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Forgotten Friday: Reliving The Dream

December 28, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

My family has owned property in Chincoteague, Virginia, since 1990. It was our go-to summer vacation spot; a quiet and quaint little beach town with pristine white sand beaches and ponies clopping around like they were human.

I fell in love with the Eastern Shore a long time ago. The setting sun striking the water and reeds at just the right angle produces blues and yellows and greens that I’ve yet to see anywhere else in the world. There is a peace to being in a small town on the water, as if I have stepped back into a simpler, safer, less complicated time.

My parents chose to retire in Chincoteague. This turns all of our family gatherings into compulsory beach trips. A tragedy, I assure you.

The trip from Washington DC to Chincoteauge is a straight-forward, 3.5 hour affair, with little to see except the flat sprawling farmlands that hug Route 50 and Route 13. The occasional farmer’s market or antique store breaks up the monotony of corn and juvenile potatoes. It’s an easy, relaxing drive that usually helps soften and melt the stress of hectic DC life.

Just before the island, there is a 10 mile stretch that passes through the unassuming town of New Church, VA. It boasts a population of 205, dozens of annex offices for corporations supporting the nearby Wallops Island NASA base, and the ruins of a yellow and red building that dominates the major curve on the road through town.

This was someone’s dream, once.

I can remember when this wasn’t the shell of a venue, but a fully operational roller rink. If the parking lot on a Friday night was any example of the success of the business, The Dream Roller Rink was thriving in the mid-nineties. It often had signs promoting “all-skate nights” and food specials. Given the lack of not-beach-related activities in Chincoteague, I can imagine this roller rink was a great place for kids to spend evenings while on vacation.

Just behind the decaying rink, a short road leads to another yellow and red building in an even worse state of disrepair.

I’ve never actually been to a drive-in theater, which seems a shame.

This matching ruin was once a matching drive-in theater, owned by the same family. Both were built in 1940 by Elijah Justice who wanted to offer some entertainment for the local population and the sailors from the nearby Chincoteague Naval Air Station. The station closed in 1959 and the Justice family fought for decades to keep both the rink and drive-in financially soluble despite a dwindling pool of patrons.

Through the 70’s and 80’s the drive-in showed exclusively pornographic movies, which seems really bizarre for an open-air, drive in theater. Despite these attempts to bring in revenue through any means possible, the theater officially stopped its projectors in 1988. The screen, stained and drooping, hung on until 1998.

The only signs that this was ever a drive-in are the decaying brick concession stand and dozens of speaker poles, which have all been dug up and de-speakered.

No parking, even if you could.

The rink stayed open for two more decades, finally shutting down in 2008. A local developer, Don Brown, bought the rink and drive-in, hoping to restore both to bring an Art Deco renaissance back for the seasonal visitors to enjoy. Unfortunately, his vision was never achieved due to a land dispute with a neighbor and some poorly drawn property lines.

In the five years since it closed, The Dream has suffered the ravages of coastal storms, acrid salt air, and petty vandalism. The lipstick red has faded to cracking pink, and the mustard yellow has washed out to pale daisy. A relatively clean spot marks where the illuminated sign used to sit above the main entrance. It is a haunting reminder of a different time, socially and economically.

I couldn’t find what happened to the rest of the Justice family, but I assume they’ve long since abandoned their dreams of The Dream.

Roller Rink – Before and After:

Top image, courtesy me, 2012. Bottom image courtesy Cary Scott, 2008

Top image courtesy Cary Scott, 2008. Bottom image courtesy me, 2012.

Drive-In – Before and After:

Top image courtesy Drive-In Theatres of the Mid-Atlantic, 1998. Bottom image courtesy me, 2012.

Another interesting note: Writer Paul Hendrickson wrote an article about The Dream for the Washington Post on June 24, 1988, the same year the drive-in portion closed down.

Forgotten Friday: Beached Go Karts

September 7, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

(A special thanks to my sister, Becca, for the awesome photos in this post)

I’m not an adrenaline junkie. I don’t want to jump out of planes or off of cliffs or into big holes naturally bored hundreds of feet into the Earth’s crust. It does nothing for me. The love of self fights the love of excitement, and self-preservation almost always wins.

