Went back to Lisle, New York yesterday. Forgot my camera
again. The address I was canvassing was an old storefront that looked to have been abandoned around the end of the Korean War, although this being federal government work, naturally I couldn’t believe the evidence of my own eyes or rely upon any of the reports about the structure that had been previously filed at regular ten-year intervals. No! I had to find a living, breathing human being – IQ, teeth, optional – who would
say to me, “Nope! No one livin’ in that there…” And this human being would have to have a
name, problematic in Lisle.
The building was extremely creepy. You could still see the imprint of greasy Munch
The Scream-like visages in the few windows left unbroken. I stood by the doorway for ten minutes. I swear I could hear sepulchral voices inside, presumably the moans of the resident ghosts.
The abandoned house was surrounded on three sides by Tobacco Road shacks that you wouldn’t expect to find outside rural-most Arkansas. Broken machinery, weathered cardboard boxes, strange plastic things that had lost their day-glow mojo twenty years before, piled so high on every porch you could barely see the doorways – but I heard a sound and then felt eyes. It was about 90 degrees out, that green sweltering, swooning humidity that makes your flesh feel like it’s sublimating – in the chemical sense of the word, I mean.
“Hello?” I called. “Hello? Hello?”
“Heard you the firtht time,” said a voice. A man stepped forward. He was topless and very fat. He had incisors, but no front teeth.
“Hi!” I said brightly. “My name is Donna Draper and I work for the US Census Bureau, see?” Holding my laminated ID card in front of me the way you figure Jonathan Harker might hold up a crucifix. “Anybody live in that house?”
“Might be in winter time,” the man said. “When it’th cold and there’th no plathe elthe to go. Not now.”
“Great!” I said heartily, and pulled out my census form. “Your name, sir?”
“You don’t need my name, girlie,” the man said. “Maybe I ain’t got one.”
He continued standing on his porch staring at me, scratching at the flies that landed on his ponderous man breasts, as I dutifully made the rounds of his neighbors. Nobody home.
“Try there,” the man said, nodding at a
normal looking house, about 100 hundred yards from the abandoned building.
I dutifully traipsed over. An old A-frame house surrounded by weeds but someone had loved it enough once to hang to hang wind chimes all along its porch.
I rapped loudly on the front door.
Nothing.
Rapped again.
I had given up and was scribbling in the blanks in my official census Notice of Visit form, when the door slowly opened and I found myself staring at a bright yellow man.
Bright yellow. Really, really jaundiced. So jaundiced that I was amazed he was alive.
“So sorry to disturb you but I work for the U.S. Census Bureau, and I need some information about that structure there –“
“Oh, that’s been boarded up for a long time, for a long time,” the yellow man said. “It was a store once. And there was a store there before
that. Way back then, you know, they used to hide the slaves that were escaping from the South in
that store. You ever hear about the Underground Railroad?”
“Sure I have, sir!” I said heartily.
“Story goes that one of the owners followed his property up north and cursed the owners when he couldn’t get it back. My great grandfather owned
that store Took a while, but I guess the curse took.” The man sighed, and after I wrote down his name and phone number, began telling me the story of his life and it was so hopeless and sad I wanted to run screaming from his porch, jump in my car and drive back to California pronto. I don’t care what anybody says: there are no ghosts in California!
Instead, I stood on the yellow man’s porch and listened to his monstrously sad story for fifteen minutes because all information comes with a price, right?
When I finally escaped and got back to my car, the man with no teeth was still standing on
his porch. “Learned everything you gotta know, girlie?” he leered.
“Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!” I said and 86’d just as fast as my little red Veedub, getting on in years itself, could take me.
###So,
what the hell happened to Lisle? I was so curious that when I got home, I had to research it.
The town was founded in 1796. It was one of those Revolutionary War land grant deals to retired soldiers. By 1830, it had a population of well over 4,000 –
big for those times – and was by all accounts quite prosperous with three grist mills, twenty saw mills, one oil cloth mill, three fulling mills or pandies, three carding mills, one trip hammer or forging mill, three tanneries, two places where potash was made – and even a newspaper with the enchanting name, the Lisle
Gleaner.
In the mid twentieth century, Lisle was still important enough so that an Interstate highway was planned three miles away from the town.
Of course, all of upstate New York has been depressed for thirty years or more now. It abounds in squalor. (Tompkins County where I reside is the notable exception.) There are numerous abandoned mansions to stand in front of while you try to remember the words of a poem that was beaten into you in high school back when schools actually tried to teach you things:
Look on my works ye mighty, and despair.
Lisle remained modestly prosperous right up through the end of the 1960s as a bedroom community for executives from nearby Binghamton’s two big businesses, IBM and the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company. Then IBM pulled out of Binghamton – New York State has some of the highest taxes in the nation, the price of doing business here was just too high. Globalization took out EJ – a flood of low-cost shoes made in third world sweatshops. The affluent pulled out of Lisle, and all that was left were guys on the dole like my toothless porch acquaintance or people whose roots went so deep they could never escape like the Yellow Man.
An interesting parable of the critical economic importance of the private sector to the life of a town.
###I have a ton of stuff to do today. I don’t want to do any of it.
On the plus side I’m buddies with Lucius again, next month’s NYSEG bill is startlingly low, and Wild Bill has hired me back as his Web maven, another work-from-home revenue stream. Three more of those and I can stop all this web content brokering for pittances, and do the writing I really want to do.
On the minus side, Uncle Lew’s plate broke. The surgeon does not know why. I’m seeing a very successful medical device malfunction lawsuit in his future, although that does raise the interesting question: how much would
you be willing to suffer for five million bucks? I mean,
really suffer?
“Ya got ya health, ya got
everything,” my grandfather used to tell me. Then he’d say, “Why do you wanna go to Paris? Paris has bridges?
Brooklyn has bridges. Paris as museums?
Brooklyn has museums.”
The longer I go without blinking in my stare-down with age sixty, the more I start to understand what he was talking about.
Bonus Poll:
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Poll #1598392]
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