Poor Plainfield

Get your motor running….our Back Road Café summer road trip travels this week down historic Rt. 22 to Plainfield, New Jersey. After our visits to Atlanta, Denver, San Diego and Detroit, I thought we’d slow down and cool off in a smaller, gentler town, with happy memories of my own birth and childhood years there.  Nice try – it’s New Jersey in the summer!  Get out the bug spray and crank up the air conditioner.  Better yet, turn the lawn sprinkler on and invite over the neighborhood kids.  It’ll be fun to sit on the porch and count the twilight fireflies. 

You say you’re from New Jersey and people either pity or scorn you.  Fellow natives simply ask, “Which exit?” (There are lots of freeways.)  Ever since the popular TV shows The Sopranos or Jersey Shore, many folks assume New Jersey is just mob bosses and bimbos.  The so-called Garden State actually does have a long history of crime and corruption.  With one of the greatest shores in the world it does attract its share of beach bimbos.   But, like those shows, our residents are flawed but lovable.  And good for a laugh.

Sometimes you get the kind of reaction I got from a friend, a wealthy woman who retired to ritzy Pebble Beach here in California after she made a fortune running a chain of dry cleaners in Central New Jersey. She had lived in a town near my home town, Plainfield; “Poor Plainfield, how far it has come down.”

My parents bought a house in Plainfield in 1950 and I was born a year later.  For the next 25 years my father walked to the train station each morning and commuted an hour to Manhattan and Wall Street.  As in a lot of suburban feeder towns for New York, our house had a big yard with old trees.  We had a great tree house.  The neighborhood kids came to our house most days for kick the can and twilight firefly counting.  We swam and played tennis at the Plainfield Country Club.

When my friend says “Poor Plainfield” she means those days are over.  Because Plainfield is now a predominately black and Hispanic town.

As a kid, I assumed all of Plainfield was like my neighborhood, white and upper middle class.  Our neighborhood, our schools, our church, our parks, our stores - all white.  The big houses and big lawns – that was Plainfield.  I knew blacks lived in other parts of town, but in my idyllic childhood I was barely aware of poverty, and it never struck me as odd that there were no black members in the country club. 

But after that Poor Plainfield comment I checked out the population stats for Plainfield, then and now, and discovered to my surprise that in the 60’s the town was actually 40% black.  How ironic, that I can be so very quick to scorn the South, those racists of the 60’s, and of today, for their white denial.  But how oblivious was I, were we, to almost half the residents of my town, who lived a very different life, fewer choices and many challenges.

Things changed in the late 60’s, as African Americans all over the US began resisting and protesting segregation and racism, with frustration and anger sometimes spilling over into riots, especially in hot summers.   Plainfield had its own riot, in the hot summer of the 1967.  In nearby Newark there had been a week of race rioting and looting, which left 26 dead.  A fight about race broke out in a Plainfield restaurant, leading to a couple nights of crowds of angry young people and damage to commercial property.  Then a white motorcycle gang, the Pagans, from outside the area, came into town looking for a fight.  A police officer caught in the middle of the melee fired a shot that wounded a black youth.  An ensuing mob brutally attacked the officer with a shopping cart and eventually he was killed with his own revolver.

This began a decade of white flight from Plainfield.  I was away at college, and not aware of people leaving.  My parents moved away a few years later for other reasons, the family grown and gone, longtime plans to build on property we owned farther out in the country.  But maybe also because of the changing demographics.  We never spoke of that.  There was a lot we didn’t speak of.   It was that kind of town; we stuck with our own kind and ignored a lot.

By the end of the 70’s Plainfield was 60% black.  Today it’s about half black, lots of Hispanics, 25% white.  The mayor and other city leaders are black. I went by my old house a few years ago and met the current residents, a black family.

Other changes; the downtown shopping area, heavily damaged in those riots still has many vacant stores. The hospital I was born in was bought by a multinational, for profit health care chain and then a few years later it was closed and shuttered.  

Of course all towns change.  You can’t go home again.  I am sad for the loss of some old stores.  But they might have failed anyway; lots of stores do.  Or they move to the malls.  The town’s population is up, as is the average income. My old church is now integrated.  My old house, according to Google street view and a real estate virtual tour, looks pretty good.  They added a deck; why did we never think of that?

Last week a group in Plainfield called YOU, Youth Organization for Unity, held a candlelight protest of the Trayvon Martin verdict.  A circle of a hundred people, mostly black, calmly stood in front of city hall and decried our nation’s continuing racial injustice.   There was no violence.  In other cities, like Oakland here in California, there were some nights of looting after the verdict, but much less than folks expected or feared.  I’m not sure what that means.  I do commend President Obama’s moving and thoughtful comments on the case.  

Maybe I’m too optimistic or naïve, but I can’t say, “Poor Plainfield.”  I actually feel more scorn and sadness for what I now know it was really like in the 60’s, a city of fear and denial.  It’s not poor today, it’s real.   I just say, “Yes, I grew up in Plainfield.  Good town.  Good memories.  Good people.  Good luck.”

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter