Credit: Courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives
"They were five rows of houses, and the house was only one story high, and they called it Mexico. We lived in a block that was eight rooms, one story, no back porch and no front porch. We had two bedrooms, no, one bedrooms and a kitchen, two rooms. Until [I was] about eight or ten, we lived only in those two rooms. We all slept together, my dad and my mother on a bed and us four children on one, and I enjoyed the floor a lot. In the kitchen we had a coal stove and a cupboard and benches instead of chairs; maybe we had two chairs and a round table … we had no plumbing[no water in the house] we had to go outside to get it. And … up until [ I was] about seven or eight, we had no lights. We had oil lamps. [We had] wooden floor [and we] scrubbed them." Adapted from an Oral History of Anna Giacomalli