The one exception is driving. Something about clutch and gears and accelerator coming together in glorious harmony, resulting in a symphony of speed, resonates deeply in my pysche. I’ve always loved to drive, and drive fast. It was speed I wanted, and the car was the means to that end.

I couldn’t physically drive a real car until I was about 15 years old, because I was a tiny boy who didn’t experience his adult growth spurt until relatively late. Having my feet be able to reach the pedals was a prophecy straight out of Plutarch; like Theseus growing to a strength to be able to move the stone to retrieve his father’s arms, I had to impatiently wait until my physical body could handle 2000 odd pounds of steel and gasoline.

I sought to satiate my desire for speed in others ways. Bicycles. Skateboards. Sprinting. Soccer. They brought me fleeting joy, but I always wanted to go faster than the highest gear would let me go, just a little faster than the steepest hill could propel me.

And one glorious day, I discovered that they had made cars for kids; smaller things with less power that could be controlled in a relatively safe manner. I’m talking go karts, holmes.

The first time I shoved my slight frame into the tiny plastic seat of a homeade go kart, I felt like Mario Andretti mixed with Mario the plumber. If I’d had a red shell to throw at other karts, my life would have been complete.

I was an equal in a go kart. I wasn’t short or weak. I could keep pace with, and even pass my older sister. I could race my dad with the chance of actually winning. I was as big as the biggest man in the world inside that little black contraption, the 12 horsepower lawnmower engine puttering under the hood, feeling like nothing could ever go wrong as long as my hands were on that wheel.

On the southern most part of Chincoteague Island, Virginia, (the beach town where I spent my summers as a kid) there was a small go kart track that my father used to take us to when it was open during the Summer season. I remember fondly scooting around that oval of pavement, watching the sun sink into the Western bay; its rays throwing long shadows and an orange glow over my race, burning this image of childhood perfection into the permanence of my memory.

My sister visited the island and the track a few weeks ago. By my crude math, I hadn’t seen (or even thought about this place) for nearly 14 years.

Thinking about it, I’ve never see a private go kart track.

It’s hard to tell when the track closed. It’s clearly been abandoned for some time, based on its current state. I don’t think it was ever exactly a high end go kart track (if such things exist) but at least someone maintained the track and the karts and the little house where you bought tickets.

I have memories of this place being alive with noise and activity as I waited in line for my chance to burn as much rubber as a 10 year old is capable of burning.

There are a few more obstacles than I remember.

The bones of the track are still there, but it’s beyond salvage at this point. I suppose there is no place in our current world for the frivolity of a go kart track in a sleepy beach town.

The tires once surrounded the outside of the track as a makeshift guard railing.

You can see from the below set of images that the surrounding wetlands flora has been encroaching on the track steadily since about 1997. There is a large gap in the satellite imagery, but I think by 2007 it is safe to say that this place hadn’t seen patrons for quite a while. The large truck/trailer parked on the track was the biggest hint.

Ah Google Earth, I wish I knew how to quit you.

It’s sad to see this little piece of my childhood in such disrepair, but I suppose it’s bound to happen. Businesses close, buildings are torn down, people move, and nature reclaims anything it can.

But memories linger. It may look depressing to an outsider, but these pictures are a connection to bright memories of happy days. I may have sat in this very car all those years ago, when I was the king of the track, learning what it was to be in control and trying as hard as I could to win some imaginary race against imaginary competitors.

Sounds oddly similar to how I feel now.

Not a very good parking job.

Forgotten Friday: A Bridge Over Landover

August 31, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

I’ve always had an infatuation with the ancient world. My earliest childhood memories are faded and grey, but I can still remember scrutinizing books about the Parthenon, Tintagel, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. I never cared if these places were real, or if they still existed, I just cared about the history that was interred with their architectural bones.

It’s not that I’m obsessed with the buildings themselves. Mossy stones and broken arches make for interesting photography, but I’m more enamored with the idea of the people these places represent. People who lived lives that would seem alien to us now. People with struggles and challenges like we’ve never known, that have somehow been truncated to a few pages in a text book and a Wikipedia article. People who would be confused and angry that we waste time on things like Facebook status updates and just how hairy Snooki’s baby really is. These places echo the souls of the people who built them, lived in them, and died in them; whose memory is only maintained by a select few who care enough to think beyond the present.

