I went back to Ohio, but my city was gone.
Driving through south Jersey on Saturday on the way to see my mom, I glanced to the left to see that the neighborhood I grew up in was gone. It wasn’t very big; we didn’t even call it a town, but a village (“The Village,” to be exact).
I exaggerate very slightly. It wasn’t entirely gone. The house we lived in actually still stood - but truly about 90% was demolished, and a row of yellow bulldozers sat lined up placidly near the rest. What made it more jarring was that even most of the roads were gone; so it wasn’t a matter of missing buildings, as much as a sense that the place itself didn’t exist any more.
A couple of years ago, I had a somewhat similar experience with the neighborhood I lived in prior to that, until age 10 - a full half of it was torn down to make room for a Wawa (convenience store) on one end and a Walmart on the other. But this was much more sudden. True, I had seen the mini McMansions sprouting hectically at the edge of what was now in many parts a rural ghetto; and known that the homes directly adjacent to the new growth would surely be weeded out. I just didn’t realize that the entire village was going to be flattened within the space of two weeks.
I had been to a panel discussion about this very town last week, in New York. The Village is a subject of interest to some people because it housed the largest community of Japanese Americans on the east coast just subsequent to World War II, and because the entire community was essentially created by one local agricultural industrialist who was very resourceful about getting cheap labor. In a daring experiment, he hired thousands of Japanese Americans straight out of the internment camps; and shortly after, sponsored masses of displaced people from Estonia, Latvia, and other eastern European countries. The town was built around his factory and among his fields. He was the single largest employer on Japanese Americans after the war, on either coast or anywhere in between.
Someone at the panel had asked me about what The Village was like during the time I was growing up, in the 1960s and 70s. Ironically, the first thing that popped into my mind was how relatively unchanged the physical environment was from the 1940s (of which we had just seen slides), through when I lived there. The general store with its open cement slab of a porch; the cinder block barrack apartments that housed my father during the last 20 years of his life and several of my relatives when I was growing up; the rows of bungalow-style two bedrooms that were the best The Village had to offer; the little row of businesses (tailor, one barbershop for the men, separate beauty salon for the ladies) that curved around the general store across a small road. So I told them about that, especially the general store, because it had made me chuckle to see the 1940s teenagers loafing with their legs dangling off the porch in the same style we did thirty years later.
Then somebody asked, “Is it still there now?” And I said yes; that the general store had closed, as had the businesses (the last of them, just a couple of years back, when the original barber who was still cutting hair in his eighties, died in 2005); but that all of the buildings were still there. And they were; I had just seen them the week before.
It had never occurred to me to think that the pale, oblong one-story barracks, which were quickly built in 1944 to temporarily house the arriving former internees, could or would be crushed so fast and easily. It almost seems as though the density of history and experience they held would translate into a physical density that would make for a more gradual demolition. But of course, it didn’t.
Well, so … it’s not still there now, after all. Not the store, not the porch, not the barracks. The McMansions - or maybe they just look like mansions compared to the poor housing stock they replace - hover impatiently at the edge of a huge demolition site with a few houses and barrack apartments left huddled at one edge. Visually, one thing that particularly struck me was that many of the street signs were still intact - standing oblivious to the fact that the streets themselves, and the buildings that had made the streets relevant, existed no longer (and, in another week or two, the signs won’t either). Parsonage Road, which had bisected the tiny cluster of retailers, as well as my grandmother’s house; School Lane (or to be exact, “School Lane Road,” because all of the roads were called “Road” no matter what else, and the signs said so).
The exception to this forlorn, doomed signage was - again ironically - Hoover Road. Yes - the one local road that still exists is named after Herbert Hoover. Probably one of the shortest-lived of honorary names in the country has proven resilient here, and alone survives to usher in the New Village. It continued to be appropriate for a lane leading to pale, oblong one story buildings which, with later improvements such as indoor plumbing, remained to house poor people of various races and ethnicities into the 21st century. Whether it’s more intriguing to me that a Hoover Road survived to wind towards this “temporary” housing for so many decades, or that a Hoover Road now leads to a row of equally-hastily-built show homes, I’m really not sure.
When the McMansions started going up within yards of my father’s old apartment a few years back, I thought that the developer was naïve. Much of The Village had been poor when I was growing up, but it had gone way economically downhill since then, filled with poverty and violence. One time I had begun to set up a home health aide visit for my father through an agency, only to have them say in a shocked tone, “we can’t send anyone there,” when I told them the address. So who would spend big money to buy a home so close to The Village? Of course, it was I who was naïve. As a New Yorker, I’m not unfamiliar with “gentrification” - but it never occurred to me that the entire town was slated simply to be replaced. Maybe I had a blind spot because it was too personal and too much to take in.
Sunday, I stopped by to take pictures of what was left. Most of the remaining homes had been evacuated. But there were still some folks around, and a few black and white cats. A group of locals trudged along a well-worn path in the middle of a field which lies between The Village and the highway, across which is a single store where people get their cigarettes. Although you could walk across any point in the field without being impeded by anything more than depressed-looking clover and anemic crabgrass, enough people take the shortest diagonal route that a dirt path cuts through the rest of the nothing.
I didn’t see any of the few people I still knew. I stopped by the one of the apartments where a friend of my father’s had lived, but knew immediately that she was already gone because there was no sign of the spectacular garden of irises, forsythia, and gladiolas, which she carefully cultivated and of which she was very proud. When I first heard about the new homes, the Mansion Developer was also slated to build some replacement public housing; but it seems as though it will only house a fraction of the people who were displaced. Of the band of people on their way to buy cigarettes, I wonder where they will, variously, go next. I think that in large part it will be up to them to squeeze out a new place for themselves, like most people who live in places that get improved by developers; and like those who took refuge here just after the war.
