Binghamton Archives - Page 8 of 13

There’s hope yet for Binghamton

I stayed in a hotel that was once the old city hall.

Binghamton, NY, as I’ve noted once or twice here, is my hometown. Almost every year, I go to Broome County to attend the Olin family reunion – that’s my mother-in-law’s people who can be traced in what is now the United States back to the 1680s.

Those trips, however, were to a park in Endicott, part of the Triple Cities, to be sure. (Endicott and Johnson City, though, are villages; only Binghamton is incorporated as a city.)

When I did venture to downtown Binghamton in the 1980s and 1990s and even the early part of this century, it was depressing. The anchor department stores of McLean’s, where my late mother worked as a bookkeeper, and Fowler’s, were magic to visit on Christmas Eve in 1970 and 1971. When they left, and smaller stores followed, the downtown was overrun by vacant spaces. If it weren’t for Boscov’s, in the old Fowler’s, there would have been no downtown retail to speak of.

The building of a new Route 17, which will become Interstate 86, made it easier to get through Binghamton, but the city wasn’t a place to go TO. The State University of New York isn’t even in Binghamton proper, but out on the Vestal Parkway on old Route 17/Route 434.

But an interesting thing happened:

“Downtown Binghamton, by most accounts, is in the midst of a revitalization. After years of decline, a boom spurred largely by masses of Binghamton University students leaving the dorms of the Vestal campus for the city has filled once-vacant storefronts downtown and chipped away at blight there.’

And that has spurred numerous coffee shops, tattoo parlors and the like catering to that population. I stayed in a hotel that was once the old city hall, not far from the current city hall, where I was a janitor for a few months in 1975, and there are blocks around there that have been totally transformed.

“But further away from the city’s core, other neighborhoods are waiting to see whether the ripple effect of the downtown boom will reach them.” I noticed that too, particularly in the part of town I grew up in.

Still, I felt hope that there is a chance of economic revival in my old hometown. That made me quite happy indeed.

Charles McGill and the politics of the golf bag

Charles McGill’s work was both a physical and mental struggle.

When we were in Binghamton, NY, my sister Leslie and I went to the Orzio Salati Studio & Gallery at 204 State Street, part of a block of artist venues downtown. We went because our late father knew a guy named Charlie McGill. Charles McGill, who graduated from high school in Binghamton in 1982, must have been Charlie’s son or nephew. The statue, BTW, is a rather good likeness of the artist.

“For the 18 years [Charles] wrestled with the golf bag. He found it to be a ‘very political object due to its its historical associations with class inequality and racial injustice.” The country club had been so long the dominion of people of a certain demographics that, more than once, McGill, an avid golfer, was mistaken for a caddie.

We know all of this this because Salati, the curator, but also McGill’s friend and fellow artist, told us. He explained that McGill’s work was both a physical and mental struggle. Physical because the golf bag is generally well constructed, with leather, steel reinforcement, hard plastic form and rivets. The piece below is Tondos (from the Italian rotondo – round).

Sometimes, he didn’t deconstructed the golf bag, but amplified the message, such as the Three Kings bag with images of Martin Luther King Jr., Rodney King, and King Kong.

Unfortunately, the planned show for Charles McGill in his hometown became a memorial exhibit, as the artist died from metastasized kidney cancer in July 2017. The pieces are all on loan from various galleries.

And, as is often the case, his work was increasingly being recognized for “making a bold statement” and going for far more money than it had just months earlier. Rondos, for instance, is now going for $30,000.

The show continues through the end of October 2017, Saturday from 11 a.m to 3 p.m. and by appointment (607 772-6725).

March rambling #1: Platypus Controlling Me

The Toxic Attraction Between An Empath And A Narcissist

What Is Your Name? Where Are We? Who Is President? Oh God

Trump(Doesn’t)Care cartoon

Poor People Need BETTER Health Insurance than the Rest of Us, Not Worse

The lessons we fail to learn: Warren G. Harding

American ‘Christianity’ Has Failed and I don’t want to preach a faith that can be so easily adapted to self-hatred and self-harm

How the baby boomers destroyed everything

The 1862 Binghamton (NY) Race Riot – something I did not know about my hometown

After Slavery, Searching For Loved Ones In Wanted Ads

Coins of the Rebellion: The Civil War currency of Albany merchants

Jobs, Income, and the Future

A brief history of men getting credit for women’s accomplishments

The Weight of The Last Straw

7 Lies About Welfare That Many People Believe Are Fact

Albany, NY Plane Crashes Into Houses On Landing Attempt, March 1972

Contractor sues for $2 million in unpaid bills on Drumpf’s D.C. hotel

Kellyanne Conway’s interview tricks, explained, and her boss’s 10 steps for turning lies into half-truths

