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The Synecdoche of Schenectady

Posted by: Monica Gagnier on November 10

The news that Schenectady, N.Y., is the setting for Charlie Kaufman’s new indie film Synecdoche, New York was just the excuse I needed for a reunion with my college chum Carl Johnson. Carl’s family has strong ties to the down-at-the-heels city, which is trying to recapture some of its glory by revitalizing downtown, one block at a time.

Carl, a Republican, and I, a Democrat, were co-editors of The Daily Orange in our junior year at Syracuse University. We had some intense debates about the role of government in business and society during our tenure, but we both voted for independent John Anderson in 1980 because of his “green” appeal.

After I graduated, Carl stayed on and earned a master’s in public administration, becoming an expert on the environmental impact of development, particularly acid rain in the Adirondack Mountains. He’s been a “wonk” longer than I’ve known the definition of the word.

Carl suggested that we meet at the Muddy Cup Café in the lobby of Proctor’s Theatre on State Street in Schenectady. That sounded good to me. I know the Muddy Cup because the independent coffeehouse chain has an outlet in Beacon, N.Y., where I live.

Before I met with Carl, I looked up the word “synecdoche,” which the Wiki says is a “linguistic term denoting a part of something used to refer to the whole thing.” Little did I know that my college buddy would prove to be a synecdoche of Schenectady, known to locals as the “Electric City” because it was the home of General Electric for nearly a century.

GE still has some administrative, research, and manufacturing facilities in Schenectady, but it followed other corporations to the suburbs by moving its headquarters to Fairfield, Conn., in the mid-1970s. From Schenectady's point of view, that added insult to injury, because GE dramatically scaled back manufacturing in the Electric City in 1969.

Temporary jobs at GE and American Locomotive Co. (ALCO), once a leading manufacturer of steam and later diesel-electric locomotives, were what lured Carl's paternal grandfather from the environs of Lake Placid, N.Y. to Schenectady in the 1920s. By the 1930s, the family had relocated for full-time factory work. "Even during the height of the Depression, there were jobs in Schenectady," Carl said.

The late 1950s found Carl's future parents working at Wallace's department store downtown. His mother, an able seamstress, sewed fashions for the store's mannequins, while his father delivered furniture for the retailer. His maternal grandmother worked in Wallace's cafeteria and played matchmaker. "For some reason, she thought they should meet. I don't know what she was thinking," he said.

After finishing our coffee at the Muddy Cup, where Carl showed me photographs of Schenectady in its halcyon days, we walked a restored block of State Street to a Bank of America so I could get some cash. "This used to be the Schenectady Savings Bank," Carl told me. "My mom used to work here." Apparently there were few places downtown where Carl's family did not work.

After Carl's parents got married in 1958, his mother stayed home to raise two children. She returned to work in the late 1960s, starting as a teller and working her way up to manager of Schenectady Savings Bank's first call center.

Along the way, the savings bank changed ownership several times and converted to a bank. Carl's mom decided to retire in the late 1980s when she was asked to train a man much younger than herself to become her boss. She had never gone to college, and he had a degree.

After I replenished my cash stash, we headed to Aperitivo, an Italian restaurant a few doors down from Proctor's, for lunch. Built in 1926, Proctor's is what Carl calls "a grand theater" that attracts theatergoers from all over the region with Broadway road shows like Legally Blonde, concerts, and movies on its iWerks screen. The theater's state-of-the-art equipment is testimony to GE's generosity to its former hometown.

While Carl and I waited for lunch to arrive, he told me the restaurant where we were sitting was once called Peggy's. His mom and grandmother went to work there with a group of women who left Wallace's cafeteria in the late 1950s. Who was Peggy? Here was a piece of Schenectady trivia that even Carl couldn't provide.

As one would expect, the end of big-time manufacturing at GE and ALCO in 1969-70 ushered in the demise of Wallace's and another venerable merchant, Barney's. The golden age of downtown retailing was over in Schenectady. By this time, Carl's father had moved on to driving trucks for the grocery chain now known as Price Chopper.

After lunch, Carl and I walked through the lobby of the majestic Parker Inn, located next to Proctor's. The hotel is one of several downtown businesses that has received financial assistance from the Metroplex Development Authority, led by Ray Gillen. Despite the tangible progress that the agency seems to be making, Gillen has ruffled some feathers.
Carl told me in an e-mail: "They seem to be following the advice that downtown revitalization people have been preaching for some time, to do everything you can to concentrate your businesses into a small, high-quality area. This has meant relocating some businesses in order to do redevelopment. So, of course, not everyone is happy. But now downtown can support a place like Aperitivo, where before people came for shows and left immediately."

