Flashback and ahead April 16, 2024
Bright almost scalding light greets me this morning, although the temperature is significantly down from mid-80s yesterday.
I’m not a big fan of bright sunlight. My mood tends to
prefer cloudy, rainy days.
But I’ll take what I can get.
We’re in that post Easter time in anticipation of Memorial
Day and the official start of the summer season.
We’re planning a trip to Asbury Park again for the end of
the week, and then an overnight up to Kingston for our semi-annual visit to Woodstock
for some time between now and the end of May.
Both places have become anachronisms, reflecting a reality
that no longer exists – Asbury having lost nearly all of its blue collar credibility
in its rush to embrace Gen Z, while Woodstock clings to what remains of a
generation of love and peace.
Since I have a foot in both working class and hippie
culture, it makes sense that we would travel to these places, getting our
glimpse of something rapidly fading.
I’m also planning a day trip to Scranton to see my daughter,
whose life seems to be on an upswing these days. Love will do that.
Somewhere in all this, I want to return to downtown Paterson
to see how much has changed since my previous visit (discounting my coverage of
the BOE there last year) many years ago.
I still haven’t seen Spielberg’s West Side Story – which I
know won’t be as good as the original film my mother dragged me to New York
City to see when it came out many, many decades ago. But because the center of
Paterson still has most of its historic buildings, Spielberg’s film may take me
back in time to my childhood there.
We shall see.
I returned to Passaic last weekend – the old neighborhood
thick with new development that hopes to take advantage of the train station in
Garfield. So far, Garrick’s prediction that the complex of cold water flats in
which we lived during the 1970s and 1980s and his family had owned since the
1920s has not yet come to fruition. He claimed the building are to be razed for
new development, something I suspect won’t happen until the warehouse property
next to it can be obtained.
The go go bar around the corner is now a daycare center. Joe’s
bar across from the Polish deli was redeveloped into an apartment, as was the
community hall associated with it (where the band practice during that time
when Jack replaced Paulie as the lead singer.)
All the buildings along the Garfield side of the river, running
along River Drive, have been demolished in order to create a walkway – most likely
to promote the massive new development going up on the site of the former chemical
plant.
I took a lot of pictures along that section of road where I
used to jog, although upstream, near the Dundee Falls the park has replaced Service
Diner where I used to stop for coffee. The old factory behind the Dunkin on
Outwater Lane (which I depicted in several stories) is now a strip mall – an improvement
I suppose.
Yet all in all, very little has dramatically changed. The
Polish church is still the center of that community. And the Swit house I
thought had been demolished still stands, an icon to that neighborhood’s most
famous person (if you don’t count the visit of the Cardinal that eventually
became the first Polish Pope – his life-size statue installed above the church
doors, somewhat scary.
For all the pending sense of doom, I still return to that
place in my dreams, to the cold water flat where I always felt safe, and to the
neighborhood where my family settled when they arrived here in the 1880s.
Their ghosts still haunt that place, as do the ghosts of my
friends.
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