Sunday, October 05, 2003

	Click photo for larger image.

Like many of its neighbors, the empty house at 201 Talbot Ave. in Braddock is covered with vines.

Surrounded by members of their family, Frank and Cecelia Zygmunt, sitting on sofa with grandchildren on their lap, celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary in the living room of their house at 201 Talbot Ave., Braddock. Dan Colagrande, 55, Sylvia Colagrande, 76, and Dorothy Gray, 60, were among a group that recently returned to their old family home (top photo), which is slated for demolition. "We were reclaiming the house, and saying goodbye to the house," Gray said. Click photo for larger image.

Its doors are sealed with plywood, and a portion of the porch roof has collapsed. Monstrous weeds choke the tiny side yard. Within the house an eerie quiet reigns.

Silence has waited a long time to stake its claim. For nearly half a century, as home to the family of Frank and Cecelia Zygmunt, the house was filled with sounds of life.

In 1926, the cries of a baby fresh from her mother's womb echoed through the second floor. In 1932, piano music and laughter wafted from a first-floor reception celebrating the wedding of Frank and Cecelia's daughter Matylda.

Sixteen years later, the house was somber, the voices muted. Matylda, now a mother, had died suddenly and was laid out in the same room where her vows had once been celebrated. Dorothy Gray, Matylda's daughter, was 5 when her mother died. She remembers how an older cousin took her and her sister Maryann for a stroll on the sidewalks of Braddock, to get the girls away from the heavy grief within the house.

Over the decades, as the Zygmunt family grew, the house became a central gathering place for uncles and aunts and cousins -- a "merry-go-round" of activity, as Gray put it.

Dorothy is 60 now, and she lives in Murrysville, although her heart and memories remain on Talbot. From the time of her mother's death in 1948 until 1952, she lived in the house. She has black-and-white pictures of herself playing with dolls on the porch and posing with Maryann on the sidewalk. She remembers sliding down the home's oak banister and singing carols at Christmas.

Frank and Cecelia had bought the place in 1922, when Braddock throbbed to the rhythm of the giant Edgar Thomson steel mill at the opposite end of Talbot. Frank emigrated from Poland in 1901 and worked as a teacher and organist at Braddock's Sacred Heart Church. Cecelia was the daughter of Polish immigrants. Of the couple's five children, all but one have died. Sylvia Colagrande, now 76 and living in Rockville, Md., was born in the house on Talbot. Those were her cries that filled the second floor in 1926.

Frank and Cecelia are buried at Braddock Catholic Cemetery, and no Zygmunts have lived in the house since 1969, although a son, Henry, kept an office there in his years as a justice of the peace. In the mid-1990s, the family sold the house. Dorothy says another family lived there for a while but that the house needed too much work and was eventually abandoned.

Not long ago, Sylvia heard that the house at 201 Talbot was on a list of structures scheduled to be razed. She wanted to see the place one last time, so she and her son Dan devised a plan. Six family members gathered at the house on a sunny day in late May. Those present were Dorothy, Sylvia, Dan, a cousin, Marc Markiewicz of McMurray, and his wife, Dee, and daughter Tonya.

Dan, who had driven with his mother from Maryland for the event, used a pry bar to remove plywood covering a side door opening. Then the six entered the house that had been abandoned and silent for so long.

The place was a wreck. Debris covered the floors. Gone was the oak woodwork, including the pocket doors and the banister Dorothy had used as a slide. In the living room was a bare mattress, shoes and a shirt -- evidence that the house hadn't been completely abandoned. The group explored each room, remembering the people they had loved, and how those people had lived.

Dorothy had brought a bottle of wine and some plastic cups. On their final gathering within the walls of 201 Talbot, members of Frank and Cecelia's family raised a toast. Then Dorothy handed out blue felt-tip markers. On a wall in the dining room, she and her relatives wrote the names "Frank" and "Cecelia." Then they wrote the names of the couple's children -- Henry, Matylda, Tadziu, Leona and Sylvia -- and finally, the names of all the grandchildren who had lived in the house. After everyone had exited, Dan hammered back into place the plywood he had removed.

Before leaving Talbot Avenue, Dan and Marc dug up a few Rose of Sharon bushes that Cecelia and Frank had planted decades ago in the tiny side yard. Somehow they had survived. Dan took one to his home in Rockville; Marc took one to McMurray; Dorothy has one at her home in Murrysville. At a family reunion next year, Dorothy plans to have cuttings for each of her cousins. The Zygmunts' bushes will be spread from the East Coast to as far west as Phoenix.

"They're so hardy," Dorothy said of the rose of Sharon. "You can make cuttings from them and still they'll grow."

An index to Here, a weekly feature produced by Post-Gazette photographers and writers who roam the region to capture close-up slices of life here.

Steve Mellon can be reached at smellon@post-gazette.com.

E-mail this story   Print this story