RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,198
(business as usual)
When I was a kid, during the
1950's anyway, the baseball
pitcher don Newcombe lived
in Colonia. Right along Inman
Ave. He was from Madison
and Elizabeth, NJ; first Negro
player to win the Cy Young,
some other titles and some
other achievements of note.
His career eventually petered
out, due to age and alcoholism,
but by then he was in Los
Angeles, with the Dodgers
after they moved, and he then
spent, as well, a final playing
year in Japan. All went well,
he was pretty famous, a real
baseball star and the rest.
The site of his home was
later the First National Bank
of Colonia, and there's a
pharmacy next to it too. All
traces of the old are gone.
Anyway, long about the
same time, give or take, the
Garden State Parkway came
pounding through Colonia.
ripped right through it. In the
old Dover Road section, for
years, until about 1982, an
old, gracious barn could still
be seen alongside the lanes
northbound, just after the
'New Dover Road' overpass.
Colonia was, by then, a truly
suburban area and most all
remnants of the agricultural
days were totally wiped. C'est
La Vie Avenue was rejected,
of course, for any of the new
road names.
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Don Newcombe's house was
gone not so many years after.
That Colonia Bank building,
across from what later became
Greiner Towers too, for senior
citizens, etc., and a strange
looking, Spanish, faux-settlement,
style Catholic Church, nestled
by the parkway. No one even
thinks about any of this now,
but I do. These old baseball
guys were always markers for
me about time and age and such.
As I grew up, one of the more
unsettling things was to move
along through that transition
from when cops and ball players
were always 'older' than me, to
the point when, suddenly the
same figures began to seem like
young kids, by comparison, to
me. Time passes, I suppose, and
you take with you what you will.
They never named the Garden
State Parkway, nor any portion
of it, the don Newcombe Highway,
but, whatever.
-
The same thing was done in Elmira,
oddly enough. After that 1972 flood,
and the ensuing Army Corps of
Engineers' re-jiggering of the old
city, they plowed this 'Expressway'
thing right through town. I never
knew why, because, just outside of
town Route 17 did the same thing
in a much more pleasant fashion,
along the Chemung River and some
old rail tracks. It was a nice, quick
and efficient means of bypassing
the entire place while on the way
to somewhere else west or east.
Certainly nothing of this sort was
need 'within' the town itself. It
was redundant, foul, and poorly
thought out, ramming straight
through and cancelling some
streets out or mashing others into
a dead end. The City of Elmira
didn't deserve that, nor need it,
flood-planning and flood-plain
conservation be damned. It was
more like punching a guy in the
chest, pummeling in and ripping
heart out, and then just walking
away. Houses, homes, and businesses
were lost and torn down. Right where
I was working, the old industrial
tail of First street, both Whitehall
Printing, and the Chevy dealership
there, were wrecked, (er, 'removed').
Nothing ever really came back to
re-inhabit any of this, because once
you punch a highway through there's
little sense for any small-scale or
'local' business to slide in, and the
resultant roadsides just remained
remnants of their things, scrap-metal
places, or old, abandoned buildings
and crap. By the time the 'Army'
engineers were gone, onto their
next project (probably ripping up
Binghamton or Scranton (75 miles
off in either direction), the final
insult was that they 'named' this
beastly conglomerate the 'Clemen's
Center Expressway,' in reference
to a 'Performing Arts Center' that
was also built in conjunction with
this roadway project. Millions of
government dollars, of course,
funneled into a dying, destitute,
old town with much poverty,
so that the roadway and 'Arts'
Center attendees, whoever they
may be, could motivate their
paltry inner lives on a fake
version of Mark Twain, and listen
to the likes of any contemporary
pop-music zany, or a 'theater'
production of their choosing,
with complete driving ease and
convenient parking. Go figure.
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Army, military, and government
functions are usually pathetic, and
this was no exception. In the same
way as barreling the Parkway through
Colonia, NJ, it probably made some
sense on the bureaucratic documents
of government-sanctioned 'roadway'
engineers and urban detailers. This
is all done in the name of safety, ease,
efficiency and security (In the older,
Eisenhower-era approach, in fact,
the entire national highway, thruway,
and interstate-travel system was
undertaken in a Cold-War outlook
of necessity, for moving military and
armaments all around the country,
in the expectation, back then, of the
Red Army communist assault on
our fine, upstanding, nation.
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If you say 'people,' or 'there are people
involved here, being displaced and their
landscapes changed,' I can only say this:
Speaking both for Colonia, Elmira, and
for all the other places so affected,
everywhere, you must realize that, for
politics and for politicians, 'people'
exist only every fourth year, when they
are once again best friends, wonderful
cohorts, honorable citizens and reliable
voters. 'Thank you, Sir and Madam, for
your vote.' And the next day that same
door is closed and all returns to
business as usual.
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