I took a nostalgia trip today, to Main Street in downtown Passaic. This was where my mother and father used to shop back when I was a kid. The first of the big highway malls were just starting out at the time (around 1962-63). We eventually took to the malls, with all of our fellow suburbanites, leaving Main Street to the poor and working-class folk of urban Passaic.

Well, Main Street is still there, as can be seen in the pix below. It looks and sounds quite a bit different today; Spanish language and Latin music fill the air, and the stores are certainly more colorful looking, if a bit more raffish. The big office building with the funny tower on the top is empty now, awaiting an uncertain future. My mother once worked there. The YMCA and Salvation Army are also still there, as can be seen. You also see the usual hotel for urban transients. The fancy restaurants have been replaced with fast food and ‘adult entertainment’ bars. And the last movie theater (the Montauk) has bitten the dust; even porno couldn’t sustain it. Nonetheless, it’s nice to see that Main Street still has a pulse.

 

 

 

We’ve had a relatively easy winter here in New Jersey. There were a couple of snowy days and a couple of cold snaps, when it went down to 7 or 8 degrees. But we’ve had nothing like the Siberian conditions experienced out in the Midwest, with weeks of snow and sub zero temps.

But even a mild winter gets me down. There are still too many short gray days and long dark nights. I think that Seasonal Affective Disorder has been getting to me. But sometime during this past weekend, it struck me that it’s March. Then the sun came out and the air had changed: the smell of plant life growing had returned, if only faintly. There could still be an Arctic front and we could still get snow. But you know that the “S.A.D.-ness” will soon be coming to an end.

Back in December I posted a crude translation of a little poem about the start of winter, from some Russian lady’s blog site. She marveled about how winter could be “cozy” and “bright”. But the truth is that winter is more dimness and grunge, even when it’s relatively tame. Here’s a pick that I took a few weeks ago which captures the feel of winter. It also helps to explain why it feels so good when the gray finally starts going away.

About two weeks ago, the UPS guy showed up at my apartment house and left eight boxes on the porch. I saw the boxes and out of curiosity, I looked at the shipping label to see who this stuff was for. To my surprise, it was for me! But I didn’t order it, it was a big mistake. I recognized the name of the sender, an internet purveyor of specialty food items; I had ordered from them before, but not for several months. So I went on line, and to my relief I didn’t see any unexpected charges against my credit cards. Then I shot an e-mail to the company telling them that it was all a big mistake, I didn’t order this stuff. They wrote back and asked me to open one box, get out the invoice, and give them the reference numbers. I sent that back to them, and asked them when I should expect the stuff to be picked up. Two days went by, no reply. So I wrote again, asking ‘when are you having this stuff picked up?’ Again, no response. So, I got out the invoice and decided that whatever this stuff was, it was now mine.

Actually, it was a lot of beans. Another customer had ordered big 25 pound bags of beans and grains from this company. I can’t figure out why; their prices per pound are almost twice what you pay in the supermarket (despite being bought in bulk). Well whatever, the stuff was now mine, por nada.

Actually, I gave three of the bean-bags and a sack of organic couscous to a homeless shelter that my brother used to volunteer with. That still left me with a good supply of lentils, black-eyed peas, wheat berries, split green peas, and white beans. I got them put away in my kitchen, but then I started thinking about the bags that the stuff came in. Most suburban people (like me) normally never see bagged foods in bulk. You see cans and plastic wrapped food in supermarkets, but unless you work in a warehouse or a food factory or an institutional kitchen, you never see 25 pound bags of beans. So here’s a picture of one of the bags. This is what it looks like, straight from the heartland of America (the bean company is in Nebraska). It definitely looks different. It didn’t come from coastal, urbanized America; it’s plain and understated, but colorful and creative in a certain way. Perhaps it’s something waiting to be discovered by the artistic crowd in Manhattan. Yes, I could see a special display at one of the big art museums, maybe the Whitney: “Straight from the Heartland: Bulk Bean Bags of America”.

