When my dad lived here, they hadn’t had running water or central heating. He used to have to stoke the furnace on winter mornings. Running water finally arrived in the fifties. The pipes were attached to the backs of the buildings, as they had been to my childhood home on South Houston. You got just enough water into the house to supply the kitchen, so a tiny bathroom with a handheld shower was installed behind a makeshift partition near the kitchen sink. I could still remember the first time I visited a college friend in her Oak Park home. It seemed so luxurious to have a second bathroom, and a big tub to stretch out in.

A woman came up the walk with a toddler and a shopping cart in tow. Petra turned to her eagerly, asking, in competent Spanish, if we could look inside. “Mi abuelita vivía antes en este apartamento” (My grandmother used to live in this apartment).

The woman looked at us doubtfully but shrugged, and gestured to us to follow her in. Petra and I helped her carry the heavy cart—loaded with bottles of pop, milk, and topped with clean, folded towels—up the steep wooden steps. Inside the narrow hallway, crammed as it was with bicycles and strollers, Petra’s high spirits became subdued.

“Which one did Granny Warshawski live in?” she asked me.

“Second-floor front,” I said.

“The Velázquez family,” our guide said in English. “She’s not home. But the father’s mother stays with the baby. Maybe she’ll let you look.”

She called to the toddler, who was staring dumbstruck at Petra. Mother and child went on down the hall, the child looking back over its shoulder at us. We climbed to the second floor and knocked on the Velázquezes’ door. We could hear a baby wailing and a television blaring in Spanish. After a moment, we knocked again, and then heard a voice asking in Spanish who was there.

My cousin called back, also in Spanish, explaining our mission. Our grandmother’s old home, could we have a quick look? A suspicious silence on the other side while we were inspected through a peephole and then the sound of many locks scraping back and the rickety door being pulled open.

We were instantly inside the apartment. No foyer, or other formality, stood between us and the front room, where a sofa bed stood open. The baby, who was about ten months old, lay on it, still crying. An older sibling in front of the television turned to look at us. He shrieked and ran behind his grandmother.