A college course on calling out scientific crap

The adult children of him will ditch Secret Service protection once he leaves office

Sen. Gillibrand Has Perfect Response To Regime Misspelling Her Name

‘Where I come from’ we claim universal generalities as our peculiar virtues

Some ‘snowflakes’ can take the heat

The biggest threat facing middle-age men isn’t smoking or obesity, it’s loneliness

About Robert Osborne

Amy Biancolli: woman walks into a sandwich shop

The Toxic Attraction Between An Empath And A Narcissist

You May Want to Marry My Husband

This 75-Year Harvard Study Found the 1 Secret to Leading a Fulfilling Life

David Kalish: I am my dog’s seeing-eye person

Coke: Global ad campaign celebrates inclusion and diversity

Alphabetizing Books

Ruben Bolling won the 2017 Herblock Prize

Now I Know: The Boy Who Captured the Wind and How to Claim Antarctica and The Park at the Bottom of the Lake

MEET APRIL THE GIRAFFE, formerly from Catskill Game Farm!

Sammy Davis Jr. Oscar blunder

Cush Jumbo

Lawyer’s Pants Catch Fire During Closing Argument

Garter snakes can be super deadly

Music

Divenire – Composer Ludovico Einaudi

There’s a Platypus Controlling Me (from Phineus and Ferb)

What are the songs that best capture our moment?

K-Chuck Radio: A dose of Northern Soul

Don’t Let Me Down – The Beatles

10 Beatles Covers You Really Need to Hear

Songs about the moon

The First Ward of Binghamton

My maternal grandmother is buried in the northeast corner of Spring Forest Cemetery, less than two blocks from the house she grew up in.

I went to the Olin family reunion last month. I told my sisters, who are in California and North Carolina, that I was going to our hometown of Binghamton, NY. But, for reasons of time, that proved not to really be the case. I went THROUGH Binghamton, on Route 17, heading west to Endicott, as represented in the northern portion of this map, right past my stomping grounds in the First Ward.

When I was growing up, there were houses where that highway is now located. They razed dozens of homes to build a road that would make getting to somewhere else much easier. This broke my heart.

The vast majority of my growing up is represented in this graphic. This is approximately the eastern half of what was known as the city’s First Ward. See Route 11 to the right (east) of the map? That’s Front Street, and there’s a one-block stretch off it, Gaines Street, where I used to live.

In fact, one of my sisters found this video of 5 Gaines Street, the house I grew up in, posted in 2014. When WE lived there back in the 1960s, it was green, rough material that was probably made of asbestos on the exterior. Though I spent 18 years there, none of the interior structure looks familiar, though the backyard does.

Every weekday, I’d walk from Gaines Street to Oak, Lydia, Murray, Meadow, Mygatt to Dickinson Street – I loved the zigzag – to that circle near the southwest corner of this map, on Starr Avenue and Dickinson. That’s where my school, Daniel S. Dickinson, used to be. I attended there from K to 9. They razed it a few years later.

My maternal grandmother lived on Maple Street, off Prospect Street, so we’d go to her house, via Mygatt Street, at lunchtime, and, when we were younger, after school. That building’s gone, too.

Philadelphia Sales was on Clinton Street, but we almost always entered from the Dickinson Street side, through the parking lot. That was the basement entrance where the best popcorn ever was located, or so we thought at the time. It’s also where we bought our records, 45s mostly. That story now defunct.

I often took a circuitous route home. There was a candy store on Mygatt Street between Dickinson and Clinton that had that red shoestring licorice I loved. Friend Bill lived across the street. Heading north on Mygatt Street, we’d say goodbye to Lois near Meadow, and Karen near Spring Forest Avenue. Walking east on Cypress Street, I’d say adieu to Carol, and then cut through Ray’s property through Canny’s trucking, then back home.

We played at Valley Street Park, just north of our house. I tried to learn to play piano at Mrs. Hamlin’s house on Elm Street, between Everett and Mygatt.

The Trinity A.M.E. Zion Church used to be downtown, but when the block was torn down to build a playground, the congregation moved to a building at the corner of Oak and Lydia. That’s still there.

