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"Meadowbrook" is the name of a Parkway on Long Island near where I used to live in the '70s, but it has a more specific connotation for me. An exact spot, right here, the little blue body of water that sits (now) between Perimeter Road and Korean War Veterans Memorial Drive. Never talked about it,
MITCHEL FIELD MEMORIES
A pair of old blog posts
by J. Eric Smith, 2004
Back when I lived there, though, Perimeter Road was a semi-abandoned gravel road and the big four lane Charles Lindbergh Boulevard didn't exist. They were in the process of building the campus of Nassau Community College, and that little body of water was behind the construction site, very isolated, very wild and overgrown and lush and verdant, even though it was basically just a glorified drainage ditch running alongside the Meadowbrook Parkway. (Who knows, perhaps it was the brook in the meadow that gave the parkway its name?).
All of us who lived there on Mitchel Field (the semi-abandoned military base on which Nassau Community College, the Nassau Coliseum and the Cradle of Aviation Museum now stand) roamed freely among the abandoned hangars and runways that had pretty much been deteriorating in place since the end of World War II. We were generally fearless, and climbed into old buildings and walked down isolated trails and paths without a thought. It was an amazing place to be a teenager, like living in something out of Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome. We loved roaming the grounds there.
The only place that creeped us out, though, for no good reason that we could explain, was that little isolated creek bed beside the parkway, the spot on the map. There was a pack of wild dogs that stalked that area (including a frighteningly pale Weimeraner that we called The Ghost Dog), so we (publicly) attributed it to that, but there was just something wrong about the spot in general, something that made us feel like something bad was going to happen if we stayed there very long. We'd periodically ride our bikes over there to show our bravura, but usually found reasons to go elsewhere pretty quickly. It was our dead zone, our no man's land, our haunted house (minus the house).
Many years later, I evoked that feeling in a song I wrote, called (duh) "Meadowbrook."
Never made a sound,
Never knew the story of
The body that we found.
The body that we found.
Meadowbrook is dewy,
Meadowbrook by dawn.
Underneath the rising sun
The body on the lawn.
The body on the lawn.
Silent in the sunshine.
Silence in our minds.
Silently we walked away,
The body left behind.
The body left behind.
Time can tell a story.
Time can change a face.
Someday will our memory of
The body be erased?
The body we erased?
The body be erased.
***
Writing about "Meadowbrook" yesterday led me to searching for some online images to remind me just how creepy that spot was, and to see if I could demonstrate just how Mad Max like my teen years were there on Mitchel Field.
I did find some pretty cool images.
Here's an aerial photo of the base, just a few years before I lived there, with the creepy Meadowbrook area circled in red, just to give you sense of how it could be right in the middle of a bustling suburban area, but also be very isolated.
And here's a picture of an abandoned train bridge across the Meadowbrook (you can see the Parkway through the trees). We used to use this path to get down to the creek itself.
I also found a picture of my house at the time online, oddly enough. It's here, under the arrow.
Immediately behind my house, back in the mid/late '70s, was a series of shabby looking trailers surrounded by a tall, secure fence. It was a drug rehab center, the patients (or were they inmates?) of which used to hang out on the fence and try to get the neighborhood kids to buy cigarettes for them at the base mini-mart. And right behind that rehab center was an old brick building that was in complete disrepair: holes in the ceiling, no doors or windows, etc. This was our primary hangout, and I was absolutely thrilled to find a series of pictures of its interior online. The murals that are pictured on that page were really surreal to us at the time. We didn't know why they were there, but they provided cool backdrop to our nefarious teenage wasteland.
I wrote about the Perimeter Road being a semi-abandoned gravel path that went around the old base. Here is what it looked (and I guess still looks) like. It was great for dirt bike riding.
This page has some shots of some of the creepy old buildings on the base. They say they don't know what the one on the bottom is: we always called it the incinerator (and I think accurately). It had this huge metal drum inside it that you had to drop into from the top. It was a cool place to hang out and listen to music.
But the best place for hanging out unseen was the bunker. We also had a dirt bike trail with awesome jumps that went over the top of the bunker. Very, very cool. I'm sure our parents would have killed us if they'd known where we were spending our time after school each day.
Move it on over . . .
