Think Water Street is rough? Back in the 50s, it was tough

Long-time resident sets record straight on fuel tank discovery, describes youthful days in Warren's North End

By Ted Hayes
Posted 6/22/18

Two old fuel tanks recently uncovered under a Water Street sidewalk aren’t from an old forgotten service station, as some town officials have speculated, but instead served telephone repair …

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Think Water Street is rough? Back in the 50s, it was tough

Long-time resident sets record straight on fuel tank discovery, describes youthful days in Warren's North End

Posted

Two old fuel tanks recently uncovered under a Water Street sidewalk aren’t from an old forgotten service station, as some town officials have speculated, but instead served telephone repair trucks during the mid-20th century, when Water Street was a “rough, tough” place.
That’s the recollection of Maple Street resident James Salomon, who last week read a Warren Times story about the tanks’ discovery and cleanup, and called the paper to set the record straight:
“Those are from Bell Telephone,” said Mr. Salomon, who grew up in the North End in the ‘50s.
“Before it was (present-day MM Furniture Restoration) it was Opfer’s Machine Ship, and before Opfer’s was there, it was the telephone company, back when we had party lines. That’s where they had all their trucks for the area, and they had a lift to service the trucks. The tanks were to fuel them. There was no service station.”

‘We loved it’
Back when Bell Telephone trucks were still pulling in and out of the Water Street yard just north of Mercier’s, Mr. Salomon was just another kid growing up in the “run down” north end. Keeping entertained wasn’t hard, he said. He had a paper route starting at age 10, knew every inch of the area, and had plenty of neighborhood friends.
“During that period of time, everybody thought the North End was really run down. They thought that everyone who lived in the North End was a rough, tough guy, dangerous. But we loved it. There was all kinds of stuff to do, every single day.”
First there was the old dump at Jamiel Park, where factories and residents dumped their trash for decades. He and his friends would walk down there many mornings and spend hours digging through the industrial and residential waste that accumulated along the waterfront. There was always a treasure or two to find.
“We used to take the doors off the refrigerators and paddle them around.”
“Then we had the river. We were known as the ‘Water Rats,’ and we were always getting kicked out of somewhere. Between American Tourister and the town beach, you could spend all day doing something.”
Sometimes that involved playing ball. Other times it meant poking around in vacant lots and other times swimming in the river.
“The town pier used to be Staples Coal Company,” he said. “They had a big tower with a hopper on top, where the boats would come in. The hopper was gone but the tower was still there and we used to love to jump off it into the river. What was down there (under the water) we didn’t know, but we survived.”
Getting into kid trouble involved plenty of bumps and bruises, and Mr. Salomon and friends suffered their share of cut feet and scrapes down at the docks.
“Whenever we’d get cut up there we’d go to Dr. Frechette, he had the biggest white house on Main Street. He’d see us coming and say, ‘Oh why are you kids getting yourself all cut up again?’ Then he’d stitch us up.”
Then they’d head off, maybe back to the water or maybe down to Brown Street, where there was an old industrial building nicknamed the “Power House,” that once served the train line. The building is gone now but others remain, just off the bike path near Brown Street.
“We spent a lot of time back in there,” he said.
The Bell telephone building turned into Opfer’s around 1959 and Mr. Salomon, who later rose two children, moved to Maple in the mid-70s. But the childhood memories stick with him.
“It was a wonderful place to grow up,” he said. “This was all way back when we had the old black phones that said ‘Bell’ on them. Matter of fact, I still have two of them. CHerry 5-6320, that was my grandmother’s number, and that’s what I used to call my (future) wife on.”
The next step for those old tanks? The town has tested their contents, found limited petroleum contamination and is expected to get the OK from the state DEM to fill them, cover them over, leave them there and lay down a new sidewalk.

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