Posts Tagged: nostalgia
Old Armenian Town
This is about all that's left of a once substantial Armenian neighborhood in downtown fresno.
Each time I visit my hometown, I feel a little more sad nostalgia for the once-vibrant downtown. My parents lived in one of the old residential neighborhoods in downtown when I was born. I’m not sure our house on S St. was officially within the area now referred to as Old Armenian Town, but we had many Armenian neighbors, which was fine for our Greek immigrant family.
Of course, as a teenager and even young adult, I didn’t think much about the neighborhood in which I spent my toddlerhood. But a few years later when it dawned on me that it would be really nice to see the street (or even the house!) in which we lived, I was sadly disappointed to find that not only was the house gone, several blocks of S St. no long existed, having been turned into medical office complexes around nearby Fresno Community Hospital (where I was born). Even some of this is now gone and replaced with a disappointing-looking condo complex. Still, about every third or fourth visit to Fresno, I would drive down there and wander the streets hoping I would discover some hidden fragment of S St. that would be a little time capsule, an example of what it was all once like, an indication of where I came from. Eventually, I sort of, well, got over it.
Two years ago, however, I got worked up again when I learned that the City had approved (re)development plans for what sounded like a cheese-ball commercial project to commemorate Old Armenian Town, called, oddly enough, “Old Armenian Town.” They demolished the last of the former Armenian neighborhood, saved three or four small houses, and moved them over to an empty field directly next to the elevated freeway, where, I guess, they would be “on display.” There they have been on display ever since, up on blocks and surrounded by chain link and barbed wire, disintegrating in the Fresno summer. Links to an alleged page about the “Old Armenian Town” on the Fresno Redevelopment Agency web site return “page not found” and no mention of this “major commercial development” is made anywhere I could find on the site. This is no surprise. Counting the number of empty lots around Fresno where historic buildings once stood but now mark the sites of developments that stalled after the demolition phase is a lengthy, tedious exercise. If anyone knows anything more about the project, leave a note. I’d love to hear something good about it. At this stage, something would be better than nothing, I suppose.
Well, when I started this post, I meant to talk about my little photo walk in the neighborhood just to the south of the Fulton Mall and post some photos. Instead I became distracted by Old Armenian Town. Forgive me for that. I’ll get back to the photo walk shots in a day or so. In the meantime, here’s a couple more shots of the spot, including a nice one of the Sycamore trees I remember all over the neighborhood when I was small.
Sycamores in Armenian Town
Old Armenian Homes in a museum of decay.
More nostalgia
Becca turned me on to this site, which I thought was kinda cool, Place and Memory. It is a wiki of places that no longer exist. How awesome is that, and useful too. Well, for those of us who are fixated on recapturing our once glorious past, it is perfectly cathartic. And recorded versions of stories make it onto NPR. In any case, the very first place I thought of when I saw the site was Yosemite Nursery in Fresno, and I wrote the Entry below. Though I would encourage you to read it at the site and make your own entry about a place that no longer exists.
My family moved to the neighborhood when I was about 5 years old. We lived on Griffith Way. At the top of the street was Hwy 41/Blackstone Ave, and there on the corner was this amazing place. It was an amazing nursery with a large variety of plants, trees, soil, mulches and so on. It was owned by a Japanese family and their house was on the Griffith side of the property, with the nursery sprawling behind it. In front of the house was a koi pond, or series of ponds, with connecting streams and Japanese bridges, meticulously pruned black pines and other topiary.
The parking lot was on the Blackstone side. At the back of it stood the business office and covered areas for shade plants, bonsai, and also the fish hatchery! There was a series of troughs with koi, goldfish, etc. I seem to remember that they were segregated by size to some extent. Around the outside of the parking lot, along the street were huge piles of feather rock for sale. Feather rock is volcanic rock that has a sponge-like structure, which makes it very light for its size. It is also essentially glass, which means it is very easy to get cut up when you climb on it, as we often did. I remember that that it came in two different colors, a glossy black, and a more muted gray.
Down the block from the house on the Griffith side was a series of large stalls containing different soils and mulches, and so on. There was tractor that was used for loading material into customers’s trucks. I still remember clearly the sweet, bourbon-y smell of the redwood forest humus.
Behind all this lay the vast (to a kid) interior of rows and rows of trees and plants, hiding places, and mysterious objects. I loved going there with my parents and running off to throw pennies, or just pebbles, into the koi pond, to look at all the curious, colorful figurines and statues for sale, to get lost in the backwoods, and to feel the cool, damp soil between my toes on a scorching Fresno summer day.
Fresno continued to grow northward, and what was once a north gate on Hwy 41 heading to Yosemite, became a rural holdout in the middle of the city. Eventually, I don’t remember exactly when, the place closed and the property was developed into an L-shaped strip mall.
By: Neocles
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