Saturday, January 23, 2010

Demolition Of Blazer Stadium

Today's posting is a little out of the norm - and a four hankie tear jerker to boot. No frolicking footage of the 1970s this time. Instead we focus our attention on the Blazerville childhood stomping grounds, and the familiar buildings contained within, which have taken a number of serious body blows over the past few months.

Long time regulars Brown's and Cowan's grocery stores have both come crashing down in place of modern homes. Hillcrest Park has been transformed from a big, wide, playing field into a crowded and complex theme park full of fancy new olympic buildings. And the nearby 'Projects' housing complex, a place of mystery, fear, and roving enemy gangs for most of my life (since the mid 1950s) has been flattened into a giant dusty pancake.

Oh sure, there'll be plenty more retrospective videos produced on the demise of these long standing, low income occupied, bland but functional monoliths much better than mine, but I made 2 or 3 trips back into the old neighborhood to capture these scenes on the video camera so the least you can do now is watch 'em without complaining about it.

And yeah, the original Blazer Stadium was located just inside the eastern boundaries of Projectonia, hence the title of this post. This was the field in which us Blazer type kids first learned how to punt, toss and catch a football. If I'm not mistaken (and maybe another Blazer can confirm it) the Block Blazers never lost a football game to the Project Rejects in all the years of interlocking play. True, we always seemed to lose when hockey season rolled around (up at Brock school) but we never lost to those nasty Rejectonians at touch football.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

As kids in the 60's & 70's we would have probably welcomed the Projects being "flattened into a giant dusty pancake".

But now that we are older, it reminds us of how much time has really passed. And we can't go back - can we?

Yes, I also remember that the Blazers always defeated the Project Rejects in football. We were one well-oiled machine with our star quarterback Donny at the helm.

But, for some reason, we could not duplicate our success in hockey. (Even with the famous "Passing Brothers" in the line-up).

O.K. Magee. Go long!

Evert Kenk said...

I agree. Back in the 60s we would have endorsed the elimination of all things Projectonian. Creepy place.

A change like that would have been a win/win situation for us. And we still would have had plenty of time to solidify new memories of whatever took over the location.

Now, like saps, we kinda miss the ugly, old buildings and the childhood days they represent to us. Funny that.

Nat Norkin said...

Projectonian? A neoligism is ever there was one.

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