FORBIDDEN PAWTUCKET

BEFORE WE GO BACK TO DICK'S VARIETY 

Let us take a detour to the  Blue Pond

it is the only one  of all of the five forbidden zones that  is now completely erased from the  landscape of Pawtucket.

How did they manage that?  
I mean 
1.only the Barrel Yard is completely intact  and
2. the DUG-out at McCoy Stadium.
3. Dick's Variety is no longer in business; but the building that housed it is still standing.
4. The Back lots are there,  but they have become the place  for a  large trailer  park
5. THE BLUE POND IS GONE

Where are they hiding it?  I know just where it used to be. I have driven in the back streets that run off Columbus Avenue and  border the Stadium  --nothing there --but houses.

I still know  how to walk there,  and I have retraced my steps from the backyard of my girlfriend Lucille's house which sit as the first  house on Columbus and right across from the Back Lots.

On a cold  winter night after I had  finished helping to do dishes I would sling my  ice skates over my shoulder and put a few  big raw potatoes into my coat pockets.  I would almost skip down Rhode Island  Avenue and could feel the reassuring thud of the skates  against  my back.  I ran into the warmth of Lucille's back hallway and knocked on her first floor tenement door. 

Lucille was usually ready; she  would come out with her skates and a  quarter pound of  butter that she had sneaked from her fridge.  We would go out the back of her house and into her back yard.  Her yard butted  up to the parking so in minutes we were walking over to the right and we would pass the back yards of  other houses lined up on Columbus. 
When we reached a  woody area we followed a narrow path and often times we could already see the fire blazing there that  boys had lighted  on the frozen shore of the pond.

Why was it called the Blue Pond? Because the water in the pond was colored a dark indigo. AND when that water froze it created a miracle of a mirror that we skated on. As the night darkened, the moon rose, the flames of the bonfire ignited,  it became an enchanted place.

My contribution to the enchantment  was the potatoes in my  pockets--we laid those on the edge of the fire, When they were tender, one of the  gloved boys would snatch them from the fire and  Lucille would produce her butter. One of the boys with a  knife would cut the potatoes in half and would  place a large  hunk of butter on each. That hot buttery potato on a freezing night under the stars was the best treat I have ever had--nothing has matched it  or even come close.


HOW CAN A CITY LOSE ANYTHING AS WONDERFUL AS THAT?

Maybe if I had access to old city plat  maps I could find the lost  wonder.  I know that I did not  just conjure it.

In fact  sometimes in the summer I would go looking for it and  it was hard to find,  The area  was more overgrown and the  main clue was the smell. Follow your nose.  It was a slimy swamp with blue-black oozing water and bright green  algae  blooming on the surface.  Someone  told me when I asked that it had  once been part of a bluing factory,which is part of a manufacturing process in soap making.

I wonder if that swamp was all that was left of the pond or small lake that had been drained or/and diverted and filled in to construct McCoy Stadium. After all, the street that  runs off  Columbus Ave and  runs along the line of the Stadium parking and drive is called LAKE STREET.
So maybe this odoriferous, black ooze of summer time filled with croaking frogs and transformed to a magic mirror of stars when it froze in  winter was all that remained and was that lake's revenge.
But now there are only houses--so someone built a house there and someone is living there.
So whoever owns a house on Lake Street built in the late 50s or after and wonder about a strange smell in your cellar some summer days.... now you know.

PASS IT ON -- I NEED AN ORANGEADE  AT DICK'S.
Let's go there .