North End Harmon is what locals mean when they say up the hill. The hill is gentle, thirty feet of rise over five blocks, but it is the only topography Harmon has, and the residents lean on it as if it were a mountain range. The streets run east-west, named after trees: Maple at the bottom near Main, then Oak, Elm, Birch, and at the upper boundary, the unnamed one-block stub of road that the township calls Hillcrest and that nobody else calls anything.
The houses are mostly late-Victorian on Maple and Oak, brick American foursquares on Elm, and ranches at the top from the postwar suburbanization that did not, in the end, suburbanize Harmon. The sycamores along Maple were planted in 1923 by an arborist whose name is on a small plaque at the corner of Maple and First, which has been there so long that nobody reads it.
The Marsh family live at 412 Maple Street, three houses down from where Helen Marsh taught piano for forty-three years in the converted parlor at the front of the family house. The Calloways live on Oak. The Brennans bought a Birch Street foursquare the year before the husband’s diagnosis. Boyd Haskell’s parents’ house, where Boyd grew up, is the small ranch at the corner of Birch and Hillcrest, owned now by a couple from out of town who paid cash and use it on weekends.
The North End is where the books most often take their breakfasts and their fights and their slow domestic accumulations. The Lamplighter is where the warnings happen; the North End is the room the warnings name.
The streets are quiet enough that, in the early chapters of The Good Father, David Marsh can stand on his front porch at four in the morning and hear the freight train from twelve miles north, the one that ran the spur from the steel mill up the lake. The trains do not run anymore; the spur was abandoned in 2019. The sound, in the book, is what David remembers; the silence is what is actually outside his door. The book uses this sound the way it uses the breakfast plates, as a thing that is disappearing slowly enough that the protagonist can pretend it is still there.