My recent trip to Ireland brought my obsession to a head as I was surrounded by broken skeletons of castles, churches, and things unidentifiable after the ravages of nature and time. I’ve been longingly staring at the pictures of these buildings, dreaming up stories about their denizens, imagining who and why and how they lived.

But interesting history doesn’t need to come from thousands of years ago. There are hundreds of things woven into the banality of our everyday lives that we don’t see because our receptors are pointed inward, not outward.

I work in what, on the outside, appears to be a normal corporate park. The buildings are plain and brown, a hold-over of contemporary mid-century design. The boringly named “Corporate Drive” is in Landover, Maryland; a place that many locals would regard with disdain, or at the very least, indifference.

This is the kind of corporate park that is a tangible of the cliche: “sign of the times.”

The parking lots look like this:

and like this:

1:45 on a workday.

Garbage is strewn about everywhere; the result of a landslide of diffusion of responsibility that comes from the thinking, “well there is already trash there so it’s OK if I throw mine here too.” A fetid swamp pools just off the sidewalk that would probably be a pristine pond if not for disgusting human intervention. In the middle of this swamp floats an algae covered, half-deflated basketball. The back end of a Safeway shopping cart sticks out of the green muck like some iceberg forged in the fires of the industrial revolution.

Why use a trashcan when Mother Earth is right there?

It’s the kind of place that makes you feel sad for both nature and humanity.

I walk about a half a mile to our client’s building from my normal office twice a week. This walk isn’t lonely; I’m often dodging people coming from the Metro or heading to a nearby deli for lunch. Most keep their heads down and ear-buds secure, and react awkwardly and sheepishly if accidental eye contact is made. Short of some aggressive geese and tenacious plant life, it’s about as uninteresting a walk as you might expect.

But on my way back from the client’s office last week, I took a different path. A path I’ve never walked before, behind buildings I’ve never been in, past people I’ve never seen.

When I climbed an old concrete-and-wood staircase behind one of the corporate offices of Giant and Safeway (they share a building? WTF?), I found what appeared to be a gate to nowhere.

Mr. Tumnus, is that you?

As soon as I dismissed my thoughts of Narnia, I tried to figure out just what the hell this thing was. It had gates like you’d find surrounding (protecting?) a dumpster, but there was no way a dumpster would go behind this gate, as it led to a 6 foot drop off. As I illegally opened and moved the gate out of my way (what? the padlock was rusted to all hell, it only took like three kicks to open it) I saw what was on the other side:

A “well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures.” One hundred internet dollars to anyone who can place this quote without Google.

A pillar. No, a series of pillars, all overgrown with ivy and lichens and vines galore. They were blanketed in the kind of growth that looks like nature is really pissed off.

I moved around the side of the gate to get a better look and saw at least four of these pillars. About six or seven feet tall, made of poured cement, they stood there as a monument to something long gone, to a time when it was possible to cross this creek and see the other side of the world.

It didn’t take me long to realize this had been a bridge at some point. My mind flashed back to a time when these wetlands were actually beautiful; free of trash, with clean waters and little ducks swimming all happy-like. I imagined employees taking breaks and hanging out on this little causeway. I imagined them finding some peace from a hectic work schedule in the forested wonder just beyond their cubicle walls.

The odd thing is, this bridge clearly did not fall apart from age and mistreatment. There are no broken stones or chunks of concrete in the water below, no signs of damage to the pillars or the entrances on either side. Someone, at some point, deliberately had this bridge removed, for reasons unknown (or at least unknown to the current building property managers, when asked).

Unless the accumulation of trash, run-off from the nearby Metro maintenance facility, and pollution from the even more nearby i-495 freeway had poisoned the ecosystem and ruined the serenity of this little bridge. But that’s not possible is it? We’d never destroy the innate beauty of the natural world in the name of progress, would we?

I found an image of the bridge still intact in 1993:

April, 1993: Google Earth Coords: 38°56’53.61″N 76°51’53.91″W

But the next record in 2002 shows only the pillars:

March, 2002.

In less than ten years, the bridge is gone. I guess I’ll never know why it was dismantled, or if anyone really got to enjoy it when it was there.

At least it can live again here on the internet, if only for a few minutes while you read this.

RIP, random bridge I’ll never know.