The "Memories From A Young Boy Living In Lancaster, Pennsylvania" Story

 It was an ordinary day.  Searching online for the location of a business where my Grandma Woods worked when I was young.  My Grandma Woods, the mother of my father, whose husband Joseph, my grandfather, died when my father was six years old, while working for the Lancaster Post Office.  Story I was told many times was that he was loading and unloading mail when a large container of mail fell from the upper racks in the post office loading area and struck him in the head, killing him.  I never had the chance to know him.  My father lost his father when he was a child, yet he did a great job of being a father to two children himself.  My Grandma, whom I called my Nannan, had to go to work shortly after her husband died to support her three children; my dad and my two aunts.  She got a job working for a cousin, a Mr. Raymond Bushong, who ran a company that sold coal to customers for heating their homes.  This was in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  I can remember many a day when my dad would drop me off to "visit" with my Nannan at Bushong's Office on Grant Street, behind the Lancaster County Courthouse.

Map of the alleyways of Lancaster, PA.
Bushong's Coal Company was on Grant Street
as was the Police Station.  Look hard and you can
see "Police Station in the upper left of map.

I loved my "visits" with my Nannan.  She would "put me to work" sweeping the floors or emptying the waste baskets or cleaning the windows or walking to the nearby Woolworth's Department Store to buy us both a soda.  To get to the department store I had to pass the Lancaster Police Station at 27 East Grant Street.  I naturally had to stop to talk to whatever Officer might be standing in front of the station, holding the reins of a huge police horse.  The Police Station was located at the corner of Christian and Grant Streets in what appeared to me to be an alleyway.  

Lancaster Police Station was up the steps at 27 East Grant Street.

The station was described in the Lancaster Newspaper as a "not too big, but had old, dark creaky, wooden plank floors.  Inside the station, to the left, was the office of the traffic bureau, and halfway in was a wooden railing with two desks and a large table behind it."  I tell you all of this today, since I recently found a map of the area where the former police station was located as well as a few other streets closeby the Police Station and Bushong's Coal Company.  

An old photograph of downtown Lancaster's West King Street
looking East from Duke Street.  The Police Station and Bushong's
Coal Company were a half-block to the right in this photograph.

Eventually, in 1955, a new Public Safety Building was constructed with space for parking and the old Police Station on Grant Street was closed and eventually demolished.  On days when my mind wanders, I can visualize my trips to Bushong's Coal Company and visits to the old Police Station in downtown Lancaster.  As has been said many times over...those were the good 'ole days!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.