Anonymous wrote:I grew up on Long Island and I would move back there if I could.
I grew up 35 miles from Manhattan on the North Shore, they were connected guys and organized crime was clearly involved in organizing refuse, concrete, liquor, provisions, restaurant supply etc. A kid I went to school with was a member of a family whose name was on the side of pretty much every dumpster from Queens out to Suffolk County, they never seem to be anything more than a hard-working family business but looking back there’s no possible way they weren’t operating alongside organized crime.
The way zoning worked all low income housing was in one specific area, here at least in Virginia section 8 and subsidized housing is lightly mixed in everywhere except the most expensive ZIP Codes. Schools were and still are fabulous in my town, taxes are around $24k a year for a 1/4 acre lot and those high taxes suppress sale prices for single-family homes. A house that would cost you 1.6 million in Alexandria will cost you 650,000 in my old town but your payment will be the same because the taxes are astronomical. A huge number of my friends from my high school still live within a few miles of their childhood homes, almost everyone I knew was a second or third generation American so some of that “not going too far from home” thing is likely a byproduct of that.
My high school had a graduating class of 143, mostly Irish and Italian kids whose parents had moved out to Long Island from Brooklyn or Queens, all my friends parents had really heavy New York accents, diversity meant that there might’ve been a few kids that were Dutch because there were like seven black kids in the whole school. I remember some of the Latino kids anglicized the pronunciation of their last names- think Martin..ez instead of Marrteenez.
My neighborhood which was only a few square miles was once a vacation community for rich people from the city, mostly two and three bedroom bungalows, some had been remodeled and enlarged over the years but for the most part they looked just like they did in 1946. You could have a bank executive living next to a lobstermen and they both had the same view of the sound. Most of my friends dad’s were union construction workers in NYC who were making $130,000 a year in the early 90s; they’d leave the house at 4:30 AM and be back at the train station by 5 PM with a tall boy beer in a bag.
The great part about my town’s proximity to Manhattan was that even if you didn’t find your people in our little community you could find exactly who and what you were looking for in the city which was only 40 minutes by train. I don’t remember exactly what it was called but I had a friend that went some sort of punk goth direction, he was the only one that dressed the way he did but every single Friday night after school he was jumping on the train to head to a club full of people just like him, same for gay or lesbian kids; you’re a $10 train ride from people who understand you versus being some poor kid stuck in the middle of Indiana on a farm.
The other thing I really miss is the curating of connections that everyone in my neighborhood seemed to do, whether it was a nightclub doorman, a guy who could get your free cable, someone who could fix a parking ticket, somebody that knew a cop and could ask him to not show up in court, I used to buy all my cigarettes from a union electrician who lived three doors down from me, he’d sell for 10 bucks a carton when they normally ran for 30, I don’t know where he got them but none of the packs had a tax stamp on them.
What seems to be missing most here is the hustle and mild corner cutting that everyone seemed to do back home, it made life fun and made you feel like less of a sheep; maybe it’s because of the proximity to government here and since they have a lock on corruption nobody else even thinks of competing.
I realize this is probably none of what you wanted to know but it was fun to think about.
DP. Thank you for taking the time to write this. I enjoyed reading it.
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