Pop
An essay by Dave Messineo
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Next to my house on Forest Street near Laurel Avenue, was an old tin roofed shack. Once a house, it had become a cobble of salvaged old windows and doors, with numerous tin roofed sheds attached. It was set far back from Forest Street, all the way at the back of the lot. A bearded old man, in his 90s, lived there in primitive conditions, wood cook stove, another wood stove for heat, kerosene lamps for light, an outhouse. He split firewood for his winter heat and he sharpened his ax on an old pedal driven grind wheel. He had a rain barrel for most of his water needs. When my father and mother first moved there, in the 1930s, "Pop" had no running water, so my father ran a pipe and the neighbor on the other side supplied the water, just one faucet in a kitchen type sink. Pop was supposedly the grandson of the owner and returned to the place after being away for years. His name was John Van Embergh, an old Dutchman. He had been a mason and built our garage. He also built the small plant building on Laurel, the Estes Company, which made colored fish tank gravel. No deed or title to the land was on file and it was by “squatter’s rights” that Pop had the right to stay there. Pop paid no property taxes to the town of Kearny as a squatter.
One afternoon, he put his arm into a wooden barrel and a protruding nail punctured an artery in his forearm. He yelled for my father to help him and my father came running with bandages and antiseptic. Pop kept saying “cobweb!... cobweb!” When my dad tried to apply the bandage, Pop pushed my dad away and went into a shed and reached up near the ceiling and grabbed a cobweb.He put the cob web on his bleeding wound. This was an old custom and modern medicine now thinks it may help start blood coagulation and stop the bleeding. Pop didn’t drive. He walked down to Elm Street near the depot where he bought kerosene at McCloud’s Industrial Supply and groceries at Sansone’s. The only time I ever saw him ride in a car was when my father took him to a doctor in our family car. Pop had complained about not feeling well so my father drove him to Irvington to see our family doctor. It must have been quite an adventure for Pop who never ventured out of Arlington. The doctor said he was in good health other than some normal, age related “hardening of the arteries”. Actually he was in amazingly good shape for a man in his nineties! The land in front of his shack was rich and he grew corn and tomatoes when I was little. At night he covertly cleaned his outhouse and spread his “night soil” for fertilizer. We always knew it! The weeds and plants that grew wild on his lot I didn't see again until I moved to NY state...rural agricultural type grasses and weeds. I was told that Pop used to walk to North Arlington to farm the farmland down past the Pike just beyond and below Eagan’s. Two brothers, Nathan and Frankie Howell, about my age, from Chestnut Street, came to play there all the time. Pop was their "grandfather". Apparently he may have been the grandfather of Frankie Howell, who he called Eeshie, but maybe not Nathan. We kids ran around on the roofs, had a ladder to the upstairs to play in as a clubhouse, and Pop built huts and forts for Eeshie and we all played in them. Pop had taken in an old woman named Louise, in her 70s. He called her "Weezie". She was a good person but an easy going woman, and apparently liked to hang around the tavern down on Elm Street near Depot Park, where she met men who didn’t always treat her well. Pop was very protective toward her. One night, Pop was afraid she was going out to the tavern so in a jealous rage he nailed the doors shut. The Howells pleaded with him to no avail. The police came and finally Louise left with her daughter Virginia for a while. Louise lived there for a while longer but became sick and had to leave and then died. Louise’s daughter, Virginia, was the mother of the Howell boys. Frankie, who Pop called "Eeshie", was the son of Pop's son or maybe Pop’s nephew. I am vague on that, but pop especially loved Eeshie. Anyway, The Howell boys said Pop was part Indian. They said Pop’s grandfather or great grandfather had married an Indian chief's daughter and had thereby owned half of Arlington. I always thought that story was pure baloney, but now I believe it was probably close to the truth. I found a reprint of an old Kearny map. It showed the shack location as the Van Embergh farmhouse... So indeed it was a farm in the Dutch Van Embergh family. The Dutch were the original first European settlers in the New York City/Northern New Jersey area. New York City was originally the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. The first settlers in Arlington were Dutch so there would be no deeds. The land was bought from the Indians……..or taken. Deeds only appear when the land is transferred. I always thought that "half of Arlington" was absurd because it seemed like a huge amount of land. Now I realize that it is entirely possible. Kearny is 9 square miles and only 3 square miles are high and dry, the residential area where the houses are. So, one square mile, or 640 acres, is not a very big farm, and even a farm of a few hundred acres would easily be a big chunk of Arlington. My house on Forest Street was built around 1896 and it was subdivided from part of the original Van Embergh farm. I suspect, as is often the case, that the Van Embergh family kept the farmhouse when all the land around it was sold off. When I moved up to rural Central New York state I recognized many of the things I saw Pop doing, splitting firewood, sharpening his ax on a pedal grind wheel, sifting ashes for the unburned coal ... He was a remnant of the 19th century, an island of the past surrounded by the sea of 20th century urbanization. He was living a rural life in the middle of a huge metropolitan area, with ties going further back to the very first settlers. If he had lived here in Central New York State he would have been just another old farmer...old fashioned?... yes... but not that strange.
The building directly across from Pop’s on Forest Street is the Gumm Chemical Company. They own the lot now as a parking lot. Pop never paid the taxes as he was never listed as the owner. I don't know if the town was upset about that, but the Gumm Chemical Company wanted that lot for employee parking. Pop had squatter's rights because he had lived there more than 25 years so he couldn't be kicked off for non-payment of taxes. Official condemnation signs began appearing on Pop's shack and Pop would rip them down. The signs condemned the shack as violating Kearny Health Department codes, a way around his squatter's rights. One day I spied a Gumm employee tacking up the signs. Not long after that, when I was still at KHS, I came home one evening and the black and white Kearny Police cars were parked there. My mother told me they had come and taken Pop away to the Howell’s on Chestnut Street earlier that day...pretty much against his will...and he had later escaped from his "captors" and they were looking for him. They assumed he was trying to come back to his home. I never saw him again...I assume they found him before he could get back. The next morning, very early, a bulldozer arrived and Gumm employees supervised the demolition of the shack. I'm sure Gumm hired the bulldozer. It was all done in an hour or two...none of Pop’s possessions or furniture was removed. I was very disturbed about the whole thing. I felt it was wrong to force the man out of his home, especially when at his age of close to one hundred he wasn't going to be there much longer. I wasn't old enough to do anything but I felt the old man should have been able to spend his last few years at his home. The neighbors could have helped him clean up and even gotten him a lawyer. The Gumm Chemical company worked behind the scenes with the town to get some sort of title to that lot and now it is just another paved parking lot. I am fairly certain that a good title search would have named Pop as the rightful heir and legal owner. Pop lived with a more or less affluent nephew after that but he had a hard time adjusting there. It was just too modern and civilized for a man who never bathed and spit on the floor and blew his nose with his fingers. So he then lived with the Howells on Chestnut Street where he was a little more comfortable. Within a year, though, he died. I think he had nothing to do, nothing to live for and he just gave up and wasted away. I always thought that he lived so long because he was independent and had to work every day to stay alive, chopping firewood, fixing his leaky roof, walking to get kerosene and food and supplies. He was free and independent on his little homestead. When he was gone, and all that was left was another blacktop parking lot we all became a little bit poorer. — Dave Messineo | ||||||
