As the news of Alex Rodriguez’s steroid use reverberated around the country two weeks ago, I may have been one of the few people in America whose thoughts immediately focused on a quiet patch of land off Round Swamp Road in Old Bethpage, New York, where baseball lovers of all ages have been gathering for years to watch the game played in its earliest, most innocent form.
But then, that’s the kind of impact the Old Bethpage Village Restoration has always had on people. A fixture on the school trip circuit of our childhood, the OBVR, for those of you who aren't Billy Joel, is a collection of buildings from Long Island's past. Staffed by history interpreters in the period dress of the nineteenth century, a trip to the restoration has always been a way to get far away from the nearby Walt Whitman Mall and perhaps a little closer to, well, Walt Whitman. Think Colonial Williamsburg without the crowds or neighboring amusement parks.
Nestled on some 165 acres, the village has always been a mirror—maybe even an antidote—to the problems of the current day. Gridlock on the Southern State Parkway? Go watch the blacksmith make horseshoes at the village. Kids playing Wii all day on the couch? Go help milk the cows at the village. Commercialization of the holidays got you down? Go to the village and listen to the carols by candlelight. And talk about timely: baseball players taking performance enhancing drugs? How about taking in a bare handed period game between the New York Mutuals and the Flemington (N.J.) Neshanocks.
When I learned this week via Facebook, a decidedly modern tool, that Nassau County was thinking of closing this historic living museum because of revenue shortfalls, I found myself instantly taken back through time. Not to the 1860’s, mind you, that butter-churning era the Village Restoration has been faithfully capturing since it first started collecting endangered buildings in 1963, a year after I was born, but rather the mid-nineteen seventies of my youth.
I grew up a mile from the Old Bethpage Village Restoration and it remains one of the central points along my own nostalgic map. The school trips, the olde tyme money, the sheep, the birch beer, and, of course, all that butter. We would run through the woods that separated the Old Bethpage Grade School from the village and build forts among the trees. Going to the OBVR has always been a rite of passage for school kids across the island, but for us it was just an extension of our backyard.
I remember my weekly trips with Ian Kaden to measure stream temperature for our earth science class. We would walk down a dirt road, past the Noone Inn, past the women in their frocks, feeling like we were in a scene fromWestworld, a popular film of the time.
Other days, I would go to see my trumpet teacher, Dr. Kirby Jolly, Long Island's very own Herb Alpert, perform the Old Log Hut March (and other songs with strange names) with his legendary Old Bethpage Village Restoration Brass Band. My brother found one of their albums on eBay recently and I scooped it up. After all, Jolly was a contributor to the Ken Burns' Civil War soundtrack and I thought it might be valuable someday. (That same brother, Eric, staged parts of his first feature film, Judy Berlin, starring a pre-Sopranos Edie Falco, at the village.)
I even remember endless debates with my schoolmate David over why the historic Little Red Schoolhouse, located just down the road, was demolished rather than moved to the village. “It wasn’t the right period!” he would argue, to which I would respond by saying 1900ish was probably close enough. The Village Restoration had unwittingly made us conservationists ahead of our time.
The restoration was near the center of my kid universe but the other points are worth noting. At one end of Round Swamp Road stood Myer’s Farm, a working spread in the heart of Long Island’s rapid growth. I would ride my bike past the stand selling pumpkins and corn and think I had crossed into Iowa. Meyer's Farm felt like the last thread of a quilt about to come unraveled.
Those marks are unrecognizable to me now. Though I haven’t lived on Long Island since 1980, my parents still live in the same house I grew up in. Meyer’s Farm, like Mattinecock Dairy, another rural fixture of my youth, is long gone, replaced by a massive housing development. (Just tell me it’s not called something like The Reserve at Meyer’s Farm.) Adventurer’s Inn is still there, but Route 110 is just a tad more congested. Just a tad.
The Old Bethpage Village Restoration, of course, remains an ever-fixed mark. I’ve heard people say that there’s no there there but that’s the point. It’s always been an oasis of quiet and simplicity in a noisy, modern world. It’s gone from representing Long Island history to being an essential part of Long Island’s history. And you simply can’t close history.
Update, 2/23/09: Apparently the vote to either close or keep open the Old Bethpage restoration is today. I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, check out the funny clip from Conan O'Brien's final show last week.