That massive expanse of greenery to the northwest is Spring Forest Cemetery. My friends and I would cut through it to play baseball at Ansco field on the other side. My maternal grandmother and her sister Deana are buried in the northeast corner of the cemetery, less than two blocks from the house they, and my mother grew up in.

My newspaper route started at Clinton and Oak, at the barbershop I used to go to, and went one block east, comprising a chunk of Front Street, including a long-gone apartment complex known as the Dwight Block, a nice little street called McDonald Avenue by the river, and a chunk of Front Street towards my house.

The First Ward, or The Ward, as we referred to it, was always a bastion of immigrants. A lot of Slavic folks, even now. But according to the 2010 Census, there are now Arabs, who weren’t there in 1970.

It’s been a rundown part of town for a while. But the city is trying. They’ve taken down the behemoth that was the Magic Ice building, formerly Cutler Ice in my time. Half a block from my old home, there will be new homes. The First Ward is a Brownfield Opportunity Area

Maybe next time I go to what they now call Greater Binghamton, I’ll actually GO to BINGHAMTON, see the old homestead, visit the graves.

Special thanks to Arthur@AmeriNZ, who manipulated the BOA map.

That reminded me of

I worked in that library as a page for seven months in 1969.

I saw on my friend Lynne Jackson’s Facebook page on the Saturday morning of Albany’s annual tradition, the Tulip Festival, that there would be a booth where one could “Ask A Muslim” a question.

When the family finally got there, the family got to meet Nafisa and Fazana (pictured with that hatted Lynne). They were gracious and intelligent and wonderfully open. It was a wonderful idea, though I told them I thought it was quite brave.

Fazana wrote on her Facebook page “I talked to a non-Muslim gentleman who had just finished reading the English translation of the Quran and was pleased to report that nowhere in it did it say that Muslims should kill Christians. Needless to say, I wanted to recruit him to talk to others on behalf of Muslims because we are constantly trying to convince others to believe this fact!”

That reminded me of:

When my sister Leslie and I went to High school in Binghamton, NY, we were asked by the music teacher at suburban Vestal Junior High School, Mr. Fitzroy Stewart, on the one black teacher in the district, to talk with his all-white students about being a black teenager.

Words

A terrestrial friend wrote about teaching:

It was an undergrad… who made the following observation about the linguistic style of the novel Home Boy by Naqvi and its immigrant/migrant characters.

“Why does this character always use such big words? I mean, ‘heterodox pedagogy’? ‘epistemological dead end’? Give me a break. It’s almost like he NEEDS to do that to prove he’s smart to American readers, because he’s an immigrant.”
And I looked at her with these anime-style star-struck eyes.

TRUTH.

If you’ve been casually “taught” the meaning of a vocabulary word from a Dr. Seuss book by someone you can’t possibly get mad at because you know how well-meaning they are, you too might find yourself in need of pursuing some heterodox pedagogy of the epistemological dead-end of big fat multi-syllabic words.

That reminded me of:

Living in Charlotte, NC, in the flea market, for only 4 months back in 1977, I became acutely aware of using multi-syllabic, but very common words, such as “acutely”. It seemed to them that I was putting on airs, but it was just the way I always spoke!

Stalking?

Arthur wrote about following a guy following a woman he felt was a bit creepy. I’d admitted to having done so a few times myself, usually in the evening.

That reminded me of:

Participating in the recent CROP walk against hunger on May 1. I hadn’t actually signed up but The Wife and the Daughter, and her Young Friend – daughter of a friend of ours, and a Classmate of The Daughter’s all had registered. I was on my bike, trying to keep up with the girls. Over time though, The Daughter and the Young Friend got separated from The Classmate. I’d slow down when I could see both sets, but speed up when I could not see the pair.

Some guy on the route asked me if I were with the walkers, and I explained the situation. He was checking ME out, directly. And that was OK by me.

Binghamton (NY) Public Library

One of the local Binghamton media outlets received a tour of Binghamton’s Carnegie library, built in 1904, but abandoned for a decade and a half. The local community college has plans to turn it into “a culinary and events planning center.”

That reminded me of:

I worked in that library as a page for seven months in 1969, retrieving old magazines from the closed stacks, reshelving books, and assisting people with the microfilm machines. Becccye Fawcett was perhaps the first black librarian in the city, and we attended the same church, Trinity AME Zion at Oak and Lydia Streets.