Bangor: Full of Bologna

It has been said that one cannot go home again. Well, since Bangor, Pennsylvania wasn’t my home—but my home away from home—I could and did return. It’s my mother’s hometown and where my maternal grandparents lived. My family visited Bangor on countless occasions during the four seasons. We spent weeks there in the summertime, which was a big deal because we got to frolic in an architectural marvel, the Bangor Park elevated swimming pool—girls’ locker room to the left; boys’ locker room to the right. Back home in the Bronx, a city-operated pool opened with great fanfare in the early 1970s in nearby Van Cortlandt Park. However, the chlorine adventure there wasn’t quite like the one at Bangor’s pool. The after-business hours mob scaling the Van Cortlandt Park pool’s fence to swim—and God knows what else—spoke volumes. It clued us in, too, on what the place was like in the daytime.

The return to Bangor—my Mayberry—was a pleasant stroll down memory lane. I am happy to report no seismic changes in the town and the surrounding area. Granted, there were more parked cars on the streets than I remember. Also, the locals were mesmerized—like everyone else in the wider world—by hand-held devices. And the old Colonial Hotel was now the Broadway Pub and serving pumpkin beer. Bangor has definitely become hipper. Broadway itself was an uninspiring hodgepodge of businesses, but this has been the case for a long time now.

Hipness aside, Heard’s Meat Market was still around and making what we always called “Bangor bologna.” It looked and tasted exactly as it did decades ago. I wish I could say the same for Devil Dogs and Carvel ice cream! And just as it’s impossible to eat only one potato chip, it’s likewise impossible to stop at one slice of Bangor bologna. Not too far from Heard’s is the Second Ward Company firehouse, which was just around the corner from where my grandparents lived. It borders a gravel alleyway where my younger brother and I visited Spot, a neighbor’s dog, in his outdoor doghouse. When we were young, we weren’t permitted to have a canine companion, so the opportunity to call on and pet the agreeable Spot was huge and further added to the Bangor aura.

Living all my life in the Bronx—in New York City—I have been witness to unrelenting and dramatic changes. There were still some empty lots when I was a kid, but gradually they’ve all been developed. Once upon a time, I could cross the street in front of my house and descend into a considerable “victory garden,” the last of its kind in the neighborhood. Now, the smallest patches of city earth are prized pieces of property. This is why I was pleased to see so much farmland still farmland in Bangor and the nearby towns. I would have hated to come upon rows and rows of condominiums where corn and apples once grew. I’m sure condos have popped up in a lot of places, but the back-road journey on the twisting and turning Richmond Road, with more curves than could be found at the junction, was like time travel. Even a couple of farm ponds, which intrigued me so much as a boy, remained. Okay, a little diving board on one of them was no longer there, but I’m not complaining. What would it have been like to dive into that pond with all the mud, algae, and dragonflies? I guess I’ll have to keep wondering.

After passing the aforementioned ponds, Richmond Road intersected with Koehler Road where there stood a solitary house painted yellow. It was exactly as I remembered it—still yellow, but in dire need of a paint job. What this yellow house signified—then as well as now—was that Gulick’s fruit farm was in the vicinity with a bird’s eye-view of a spewing power plant on the opposite horizon in a place called Martins Creek.

It took me all these years to put names on some of these back roads, like Koehler Road and then the Belvidere-Martins Creek Highway, which led us to the Riverton-Belvidere Bridge. The bridge is where a deceased Bangor resident from the past worked. To me, it will always be “Dutch’s Bridge.” Anyway, Hot Dog Johnny was still going strong and the package store on a sharp curve in Route 46 in New Jersey, which used to have the words “Eat” and “Liquor” on its rooftop, was still there. But whose bright idea was it to do away with the roof’s “Eat” and “Liquor?” 

(Photographs from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)