Riding Down Memory Lane

Remembering Parts of Geneva as it was Forty, Fifty Years Ago

When you are of a certain age as I am, if you have not gone somewhere for a long time, you tend to remember places and the people in them in a certain way. You may actually not remember what they were really like and instead have constructed memories of them. If, when you think back, you feel good about the people and the places, you may have erased or put in back corners the things thatwere negative about them.

That is very interesting to note, as I wrote about the people and places at the time I was there, putting them, the stories about them, and their environment into novels. As I have just gone over some of them, published a few and am still going over others, I look at least at the places with the fresh eyes of the writer of the time and, as myself, right now.

Though I have come to Geneva and been to some of the places around it almost yearly since then, for some reason I did not go back to the area around the Palais des Nations, that is the Geneva United Nations Headquarters, home to other international organizations like the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization. That was the area I lived in on Chemin Colladon, barely five to seven minutes away.

Today, driving a giant car that I am just getting used to, I did. I did not go by the highway. I went by the scenic Geneva Lake route. After all, that is how I used to drive first in an old green Mazda, then a burgundy red VW Porsche.

What struck me first was how many tall new buildings had gone up along the way. That route used to feel like the countryside. Now it is suburban with supermarkets on the side. And, as I drove up to Geneva, the road was being worked on with another tall building blocking the way to the first lake boardwalk street I recognized.

I turned to the right and there were more buildings. Interesting, there seemed to be more trees, all tall and dense, or, perhaps, these had been just younger, less majestic when I worked and lived here. Of course, more buildings, some of which I am sure are international organizations that have grown beyond their headquarters decades ago.

Then, I hit the Palais and almost chocked. It was gated, full of flags along the main driveway, flags that normal people could only see through grates. And my mind brought out an image — young people protesting the Soviet backlash in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The gates had been open then and the crowd was almost at the majestic gateway.

I continued my heart pounding and wondered what had happened to the Intercontinental Hotel that figures in my Question of Seduction. To be honest I almost didn’t see it, because the whole road, then lined with picturesque houses surrounded by gardens, was now full of six, seven story buildings. The hotel had stood out, been so prominent then! It was just another building now.

As I almost missed but turned into the street before it, the street I used to take to get to my apartment, I did not spot the swimming pool. I slowed down and there was one, but somehow, I wonder whether it is the same one, because behind all kinds of bushes, it doesn’t seem the same.

I turned again. More high-rise buildings were on my right. That used to be a field, a farm, where I went to buy fresh produce.

And there was a street I knew, an old one, on my left. I automatically turned to it, then realized it was one way and I was in the wrong direction. An older man was passing by. I opened my window and apologized for being in the wrong way on a one-way street. It certainly had not been that way when I had left.

He asked for money. He was hungry. Wow, thatwas not something from the Geneva of the seventies!! I gave him four francs and painfully turned around.

Just some meters away was a familiar sight, the little shopping center. I smiled and turned again. This time what was on my right corresponded to what I knew. Of course, there were high-rises on the left, obviously not there forty years ago. I passed the entrance to what had been my underground garage, turned to the right, and went into the driveway by my old apartment. The balconies of the building used to overlook some fields. Now there were more high-rises and, yes, the green tops of trees.

The smart, savvy young people I live with and know cannot see the world I saw. They take what there is for granted. That international buildings should be locked away and guarded is normal for them. They did not live in the world before 9/11. They were not part of this or other cities when the planet held four billion souls, half of what it does today.

I wonder how the world will change as a result of our pandemic and the heating climate that is just part of our environmental degradation. I only know that what I did was turn around at the end of what had been my driveway for over four years and started rolling back to the countryside, where I could breathe and walk Houdini.