OVERSTREET: a place where dreams were born

The village I grew up in was a small community in Upstate New York.  I didn’t know it was a small town when I was growing up.  I had to develop that perspective by leaving, first for college, then for good.  Several years ago I was in a conversation with someone who had worked at a plant in my hometown, and she referred to the people she knew there as “northern rednecks.” I was offended at first.  But then as she went on to describe my deteriorating Rust Belt village, I realized that I had grown up in a really small town  A good number of the residents of that village never left that town or environ; their perspective on the world began and ended at the village limits a mile or so apart.

That’s a pretty limited stereotype, and one that some of the people in my hometown don’t deserve.  But to an outsider looking in, they might have missed the exceptions.   That’s too bad.  It was a really good place to grow up in the forties and fifties.

The center of the village was a small park with a fountain, park benches, a historic cannon and a monument to soldiers from the village who died in war.  It was surrounded by stores, homes and churches.  We called that part of town overstreet. In all of my travels around the country I’ve never heard the term used elsewhere to describe the center of town.*  It was a colloquial phrase which adequately described a place which was immediately identifiable to the residents when spoken  or written.

I thought of this yesterday when someone mentioned the section of Providence which is coming to be known as DownCity. It’s a growing section of the downtown area in Providence which is spawning evening life and interesting shops.  It is a good term for marketing, drawing a mental picture of a fun place to be in the midst of a gentrified urban community.  Like overstreet it is a term which doesn’t need explanation when used in the local papers or other media.

Colloquial terms give identity and color to local communities.  The Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas, and the Wharf in Portland, Maine, need limited space for directions in publicity materials.  Just ask any local citizen and they can point you there in a breeze.

It occurs to me that one of the characteristics of overstreet was that it was a destination.  A local kid “went overstreet” to spend an evening with friends.  Friends met overstreet to pool resources to go someplace.  Overstreet was a place where a generation gathered, then dispersed for places beyond as another generation came along to occupy the park benches.

Four different directions scattered from overstreet. One, to the east, went out into farm country, eventually finding itself in Vermont.  South headed toward exotic Saratoga Springs, confusing Albany and mysterious New York City.  The road leading north passed through a small neighboring city and found itself in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains on the way to Canada.  And the other, the main route leading through town, just kind of ambled along to Lake Champlain and nowhere in particular. It was a great route for a family drive on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

For a teenager sitting in the park overstreet in the 1950′s the cars driving by were familiar for the most part.  But the unfamiliar ones with license plates other than yellow and blue were mysterious, causing speculation about their origin and their destination.  Many of us would have no clue about those places for several years until college, the military, or a transplanted industrial job took us away from overstreet, maybe forever.

(*Charlotte, NC, has a section of the city called “Overstreet Mall” but it has a completely different meaning and ambiance.)

Photo Credit: hometown