No, not the venerable brand of sparkling water with that famous label featuring a dainty winged nymph, named Psyche, pondering her own beauty in a pristine pool while pensively perched upon a flat white rock.
Our White Rock is in the photo. Not even a dozen dainty nymphs could make this place look presentable. This White Rock has to be almost the sloppiest spot in the City of Norwich. I wanted to photograph it in all of its glory before some do-gooders cleaned it up, an unlikely event, but you never know. Garbage galore and plastic trash are splattered with filth and everything is morosely festooned with squalid grime. Trees shroud it so the mosquitoes are poised for attack. The denizens of this putrid lair do not subscribe to the standard outdoor ethic of “you bring it in; you take it back out.”
Apparently, White Rock is a teenage hangout. What surprised me is that it has been one for at least three decades and possibly longer. As such, it qualifies as a historical place.
The reason I am writing about it is that it was mentioned in the Police Blotter in the Thursday, July 19, 2007, issue of The Evening Sun, page 5. When reading about it I wondered where it could be and why I never heard of it before. Other readers had the same reaction. So I investigated.
If a judge were to sentence youngsters to serve time here, their lawyers would plead cruel and inhuman punishment. Yet they not only dwell there on their own volition, they designed the decor to meet their own rigorous specifications. If there were any justice in the universe, they would cut themselves on their own broken beer bottles.
White Rock is located alongside the New York, Susquehanna & Western Railroad tracks between Mitchell and Rexford streets, by the curve. That painted concrete structure is neither white nor a rock. It is a loading dock remaining from the era when this was an industrial area. Two tracks once traversed here and the Auburn branch of the New York, Ontario & Western Railway crossed just a stone’s through to the north. The Sanborn maps show a rail siding here as late as 1964.
Maybe someday there will be an official commemorative plaque designating this dismal place as a historical aberration. Hey, maybe one is there already, but is painted over with graffiti.
Teenage hangouts seem to be a necessary part of growing up. Teenagers need a place where their obnoxious behavior can be acted out free from the inevitable criticism of adults.
I never liked teenagers, so when I became one I bypassed it by going directly from boy to man. This was possible back in the 1940s because youngsters were legally able to hold meaningful jobs. I hated high school so when the final bell rang I escaped by dashing to my adult job. Consequently, my appraisal of teenagers is unusually objective. However, it probably takes one to know one. Nevertheless, I tried to figure out why my teenage contemporaries behaved as they did and why their values were so different from mine. Here are my conclusions.
Teenagers do not fit into modern society because they have been excluded, probably to keep them out of the job market. So they create their own society. The concept of a teenager is artificial. In earlier societies children became adults at puberty. There was no in between stage. Ceremonies such as confirmation or mitzvahs remain as relics. Moreover, humans, like other mammals, have two major life stages; they go from not being able to reproduce to being able to. In nature, the average life span of a mammal is twice the time it takes to reach puberty. For humans, this is 25 years, twice twelve and a half. We have managed to extend our average life spans way beyond a quarter century, but the concept persists as what we call a generation, 25 years. Now, due to good nutrition and the hormonal effects of pesticides we are lowering the onset of puberty. Egad!
I say let the teenagers have White Rock. Someday they may come back here to visit it. They can slouch down in the squalor, have a beer, break the bottle, drag a smoke, drop the butt, scoff some junk food, toss the wrapper, and then resume their boring, humdrum, meaningless lives, fondly relishing the reverie of more carefree evenings huddled around a defunct loading dock. White Rock could someday become a tourist attraction.