After thirty-five years, I finally went home in 2009. I can prove it. I have a picture of the parking lot that now stands on the site of my Italian immigrant great-grandmother’s house on Spring Street. They paved paradise! I was the fourth generation living together in that home for the first two years of my life.

Seeing my second home, now that was a bit more emotional. After all, my residency there spanned more than 20 years. It’s where I experienced puberty, discovered boys, marijuana, alcohol, and insanity. As the middle child of a manic-depressive father and an older schizophrenic sister, I was fortunate enough to have been completely ignored. And I took full advantage. For every bad memory of this second home, there is a good one. I consider myself lucky.

My youngest sister and I took this journey together, which itself was noteworthy. I was 16 years old when she was born and left for college when she was two. We have not lived in the same state since and have been together probably less than a dozen times over the past 40 years. She went to college in New York and stayed close with the east coast relatives. She was going to reintroduce me to them on this trip. First though, we were taking this journey to our childhood homes. Two completely different upbringings, but the same family. Same mother, same father. Well, that may not be completely true, remember the bipolar part? She had the benefit of a father medicated with lithium. I did not.

Hudson Gardens – Riverdale, New York

I did not expect the tears. I am not an emotional person and in retrospect, I realize that this is the place that took the emotion from me. It was called “surviving.” As we rounded the corner from the bus stop, there it stood in all its glory. It always had quite an impressive appearance. Perhaps you have driven by it on Henry Hudson Parkway after coming off the George Washington Bridge or after getting off the West Side Highway on the way out of the City? If so, you have probably seen “my building” standing proud up on the hill.

Urban legend says the eccentric Spanish Count Alfred De Silva designed this sprawling apartment building (the address is 2728 Henry Hudson Parkway) to resemble a Spanish castle for his bride. It was completed in 1928 and built high enough to tower over neighboring structures and provide a clear view of the Hudson River, which the Count referred to as the castle’s moat. The story goes that he used hallucinatory drugs, and on one occasion, thinking that he could fly, he fell to his death from his penthouse apartment terrace. When our family lived there, my father told me about watching Eleanor Roosevelt pull up in a limousine to visit a powerful New York politician, Edward Flynn who was close to FDR and helped get him elected president. Flynn resided in that same penthouse apartment that had once belonged to the Count.

The building was a stately piece of architecture, complete with gargoyles. There was a uniformed doorman and as kids, we would find the scariest places in this old stone building to explore and play. There were lots of long dark hallways under the lobby between the storage spaces and the laundry room where we could hide from each other and from the Super.

“My building” was just as magnificent as I had remembered it from the last time I had seen it, thirty-five years before. There was ivy covering the brick walls and the tunnel where I was hit by a car while playing ring-a-levio, completely my fault. And there was the back stoop where all the kids would sit and wait for the Good Humor man on a summer night. I again saw Stevie’s window; it was opposite mine and down one floor. We used to yell to each other from our bedrooms and once tried the old tin can and string trick, but we could never get the string long enough.

My sister and I went up the elevator. It was still small and creaky, but the original had obviously been replaced. We nervously knocked on the door of our old apartment – 81C, and explained to the young woman who opened the door why we were there and….she let us in!

Everything looked so much smaller from a grown-up perspective. There were the same solid concrete stippled walls and the radiator in what used to be the bedroom I had shared with my older sister. We had lived on the top floor, just under the penthouse, so when the heat would come on in the winter that radiator would rattle, clang, steam and hiss. It was the sound of my childhood. I was glad to see that the old metal “casement” windows had been replaced. On very cold days, I remember there would be ice on the inside. The same bathroom tile was still the original, little black and white squares on the floor with pink on the walls.

Talk about old meets new. We were standing in the dining room, which was once our very formal living room with these wonderful people who had let two complete strangers into their home – when my much younger Gen X sister realized that her Facebook picture was taken in this apartment, in the exact same spot when she was seven years old. She brought up her Facebook page and showed the picture as proof, I suppose, that we weren’t simply two complete strangers.

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Most of Marlene Dunham’s stories are based in the place she was born and raised, New York City. Marlene’s first non-fiction narrative, Embracing the Shadows: Navigating a Family’s Mental Illness, tells of her own family’s struggles with mental illness. She hopes this story can help others who have experienced this in their lives.