‘We had a good life there’

As the backhoe punched through the front door of the house that was home for more than eight decades, Harvey Nelson sat in a car nearby, saying little, watching.

He thought of how the front door would buzz when customers walked into his father's store, Nelson Grocery, on the front of the house at 1725 Ellis Blvd. NW.

He remembered sacking potatoes there, learning to drive a Willys-Knight automobile in the backyard, swimming the Cedar River in the summer to sneak onto the bathing beach below Ellis Park.

“We had a good life there,” said Nelson, 90.

The Nelson home and former grocery store had been empty since the flood and was demolished in early April. A backhoe's bucket and thumb - part sledgehammer, part giant pry bar - tore down the sturdy building in about a half-hour.

The store disappeared in a shower of wood, metal and glass. The backhoe then moved quickly toward the back of the house, pulling the walls inward as it went.

Nelson, wearing a white baseball cap, stood on the sidewalk with Greg Eyerly, the city's flood recovery director.

“There goes 81 years of my life,” Nelson said. “It's hard to see it go, but I don't see any object to letting it stand there.”

The building was crafted about 1900 with lumber from old ice houses. Harvey was 7 when his parents rented the building in 1927. The store capitalized on picnic traffic headed to Ellis Park, doing a brisk weekend business in tobacco, watermelon, ice cream and lunch meat.

Nelson's father died in 1946, and his mother ran the store until a year before her death in 1959. Nelson and his wife, Clairbell, moved there in 1962, remodeled the upstairs from five bedrooms to three and eventually replaced the store with living space.

The Nelsons threw parties over the years. The men and women would split up - women inside, men on the porch.

“We used to have a lot of company,” Nelson said. “The men ate out there, because that's where the beer was.”

Nelson spent the past few years at home taking care of Clairbell. She died of complications from diabetes in June 2008, only a day before he was forced to evacuate the home.

He is glad she died then, not later - before the flood, before he had to find a new home, before he had to watch workers tear the old one down.