Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before

little ukraine: 17th Nov 2006 - 23:20 GMT

those leaves on the sidewalk in front of the tailor's kill me.
For the wider CN population... I feel like Patchogue has an appropriate presence on this page because, like GoG pointed out, it is, to me, representative of the small towns across America who experienced great growth through the early half of the 20th century, primarily due to some strong local industry, and then just sort of subsided into mediocrity. In this case the industry was the Patchogue-Plymouth Lace Mill, an amazing late 19th-century industrial factory which sat unused for over fifty years before its demolition in 1996. Patchogue's position as a waterfront community, sitting squarely on the South Shore and near the geographical center of the east-west axis of Long Island, also made this town quite a big attraction to urban-dwellers and proto-ex-urbanites who were not quite rich enough to make the seasonal trip to destinations further east, like the Hamptons.
The small-town experience differs from those of the urban neighborhoods which experienced a similar fate because it came without the white flight (well, without any significant amount anyway), the increased crime, and the host of other problems which plague the impoverished urban area. Patchogue is not poor but it is a poorer town than it used to be, and the revitalization initiatives taken lately are exciting.
Anyway, I hope that helps contextualize these posts and makes them a bit more interesting for the vast majority of the viewers here who have never been to Long Island!