WALLINGTON, NEW JERSEY used to be notorious for its bars. Well, perhaps notorious is too strong a word. They generally weren’t centers of gambling and prostitution. They were mostly blue-collar shot-and-a-beer places. But there were plenty of them, located on both the main drags and the back streets. Back during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, a lot of homeowners put an addition on the front of their houses and opened up a bar where the parlor would have been. Despite all the national unemployment, there were still many people working in the mills across the river in Passaic, and with all of the gloom, most of them could use a drink on the way home. So there was just enough demand for convenient liquor as to allow these homeowners to make a few coins. Back in the Depression, every little coin helped.

Many of these little mom-and-pop bars held on into the 1960s and 1970s. A few would still open up now and then, into the 1990s. By 2000, though, just about all of these neighborhood places were gone. Not that Wallington has gone dry, but you now have to stick to the thoroughfares and find a bar with upscale pretensions, or maybe a place with a restaurant attached (or the bowling alley on Paterson Avenue). Interestingly, though, if you walk the back streets of old-town Wallington, you will notice all of the funny-looking houses with living rooms extending out to the sidewalk line; i.e., the remains of the old bars.

Actually, there is one little tavern on Locust Avenue that is barely hanging on, but it’s in its last days. Locust Avenue is one of the main drags; however, the layout of this place is definitely classic Wallington-1930s, i.e. a shoebox in the front of an old two story house. The establishment in question had been run since the Depression by the Puzio family. Sometime during the late 70s or early 80s, one of the sons living at home decided to fix the place up a bit and keep regular evening hours on most weekdays and on Saturdays. It was no longer a dingy old bar smelling of spilled beer and rye, with a couple of old guys on metal stools burning cigarettes in the dark while watching a ball game on a TV above the cash register. “Pee Wee” (what everyone called the fellow who ran the place) built up a patronage of college students and young middle-class professionals during the 1980s. And I was one of those patrons. The “Colonial Room” (the place actually didn’t have a sign with that name, but there were printed matchbooks saying “Pee Wee’s Colonial Room”) was always a nice place to start the evening with. You’d leave by 10pm for other points of interest, for places where more exciting things may or may not have been happening. But even if the rest of the evening went bust, at least you got a nice hour or so in at Pee Wee’s.

Pee Wee works a day job, and by the 1990s, he lost interest in being a barkeeper by night. The place wasn’t open as much, and then finally wasn’t open at all. The 21st Century arrived without a Colonial Room available to stop into for a beer and a quick chat with good old Pee Wee. The world had lost another good thing. But not totally, as it turned out. Last year, my brother told me that he had run into Pee Wee at his church, and even though the guy is now in his early 80’s, he said he would try to open the bar on Saturday nights – although he couldn’t promise that it would be every Saturday.

Nonetheless, Pee Wee did make good-enough on his promise, and late last December I stopped in with my brother for a reunion. It was bittersweet. Pee Wee was now an old man; he’s still in pretty good shape for his age, but different from the guy I remembered (although he still has a good barkeeper’s knack for hospitality; e.g. he still gives you a glass with your beer bottle, without asking). The place was mostly empty and quiet. Pee Wee only had the background lights on, unlike the old days when all the lights were lit and the seats were full of people chatting and laughing. Behind the bar were just a few bottles, just enough to fix a couple of mixed drinks; quite unlike the rows of bottles on the shelves against the back wall, as in the old days. The reunion was great, but there was no doubt that it was 2007, and that the old magic wasn’t coming back.

My brother and I got there again last week; things were about the same, but I wasn’t expecting much this time. In a way, the melancholy had lifted somewhat with oldies music playing in the background, and with another customer or two present. But a “new era” for the Colonial Room is not in the offing. Pee Wee told us that he and his wife now have the place up for sale, and hope to move out of state in a few months. So although we will hopefully get back there at least once more before the end, the focus must remain on the past, and not the future. The goodbye process has begun. But at least there will be a goodbye process. Too many good things pass without a decent goodbye.

So here’s a pic of “the Wee” in his bar, with two friends. He’s obviously the guy in the center; Wallington is not good with irony, so you don’t expect a “Pee Wee” there to be a 7-footer, nor a “Big Moe” to be four-eight. Nonetheless, Pee Wee was a classic “tavern keeper”. The world will have lost something on the night when he locks the front door of the “Colonial Room” for the last time.