Nous voulons Fishsticks!

[captainsblog]

A story about the land of my upbringing, from 50-plus years ago through a vote last night. I'd promised some stories about my trip from three weekends back, but last week's kerfuffle kinda cut into that.

Long Island is a very strange place- mixes of immense affluence, abject poverty and everything in between. In an incredibly short post-WWII span, first Nassau, then Suffolk counties went from small villages and potato farms to massive bedroom communities for New York City. Subdivisions like the one I grew up in sprouted from those potato fields seemingly overnight. The Levitts were the first to capitalize on the cheap land and cheaper mass production tools they'd used building wartime housing, and the result was the named-for-them suburb of Levittown, one over from the one my parents settled in back in 1949.  Their home was not Levitt-built, but was of the same one-size-fits-all production design, Cape after Cape after Cape lining the newly-cut streets.

By the time I arrived a decade later, bigger and better homes took up other corners of the former fields, schools had been planted at walkable distances, and the short-lived middle class had, truly, their greatest generation. My father worked for Sperry; Grumman was another major employer in the area, who literally landed a man on the moon; and there was plenty of everything except diversity. I don't know if our deed had a race restrictive covenant like the Levitts' did, but de facto discrimination was just as strong. In my almost 700-member graduating class, there were perhaps two dozen who weren't as lily white as I was- many of them military brats from the small part of the war era Mitchel Air Force Base that fell within the western boundary of our school district.

Most of that air base sat as surplus property for my entire life, with dreams of cultural attractions and parkspace squelched by pleas of municipal poverty. Ultimately, one thing got built out there- a sports arena to attract teams from the NBA and NHL. It was built cheap, and dirty, and had all the comforts of home if your home was an upended refrigerator box.  Within five years, the promised NBA team had come and gone, and the NHL franchise, awarded only to keep a competing league from gaining a metro-New York foothold, struggled for all but a few glorious years in the early 1980s.

I left. So had all of my family, by the time Emily was born. Most people my age had little chance of affording anything close to what they'd grown up in, so they either moved east, or, more often, south- North Carolina and Florida being the most popular destinations. Lots of the original war-era owners hung on, though. Some still do. I visited two of them after attending church on the morning after our ballpark event last month. Dom and Terry moved next door to us when I was maybe five, and their home still has the same feels of welcome and family that it always did. Yet the surroundings outside that house were increasingly strange- to me, after well over a year away since my last visit, but even to them.

Many of the homes in the neighborhood have huge dumpsters in front of them. They're not being renovated; they're teardowns. Perhaps the original owner was a hoarder, or a pathological smoker or pet owner, or worse, and the only thing the next generation can do is grab the patch of land and start over. Terry lamented the quietness of the streets: "Youse kids, you were always out playing in the street. I never see any of that anymore." When I talked about how Kids These Days are probably just totally overprogrammed with soccer games and travel teams and SAT tutoring and all that crap, she semi-agreed, but then added an even more fatal observation.  The school bus stops on her corner, as it did for me in high school, and now does for the elementary kids as well (ours, a block away, closed due to declining enrollment and bulldozed for more tract housing in the late 70s). She sees the kids out there, but they just stand there, she said. "They never talk to each other."  I'm sure that's a function of overprogramming and magnified strangerdangerphobia, but it's damn sad. Those great-generation original owners fought a war, then built up those homes, so their grandkids could live in little plastic bubbles next to each other. My Latin must be rusty, because I did not think that "E Pluribus Unum" translated into "Every Man for Himself."

----

Yet that, also, is what the remaining citizens of that area seem to have once again said with a resounding chorus. Even in the times of greater prosperity, everybody there complained about taxes being too high. This, despite the fact that we had garbage pickup three times a week; the Town was able to put a stop sign on virtually every residential corner (and still is; at least two more have sprouted on Powers Avenue since I was last there), and a cop car behind many of them to catch you if you rolled past one of them; and there are constant Public Events dedicated to reminding the sheep residents who's putting the Smart Balance on their bread nowadays.

