Terry Collins
During his childhood, Terry Collins lived on Prospect Street near the North Side Depot. There was a building there that served railroad workers. He and his father would go there to take hot showers since their house did not have running water.
This interview comes from the UWL Oral History Program at Special Collections Murphy Library.
Transcript
Location: 1701 Prospect St.
Eric Wheeler: So you grew up in the Logan neighborhood?
Terry Collins: I have 11 brothers and sisters. And when I was born, we lived, uh, near the North Side railroad depot at 1611 Prospect Street. And I was born on September 7, 1947. So we lived there until I was eight.
Wheeler: 1611 Prospect rings a bell for me in terms of the neighborhood there. The Depot, which still stands—
Collins: It does, yes.
Wheeler: Was that the CB&Q Depot?
Collins: It was.
Wheeler: There is a building that is now a rental property that is within sight of that. It was a boarding house—
Collins: Yes!
Wheeler: It was a hotel.
Collins: Yes.
Wheeler: What was the name of the hotel?
Collins: Well, I don’t know what the name of it is. We called it, “The Dump.” And that boarding-house-slash-hotel is on the end of the sixteen hundred block of Prospect and we lived, you know, maybe five houses to the south of that.
Wheeler: Okay, I figured.
Collins: But just, you know, sort of, as irony would have it, my wife’s mother lived in The Dump.
Wheeler: It just came to me. It’s the Goddard Hotel.
Collins: That is correct.
Wheeler: And a picture—the original design, Queen Anne, with a wonderful, four-sided turret—
Collins: Yeah.
Wheeler: The turret has been removed—
Collins: Yeah.
Wheeler: You can clearly see it—
Collins: I don’t ever remember the turret.
Wheeler: And you don’t remember it ever being a hotel?
Collins: No, I remember it being a boarding house or a sort of transient apartments.
Wheeler: And it was a hotel for railroad workers. And probably its glory would have been in the 20s or the teens, perhaps. So the other landmark there, is it currently referred to—and that was my question—is it called the CB&Q Depot? Is that the historic name of it?
Collins: Well, we always called it, you know, the North Side Depot. And there was a building that served it that was always called The Beanery. They had the Q Lunch and they had showers. I mean, when we lived on Prospect Street, we did not have hot, running water in our house. And my dad would take me from time to time to take showers in—they had showers there for the railroad workers and, you know, he would shower there and stuff and I can remember a couple of times him taking me there. So, this building that we always called The Beanery had the Q Lunch and then it had these showers and then I think it was the waiting room for the North Side Depot—I don’t know that it was called the Q Depot, but it was—we always called it the North Side Depot.
Wheeler: Right.
Collins: Yeah.
Wheeler: So there is a lot of railroad history in that neighborhood.
Collins: Oh, a heck of a lot of it.