Hamilton Revisited

After stopping by the Colgate University campus, my next goal was to take some pictures in town.  This is not hard to do.  From the edge of campus, here is the distance to "downtown" Hamilton, New York, looking down the main part of Broad Street.  Note that Broad Street has the village green in the middle of it, so there is another "branch" on the far side of the park, to the right in this photo:


It's an easy walk, as you can see.  Now, I didn't do this, but if you turn left from where I took this photo, three or four blocks south from here is the high school.  The building is much bigger than it was when my brothers and I were students there, but even back then, grades K-12 were all in one place.  We had about 60 kids in my graduating class; 13 of us were Regents Scholarship winners.  (brag, brag)

When I was in grades K-3, however, there was another building, on the side-branch of Broad Street -- the Broad Street School, actually -- for the elementary grades.  I can still remember it clearly:  the bricks were huge and light-tan in color, but the two steps that came out from the building were grey concrete.  The bottommost step was a huge semicircle, and then there was a rectangle for the next step up.  I remember being frustrated that I couldn't descend from corner to corner down the stairs.

Inside the building, the floors had huge, dark red square tiles with black grouting, and the walls were green tiles halfway up, and pink-tan paint above that.  The big scary janitor man used to stand at the far end of the hallway as we all trooped inside, his grey uniform a bit hazy in the shadowy distance, his muscular arms crossed just like Mr. Clean.  He only got mad at me once, when I figured out how I could crawl under the doors and lock all the stalls in the girls' bathroom... 

Here is what the Broad Street School looks like today:

They tore it down during my Junior year of high school.




Here (above) are some of the buildings along Broad Street, with the Smith Building prominent.  The Smith who owned this building hanged himself in the basement of it ages ago -- there are no stories of hauntings.  These are old style residential-retail buildings, with apartments above the businesses; a dear friend tells me such buildings cannot be built by today's rules, so once these buildings fall into disrepair, they are doomed, never to be replaced.

The center of town looks like this:




This used to be the only traffic light in town, right here.  And, there was so little traffic that two friends and I once fearlessly danced a jig in the middle of the intersection, late one night.  I believe there are 5 intersections with traffic lights, now.

The red brick building on the right, with the green awning, used to be where the Bluebird Diner was, where they served up the best coffee in the universe.  I remember the year it burned, and we called it The Blackbird.  Rumor has it there's a restaurant there now where you can get good sushi, but I haven't investigated.  I still love the turret -- isn't it beautiful?

The building on the left didn't have a clock tower when I lived in Hamilton, and I have no idea when it was added to the building.  It looks like something from a phase where the town wanted to be in Back to the Future.

The street between these buildings is Utica Street -- follow it out of town and head to points north: Utica, Oneida, and on to Route 20 for places east and west along the old Cherry Valley Turnpike.

Here are some views down Lebanon Street:




And then there are some favorite buildings to feature as well, such as the Park United Methodist Church, where most of my best friends attended services:



The Town Hall (or that's what this building was when I was a kid) -- we held Girl Scout meetings here, and there was a tree out back that I liked to climb.


And, of course, the Hamilton Public Library, which was just the one little building when I was a kid, but has expanded to enormous proportions since then -- a good sign of a thriving, literate community: