I grew up in Brockton and remember it differently than the people currently walking up Main Street do today. It was not The City of Champions yet. I remember when you could drive up and down Main Street--it was once a two-way street. That's where the cooler Brockton High Schoolers would "Cruise the Drag" in the 70s. "Cruising the Drag" involved conga-lining up and down Main Street in their Woodies and cars. Even the horny Mater Dei Chickas and Cardinal Spellmeners went with. Throngs gathered near the Big Clock on North Main, and slowly drove to the end of route 28, by where the Skyview Drive-in Theater used to be. Back and forth they went, checking each other out.
Back then, there was a High Street. It ran uphill from Main Street to Warren Avenue. I knew it well. I recall going to Central Music on High Street for guitar lessons with Chet Kruley in the 70s. Later, in the 90s, my wedding photography was brokered by Entertainment Specialists on High Street. But sadly, it seems too many street folks got high on High Street. So in the mid-2000s, well after the City of Brockton made Main Street one way, they ALSO got rid of the offensive High Street, too. They opted to rename it Frederick Douglass Avenue, to give tribute to the great Abolitionist by the same name.
Take a gander at the first photograph of this article, the photo of the Historic Site Memorial. Donated by the BHS class of 1959, one can find it halfway up Frederick Douglass Avenue. It marks the location of and describes the old Sycamore Tree, a Learning Tree, where runaway slaves would meet and join the Underground Railroad, and find freedom in the non-slavery states of New England and New York.
In 2007, I and almost one hundred other artists renting spaces at the Codman Building, in Rockland, became victims of gentrification. We were being kicked out to make way for condominiums. Some of us relocated in two Rockland warehouses, while four artists and I, went to Brockton to search for cheap atelier space or an underused factory building. That was when I revisited the former High Street.
Looking for downtown space, I met a gentleman who had a rental on Frederick Douglass Avenue. Currently, the building is painted a funky chartreuse color with artist murals across the top of it. Sadly, it's unused, boarded up, and padlocked shut. I can't for the life of me remember the landlord's name, but he was African American and proud of the fact that he "Saved the TREE".
The landlord was referring to the Learning Tree, the same one mentioned in the Historic Site Plaque. He was hot to show it to me, but, I had to come inside his 'shop'. Blech. His space was a confusing mess of haberdashery and samples of cloth in varying patterns and colors. He had a ton of old office phones strew about, too. I honestly couldn't tell you what he did there to make a living--it looked like a bomb went off inside. It was so chaotic in there that I wanted out, to end our conversation, but not before I took a look at the Tree he saved.
He led me to the back of the thousand-square-foot studio. Like a great showman, he pulled off a dark tarp in one tug, and VOILA, three cleanly chainsawed sections of a Sycamore tree lay there. They were each about 5-6 feet long and much wider around than my arms could reach. I imagined stacking the pieces on top of each other and recreating the Learning Tree. I wanted to count the rings and certify the tree's age, and further prove him right. I too, believed these sections were once the Learning Tree that stood tall over the prestigious Brockton stop along the Underground Railroad.
I asked him to tell me more about 'Saving the Tree'. He was psyched. He couldn't wait to tell me how he pleaded with the demolition crew intent on removing the tree to grade the land for a bank and parking lot. He told me how he saw Greenpeace Tree Huggers chain themselves to Sequoias and Redwoods to save them from being leveled. If he talked to the right people, he was certain he could interfere in the obliteration of this historic arbor. Without chaining himself to the sycamore, he reached out to the Honorable John Thomas Yunits, Jr, the Mayor of Brockton in 2004. He explained the historical importance of saving the Learning Tree on High Street, for 'all eternity, to the Mayor. Silvery-tongued, the man implored how it was the Mayor's civic duty to preserve our city's history. Yunits, who was committed to cleaning up Downtown Brockton, ate it up. Foreseeing himself a savior, the honorable mayor ordered a Tree Cutting Service to carefully hew the sycamore into the three sections and move them to the Haberdashery/Whatever-kinda-Store.
As I walked up Frederick Douglass Avenue today, I tried to peek through the chain-link fencing, hoping to steal a glimpse of the three sycamore truncations. The building is locked up tight now and impossible to penetrate. Maybe the historic tree is still in the Whatever Store. Hopefully, this story reaches the right folk to help me retrieve and restore a commemorative souvenir of the tree and give what's under the tarp a proper tribute.
Comments
Post a Comment