Bayonne Babies Say Goodnight Friday, August 08, 2003

The headline on the AOL Welcome screen: "Too Much Democracy?" Great question! Look at this blog and answer for yourself.

Just back from a stroll. Starting a weekend without my astonishing wife, trying to figure out what to do with myself. Thinking about Bayonne, my hometown of the moment.



For the uninitiated, it's a peninsula off the coast of northern New Jersey. On one side is Newark Bay; on the other is New York Harbor (the Statue Liberty and lower Manhattan are a few miles north of us). At the southern tip, the Bayonne Bridge links us to Staten Island. At the other end, we melt into Jersey City.

It's an interesting spot. It's got layers. Go someplace like Hoboken, and you can see exactly what happened: The Yuppie neutron bomb hit, all the old ethnics vanished, and Bobos from NYC took over the buildings. There are some newish apartments and other facilities, but mostly you have brick townhouses, brownstones, factories, that kind of thing. In Bayonne, on the other hand, nobody ever moved out--the city is all two-and-three-family homes filled with generation after generation. Thus the loud leering guys in front of the Sicilian-American Social Club turn into the wiggers doing skateboard stunts off the stairs of St. Henry's.

Aesthetically, then, it's a mess. On the main drags you have some fine old brick homes, some fancy places with cupolas, some truly stunning churches and public buildings. On the other hand, the homes are a horror. They're scrunched together like somebody was trying to sneak them into a drive-in, and none of the styles match--big barny jobs right next to broad, flat-roofed shoeboxes; wood shingles next to vinyl siding, which looks like Wrigley gum stacked the long way.

The infrastructure isn't here either. Yuppies may drive out the soda shops and candy-cane barbers, but there are nights where I'd give my big toe for a Barnes & Noble or Tower Records or fruity health-food store. The windows on the main shopping drag are mostly soaped; those that aren't are full of boxes of Christmas ornaments or ratty underwear or Maximum Testosterol. We've got Robert's Coffee Shop, whose proprietor my astonishing wife insists has a crush on me, and the Magic Fountain ice cream stand, but it ain't much. I found a Greg Bear book in the Bayonne Book Trader once, but I still haven't read it.

I never "got" Bayonne, even though my astonishing wife has spent over a decade here, until a visiting friend said, "It's like an Edward Hopper painting!" From that perspective, I can almost parse it. Helping even more: This Web site devoted to the city. It's incongruously high-tech, so much so that I can't swipe the best photos, but there's an astonishing section of old, scanned postcards from the Teens to the Thirties. The place where I bought my bookcases used to be the Bayonne Democratic Club! (Take that, tax-and-spend-o-crats!) Among them are shots just footsteps--footsteps!--from my current home. We used to have a trolley, and folks in hats, and a yacht club someplace. My good buddy John informs me there was also a Bayonne Women's Pistol Club at one point, but I assume they've massacred each other by now.

Still, mixed feelings. Bayonne is very much like Queens, where I grew up (at least in the 1970s): blue collar, second- or third-generation immigrant ethnic population, small, appalling homes. Queens has turned into more of a melting pot over the years, but Bayonne remains Bayonne. There are more black and Spanish families, clustered up near the Jersey City line and down in public housing at the tip of the island; some Asian folks; some distressed-looking synagogues. But the overall demographic feels like it hasn't changed since the Forties. Interesting, hard to figure, hard to love but apparently hard to leave.

Anyhow, it's late and I miss my astonishing wife. Maybe another walk tomorrow. Until then, waiting for a signpost. G'night to Dr. Percy, wherever you are.

@ 9:19:00 PM,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home