This picture, taken at an event where a radio-station friend of mine from wayback, tells you everything you need to know:



Yup- not only is the town's political hack named on the sign, it's in bigger type than the name of the town.

KATE MURRAY SUPERVISOR was also a major player in the recent shenanigans down there over that crumbling home of the hockey team. Faced with a hideous on-ice product and a venue considered the worst in the league, its owner came to the town with a proposal to self-fund a new arena if they would approve a major redevelopment around it. The usual NIMBY crowd hemmed, hawed and ultimately hacked it all to death with a red Sharpie, so the team owner (who, I am not making this up, is named Wang) instead moved over to the next political bed upstairs- that of the county executive, who crafted a plan to float a $400 million bond issue to rebuild the arena, put a minor league baseball team next to it, and generally improve the still-bleak surrounding area.

Despite major efforts to suppress voter turnout and all the media players in the market supporting the proposal, the bond was defeated by an overwhelming margin yesterday. And so Wang's going back in his pants along with his wallet, probably moving the team away when the lease expires in three years. One likely candidate is the once-jilted populace of Quebec City, who have sent busloads of fans to the Coliseum in the past just to see if they could outnumber the local fans. (I hear tell it was close.)  Problem is, there does not appear to be a strict French-Canadian translation of the word "fishsticks," which would be important when Ranger fans came to visit.

Alternatively, the equally jilted city of Hartford might make a play, assuming they even have any municipal government left by 2015.  There, at least, the previous Whalers name would fit in well with the despised former logo:



And someone, in time, will just buy the land under the Coliseum, do a teardown, and turn it into a big strip mall. Because that, apparently, is what that Greatest Generation did all that fighting for.

Comments

[neonvincent]

The last politician who had his name written larger than the jurisdiction he represented was Kwame Kilpatrick, former Mayor of Detroit, who had his name painted on the water tower of the Detroit Zoo, not even a mile away from me. He's just getting out of prison this week. Current mayor Dave Bing doesn't even have his name on it.

[captainsblog]

I first visited Chicago in the summer of 1982, during the Daley Interregnum, when Jane Byrne had seized the ward heelers of power. I was struck by how she changed all the signs to "MAYOR JANE BYRNE WELCOMES YOU TO CHICAGO" (or to whatever place, or event, you might have been at). Given how long she lasted, there's something to be said for a little humility.

[audacian.livejournal.com]

I can't believe it failed. Hempstead and the Coliseum are such crapholes - why wouldn't they welcome what would be a ridiculous boost to the local economy?

My SIL lives next (literally next) to the Ducks stadium in CI. It's big and beautiful and sells out every night. Unlike our terrible minor league team here in Albany, they actually play well and I think having a Suffolk/Nassau rival thing going on would be nice. Except instead of having Rangers/Islanders fans heckling each other on the Subway it would be on the LIE or the Southern State, and that might get messy. ;)

I don't think Hartford will get the team - aren't they home to the Rangers minor league team now?

Albany would of course do well with any kind of major team now that the Giants have peaced out for a while, but with Joe Bruno off to prison I don't think we'll be seeing any tasty pork projects any time soon.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

I think one of the causes of Teh Stupid down there is that in (especially) Nassau, and Suffolk to a lesser extent, the basic units of government service are way bigger than they should be for the populations that they serve. Where we are now, Erie County has 20-odd towns within its borders, roughly corresponding to the school districts here; Monroe, where we used to live, is roughly the same, as are most upstate counties. Nassau has three towns within the entire county, my former home of Hempstead covering the affluence of beachfront communities, the poverty of Roosevelt, and places like the one I grew up in, which has to contend with the county owning three huuuuge tracts of land (for the county jail, county hospital and the largest public park) and thus yanking them off the tax rolls.

Throw in the complication of the skyrocketing of property values from the 70s to early 90s (we would've been lucky to get 50K for the family manse when I left, but it sold, in early 1992 in far worse condition, for close to 200), and you get the discrepancy in age to go along with the one in need. All in all, you get pretty f'd up.

[greenquotebook.livejournal.com]

I'm speechless...