"Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores/ Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more." Norwich, where my family and I have lived for almost the last seventeen years, and the only place in these fifty States my two children have ever lived in this country, is very much a New England town, though as an outsider, I suspect it's easier for me to see 'the city' as an assortment of villages, Thamesville, Greenville, Taftville, Norwichtown, West Side, Down City, Laurel Hill and Bean Hill than for long time residents who bristle at the notion that anything is out of order here in the Rose of New England.
The post World War II Pax Americana hasn't been very kind to much of New England--the first part of the country to be settled, its population is older than elsewhere, our infrastructure a bit more worn and frayed, our habits a little more established than elsewhere and our ability and agility to embrace new people (no, not just me) and ideas a bit more strained than elsewhere.
The village green, the corner store and the cottage industry all held out here longer than anywhere else. When the mills, built a century or more ago along the banks of the rivers and streams that provided them with power and the towns housing their workers huddled on the banks, finally started to close as the cost of labor in the Northeast rose and willing workers across the Sun Belt were identified, all the plants moved south in the late Sixties and early Seventies until they moved, again, to Vietnam, Suriname, Bangladesh and China. Here, the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution discovered they had no Plan B.
Norwich and New London County didn't see a Wal-Mart until the early 1990's-populations weren't large enough to justify the investments and the philosophy of the company and the tradition of those who lived here were sort of antagonistic to one another (It's hard to reconcile 'Live Free or Die' with buying shoes made by people in third world nations for less than starvation wages.) We used to drive into Rhode Island to shop at Wal-Mart because my wife and I had plenty of nothing, which was fine for us, but not so much for our children. And when Wal-Mart arrived here in the Land of Steady Habits, one by one, the Bradlees', the Caldors', the Ames' all went the way of the dodo.
One big box begat others. I've noticed in recent weeks, the two Shetucket Plumbing shops we had here in Norwich, one on 32, beyond Uncas on the Thames and this one that exists only in this Internet listing, are shuttered. And I have no idea how many local businesses have disappeared and turned to dust. None of this keeps out elected leadership from speaking about how "Norwich is on the Move!" (and if you don't think so, just check out how we've used a rose as the period on the exclamation point for our logo, "Norwich Now!" on the website. How's that for continuing the Renaissance?)
Here's where I get disquieted: my daughter the college student, whom we helped back onto campus this past weekend had her first part-time job while a student at Norwich Free Academy at a little place down the street from our house, Linda's Market. We live about a seven minute walk from the William Backus Hospital so there are a lot of doctor's practices in the neighborhood, and where there are doctors you have lawyers (a joke I could be stealing from my brother, Adam: 'What does a lawyer call the lowest ranking student graduating in this year's medical college? Defendant.) and all these folks like lunch.
Linda's which was sort of a place you went to buy the odd container of milk you forgot you needed or the dozen eggs or the loaf of bread, slowly reestablished itself as a spectacular place to get lunch with a booming business in take-out of soups, hot dishes and the greatest grinders (or hoagies, or 'poor boys' or submarine sandwiches) on the planet. Michelle earned her first spending money making BLTs on Vocatura rolls for some of the finest medical minds in the Northeast. And, even earlier, I can tell you Linda's grinders kept my son, Patrick, and his NFA cohorts from starving to death in those hours from lunch until dinner after school.
Very quietly, actually without a word, after closing for two weeks of vacation in late July, Linda's failed to reopen and word spread across the neighborhood that Linda and Harry, who had lived upstairs above the store (and to whom my son, Patrick, delivered the Bulletin all those years ago) had moved out leaving the building empty. An acquaintance shared with me last week that he went down to order lunch for his office one day, and realized the store was dark and empty. No final farewell; no hail fellow, well-met; no Happy Trails. It would appear that while The Revolution will Not be Televised, the Rose City Renaissance will not have soup or sandwiches.
This past Sunday, there were twenty-two foreclosure notices in the local newspaper. When we say Norwich is on the move, we aren't kidding around, I guess. I attend City Council meetings on a regular basis and listen as real estate novelists with law degrees offer PowerPoint fairy tales that would make Puff cough and watch as my fellow citizens embrace each new slide as the turning of the corner instead of as the turn of the screw.
And all I can hear are the words of my homeboy, where from I really come from, and it ain't Benedict Arnold or Edwin Land. "Well big limousine long shiny and black. You don't look ahead you don't look back. How many times can you get up after you've been hit? Well I swear if I could spare the spit, I'd lay one on your shiny chrome And send you on your way back home."
-bill kenny
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