I exaggerate very slightly. It wasn’t entirely gone. The house we lived in actually still stood - but truly about 90% was demolished, and a row of yellow bulldozers sat lined up placidly near the rest. What made it more jarring was that even most of the roads were gone; so it wasn’t a matter of missing buildings, as much as a sense that the place itself didn’t exist any more.
A couple of years ago, I had a somewhat similar experience with the neighborhood I lived in prior to that, until age 10 - a full half of it was torn down to make room for a Wawa (convenience store) on one end and a Walmart on the other. But this was much more sudden. True, I had seen the mini McMansions sprouting hectically at the edge of what was now in many parts a rural ghetto; and known that the homes directly adjacent to the new growth would surely be weeded out. I just didn’t realize that the entire village was going to be flattened within the space of two weeks.
I had been to a panel discussion about this very town last week, in New York. The Village is a subject of interest to some people because it housed the largest community of Japanese Americans on the east coast just subsequent to World War II, and because the entire community was essentially created by one local agricultural industrialist who was very resourceful about getting cheap labor. In a daring experiment, he hired thousands of Japanese Americans straight out of the internment camps; and shortly after, sponsored masses of displaced people from Estonia, Latvia, and other eastern European countries. The town was built around his factory and among his fields. He was the single largest employer on Japanese Americans after the war, on either coast or anywhere in between.
Someone at the panel had asked me about what The Village was like during the time I was growing up, in the 1960s and 70s. Ironically, the first thing that popped into my mind was how relatively unchanged the physical environment was from the 1940s (of which we had just seen slides), through when I lived there. The general store with its open cement slab of a porch; the cinder block barrack apartments that housed my father during the last 20 years of his life and several of my relatives when I was growing up; the rows of bungalow-style two bedrooms that were the best The Village had to offer; the little row of businesses (tailor, one barbershop for the men, separate beauty salon for the ladies) that curved around the general store across a small road. So I told them about that, especially the general store, because it had made me chuckle to see the 1940s teenagers loafing with their legs dangling off the porch in the same style we did thirty years later.
Then somebody asked, “Is it still there now?” And I said yes; that the general store had closed, as had the businesses (the last of them, just a couple of years back, when the original barber who was still cutting hair in his eighties, died in 2005); but that all of the buildings were still there. And they were; I had just seen them the week before.
It had never occurred to me to think that the pale, oblong one-story barracks, which were quickly built in 1944 to temporarily house the arriving former internees, could or would be crushed so fast and easily. It almost seems as though the density of history and experience they held would translate into a physical density that would make for a more gradual demolition. But of course, it didn’t.
Well, so … it’s not still there now, after all. Not the store, not the porch, not the barracks. The McMansions - or maybe they just look like mansions compared to the poor housing stock they replace - hover impatiently at the edge of a huge demolition site with a few houses and barrack apartments left huddled at one edge. Visually, one thing that particularly struck me was that many of the street signs were still intact - standing oblivious to the fact that the streets themselves, and the buildings that had made the streets relevant, existed no longer (and, in another week or two, the signs won’t either). Parsonage Road, which had bisected the tiny cluster of retailers, as well as my grandmother’s house; School Lane (or to be exact, “School Lane Road,” because all of the roads were called “Road” no matter what else, and the signs said so).
The exception to this forlorn, doomed signage was - again ironically - Hoover Road. Yes - the one local road that still exists is named after Herbert Hoover. Probably one of the shortest-lived of honorary names in the country has proven resilient here, and alone survives to usher in the New Village. It continued to be appropriate for a lane leading to pale, oblong one story buildings which, with later improvements such as indoor plumbing, remained to house poor people of various races and ethnicities into the 21st century. Whether it’s more intriguing to me that a Hoover Road survived to wind towards this “temporary” housing for so many decades, or that a Hoover Road now leads to a row of equally-hastily-built show homes, I’m really not sure.
When the McMansions started going up within yards of my father’s old apartment a few years back, I thought that the developer was naïve. Much of The Village had been poor when I was growing up, but it had gone way economically downhill since then, filled with poverty and violence. One time I had begun to set up a home health aide visit for my father through an agency, only to have them say in a shocked tone, “we can’t send anyone there,” when I told them the address. So who would spend big money to buy a home so close to The Village? Of course, it was I who was naïve. As a New Yorker, I’m not unfamiliar with “gentrification” - but it never occurred to me that the entire town was slated simply to be replaced. Maybe I had a blind spot because it was too personal and too much to take in.
Sunday, I stopped by to take pictures of what was left. Most of the remaining homes had been evacuated. But there were still some folks around, and a few black and white cats. A group of locals trudged along a well-worn path in the middle of a field which lies between The Village and the highway, across which is a single store where people get their cigarettes. Although you could walk across any point in the field without being impeded by anything more than depressed-looking clover and anemic crabgrass, enough people take the shortest diagonal route that a dirt path cuts through the rest of the nothing.
I didn’t see any of the few people I still knew. I stopped by the one of the apartments where a friend of my father’s had lived, but knew immediately that she was already gone because there was no sign of the spectacular garden of irises, forsythia, and gladiolas, which she carefully cultivated and of which she was very proud. When I first heard about the new homes, the Mansion Developer was also slated to build some replacement public housing; but it seems as though it will only house a fraction of the people who were displaced. Of the band of people on their way to buy cigarettes, I wonder where they will, variously, go next. I think that in large part it will be up to them to squeeze out a new place for themselves, like most people who live in places that get improved by developers; and like those who took refuge here just after the war.