After a long day of taking care of her grandson Timmer and studying for her nursing exam, Julie Rowden takes a break in her Armory Square apartment.
The Book of Shadows
Story by Peter Jamison — photographs by Channing Johnson
Chapter Two
Windsor — When life at the Block gets to be too much, Julie Rowden and her sister Cheryl Goodman sometimes turn to spells, invoking protection from the world of spirits. Cheryl walks in a circle three times about the apartment to seal their home from evil.
"I cast a circle of protection around my family," Cheryl says.
Do they consider themselves witches? Not in the way most people would define a witch, Julie says. After all, she says, a spell is really no more than a prayer.
The sisters — who live with Julie's 5-year-old grandson, Timmer, in a two-bedroom apartment at Armory Square, the Windsor low-income housing complex better known as the Block — are Wiccans, adherents of a neopagan spirituality that accords great importance to dreams, wishes, auras, the forces of nature.
On the kitchen table, next to Julie's nursing textbooks, is a Wiccan text, Solitary Witch: The Ultimate Book of Shadows, by a woman named Silver RavenWolf.
"All it is," Julie explains, "is the ability to effect change in another. If you think I can go, 'Poof!' and turn you into a banana, that's not it."
Sometimes, when the music next door gets too loud, when Timmer cannot sleep, Julie will light a blue candle atop her TV set — blue, symbolizing peace and serenity. "And within a few minutes — now I'm not kidding — they will mellow out over there," she says, pointing at the wall.
Cheryl says she is aware of four ghosts in the apartment, one of whom — "a big guy" — watches over and protects Timmer. Sometimes, Cheryl says, when Timmer is sprawled out playing on the floor, it is impossible to step over him —the ghost blocks the way — and she has to walk around. "That's his angel," Julie says. ("I wish I had one," she says later. "I need, like, nine of them.")
Aside from such small comforts, the Block is not hospitable to spiritual life, the sisters say. Tonight, Cheryl is sitting on the living room sofa next to Timmer. Julie is moving back and forth between the kitchen and her bedroom, talking on her cell phone with a friend. The hip-hop lyrics "ridin' dirty" are blasting through the walls from the neighbors' place. The music is a daily occurrence, the sisters say. At other times there have been gunshots or stabbings or fights just outside their door.
"Too much bad has happened in this building for it to ever not be this way anymore," Cheryl says of the chaos around her. "It has a life of its own."
"It's hard to keep a protective circle," she adds. "It will drain you."
When Massachusetts-based developer Herbert Berezin bought and renovated the Block with partners in the 1980s, hopes in town ran high that the building, which had fallen into disrepair and disrepute over the preceding decades, was on the verge of transformation. State housing officials praised Berezin at the time for pouring more money than was strictly necessary into the building. Berezin, for his part, promised to improve building security.
"I'm not going to make excuses for it," Berezin said of the complex in a 1985 interview with the Valley News after buying the Block. "It's been neglected for many, many years. That building needs a lot of work." In 1989, shortly before the Block reopened to accept Section 8 tenants, Gary Renaud, then the building's on-site manager, vowed that the renovated building — renamed Armory Square Apartments — was "not going to be a slum."