you make a right.
My mother lived on one side, we lived on the other. What we were going to do if we stayed was tear out the one wall that connected the duplex where the kitchens were and make this really big kitchen in the one part. But, if we spend this money here, and then this road comes (shrugs) -
Originally my grandfather was a farmer. So he farmed a hundred acres in that area. Never owned them. Farmed them up where that Giant Eagle is on that little shopping part.
How was the land?
It was all hilly.
I mean, in terms of topsoil?
Back then it was good. It was far enough away that, well the mill was down in Braddock.
Yeah, my dad and my uncles, they did a hundred acres, 17 thousand tomato plants we had, truck farming. It ended at world war two because my dad and all my uncles went off to war and my grandfather got sick. They had to give up the farming.
The war happens, and my dad is actually working in the mill and doing the farming. He was working the mill for 35 or 36 cents an hour.
But for him working in the mill was easy, compared to farming. Farming was the toughest thing they ever did. And it never ends. Its not this romanticized thing of the land.
I grew up in Wisconsin. If you spent any time driving anywhere you see the farms and you know that they are getting up at four in the morning, and they have to do these things every day. If you don’t, it will fail.
Exactly. And it still might fail, depending on the weather.
So its this piece of property, altogether its about 6 acres. If you go up to the top of 6th street at Kentucky Fried Chicken, see, so you make a left at the KFC and you come down Britton road and over here is the cemetery, and over here is Britain Road Storage and over here is Ridge. And you come down Ridge about 3 or 4 houses down my cousin Margie lives here, my cousin Ronnie lives here, ...
The table has become a map. Tony is pointing the house locations on the tabletop.
