I grew up in Tarrytown New York during the 1960s and 70s. I remember a lot of different things from my childhood and teenage life in that small town, and have already talked about some of them in this blog. It is funny what one remembers, and also what one forgets. When I write about my growing up there, I do so from a distance of a good number of years, in other words, I’ve gained perspective, and it is mostly the good memories that remain now. But it was not always so easy to grow up in a small town, especially if you wanted or needed a certain amount of anonymity to survive mentally or emotionally or both. But somehow as you get older, the anonymity is no longer so important. It becomes more important that people know the real you. One’s teenage years are about trying on many different coats to see if one of them fits. If you find one that fits, you hang onto it for a little while because it feels comfortable. The coat can be a clique of friends where you fit in, or doing well in school and winning praise from your teachers and parents, or being part of sports’ teams, or all of those things. Many of these coats are tried on in the context of small town life, where it is safe, even though you don’t really know that at the time. Looking back now, the ‘smallness’ of our lives then is appealing, but when we were young, some of us couldn’t wait to get out into the big world. In those intervening years, much has happened, both to those who stayed put and to those who traveled out. We now have the chance to know what happened in the lives of many of those people, thanks to Facebook. Facebook has closed the gap of those intervening years in a way that nothing else has before or will again in quite the same way.
‘You know you grew up in the Tarrytowns during the 1960s/1970s if’ is a Facebook group that now has close to 670 members. It is a fairly active group in the sense that there are new posts published regularly, not necessarily daily, but it doesn’t matter. I joined the group a couple of years ago, right after I joined Facebook. I don’t remember how I found the group but I'm glad I did. I know some of the members personally, others I’ve heard of, but most I have never met. What is appealing about the group is what they remember about the Tarrytowns--Tarrytown and North Tarrytown (renamed Sleepy Hollow in 1996); their posts reflect this. Some of the more recent posts have informed about the deaths of two Tarrytown women many people knew and loved, while others wonder about what happened to this or that person. The uploaded photos are priceless, literally a walk down memory lane as well as a walk into town history. Some of the photos are probably worth some money, taken as they were during the early 1960s and 70s. I think especially of the photos of the big fire on Main Street that destroyed a major portion of the building that faces onto Broadway, or of the old General Motors plant on the Hudson River in North Tarrytown. Some of the photos of the old Tarrytown Music Hall are just beautiful. I spent many a Friday night there at the movies. I saw one photo recently on the site of a long trailer truck packed with new cars--a standard sight in Tarrytown at that time--hauling new cars up from the General Motors factory, out onto Broadway where the road would take them out into the world at large to be sold elsewhere. Broadway was (and still is) the main thoroughfare through both towns. When I was a teenager you could visit the little hole-in-the-wall bookstore near Main Street, the Murray Franklin stationery store for cards and gifts, small stores like the Great California Earthquake with its penchant for hippie clothing, larger clothing stores like Genungs, the Baskin & Robbins ice cream store (with the great-tasting pink bubblegum ice cream with actual pieces of bubblegum—talk about chewing and trying not to swallow the gum at the same time as the ice cream, as well as the heavenly mint chocolate chip ice cream), the Pastry Chef (with its memorable cakes—lemon sponge, Boston cream pie, marzipan—all of which remind me of special family events that we always ended up celebrating with a cake of some kind from the Pastry Chef; Jean and I were talking about this recently when I was in NY), several funeral homes, supermarkets and finally the majestic Warner library with its late 19th century bronze sculpted front door http://www.warnerlibrary.org/node/888. I haven’t seen a more beautiful library building except possibly the New York Public Library in Manhattan. It is interesting to see from the newer photos posted on the site how the town has changed since then—Sleepy Hollow high school has undergone extensive renovations, gasoline stations have been replaced by diners, Patriot’s Park is now the site of the Farmer’s Market, the old Woolworth store is now a gourmet food store, supermarket fronts have been spruced up—just to name a few changes within the last decade or so. The riverfront areas of both towns are more or less unrecognizable compared to what I remember from my childhood, except for the train station in Tarrytown and of course the Tappan Zee bridge, which is unchanged and which remains the landmark that identifies that one has finally reached one’s destination on the east side of the river and the bridge—Tarrytown. The riverfront areas have been renovated and built up with apartment building complexes, among other things, and this I know just from my driving around the areas this past summer. I’ve written about these changes in some of my earlier blog posts.
I love looking at many of the old photos of the Tarrytowns on the Tarrytown Facebook site. Recently I came across a paperback book that took me even further back than the 1960s and 70s. It is called Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow (Images of America), and is by and large a collection of black and white photographs from the late 1800s up until 1947. The Introduction to the book states “Not intended to be a comprehensive history, this volume offers selected images of our community from 1609 (artistic renderings of specific areas) until 1947”. The book was written and put together by The Historical Society Inc. serving Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown, and published by Arcadia Publishing. It can be purchased through different sellers via Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Tarrytown-Sleepy-Hollow-Images-America/dp/075240881X. It is not an expensive book; I don’t think I paid more than 15 dollars for it. But it is a must-have book if you are a history buff or if you are interested in rediscovering the town you grew up in. I wanted to rediscover Tarrytown, and in doing so I got in touch with those parts of myself that remember and appreciate this beautiful historic Hudson River town.