Although Carl's family was part of the industrial wave that built up Schenectady, his recent job as an administrator for New York State saw him presiding over the city's dismantling. When we walked down to the corner of State Street and Erie Boulevard to look at the famous GE building and its huge electric-bulb sign (not lit during the day), Carl kept referring to the monolith as "Building 37."

When I asked how he knew the building number, he said he knew the numbers of all the buildings on the GE campus because his former agency had to approve the company's plans for knocking down former factories and removing them from Schenectady's tax rolls.

That seemed like a sad footnote to the Schenectady saga of the Johnson family.

Another is that my capable friend is currently between full-time jobs. On the day that we met for lunch, it was reported that the nation's unemployment rate hit 6.5%, the highest in 14 years. Market mavens such as Barry Ritholtz, who blogs at The Big Picture, have been saying for years that government figures underestimate the real rate of joblessness.

Certainly, they don't include my friend because he's a consultant. Carl left his government job, which was a political appointment, when a Democratic Administration took over in Albany in January, 2007. His next gig was with an environmental startup that involved a commute of an hour and a half in each direction. That company went belly-up a few months later.

Since then, Carl has been doing consulting gigs while he looks for a full-time position that is commensurate with his credentials and salary experience. He recently got a great offer from a company in San Antonio, Tex., but that would have required uprooting his family.

He just couldn't do it. One daughter is in high school and the other is in junior high. He doesn't want to take them away from their friends or from their grandparents, who live close by.

While Carl plays what I call "Ballet Dad," the male equivalent of "Soccer Mom," his wife has been holding down an assortment of jobs in the arts. She fits young ballerinas for toe shoes, she teaches graphic design, and, like Carl's mom once did at Wallace's, she's decorating the mannequins at Macy's for the holidays.

When Carl's not scrambling to help consulting firms bid on redevelopment projects along the Hudson River, picking up his daughters from school, or whipping up a batch of squash soup for dinner, he blogs about bicycling and his other passions at My Non-Urban Life.

He's also become an informal historian of sorts for Schenectady. He recently provided some photos to a woman who was building replicas of some of the city's downtown landmarks for a model railroader.

Like Scranton, Pa., another city which bills itself as the "Electric City," Schenectady supports a thriving model train store downtown. (Not being a model railroader, I'm always astounded at the passion of these particular hobbyists.) Scranton has gotten some TV publicity through serving as the setting for TV's The Office. Maybe Synecdoche, New York, a meditation about the life of a theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, will boost Schenectady's hipness quotient.


Reader Comments

Kevin Sartoris

November 10, 2008 06:29 PM

*Great* post! Carl Johnson's reminiscences brought back a lot of fond memories of the former greatness that was once Schenectady's. My maternal grandfather, Patrick Quinn, emigrated from Ireland in the 1930s, and took a job with ALCO where he worked until he retired in the 1970's (with a pension no less!). In his day—the heyday of ALCO and GE—Schenectady was known as "The City That Lights and Hauls the World" (in addition of course, to "The Electric City"). Growing up in Schenectady in the '60's and 70's, it was a sure bet that nearly half my friends had family working for either GE or ALCO.

I have many fond memories as a child accompanying my grandmother on trips to Barney's, Wallace's, Woolworth's, and eating at Peggy's—or at the Carl Co. restaurant—a grand department store that shared the Proctor's Theatre building. Family friends worked for Schenectady Savings Bank, and my parents knew members of the Golub family, who operated Central Market, which later morphed into the successful Price Chopper chain.

I especially enjoyed reading about the revitalization of downtown Schenectady – in particular, your dining at Aperitivo. One of my old grade school friends, Paul Sciocchetti, is behind the renovation of three adjacent buildings on State Street, and the restaurant you ate in is run by his business partner, Angelo Mazzone. They've been especially attentive to both the restoration of the buildings, as well as to the need to create attractive business and retail space in the downtown area. From what I've heard, they've been doing a great job. I trust your meal was good!

Monica Gagnier

November 10, 2008 06:35 PM

Kevin, thanks for sharing your Schenectady memories with us. In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that Kevin Sartoris was the cartoonist for the Op-Ed section of The Daily Orange the year that Carl Johnson and I were co-editors, so he's not exactly an impartial observer. It's great to have the trio together again, even if it's in cyberspace!

Jacob Brancasi

November 23, 2008 02:32 PM

I was born and raised in Schenectady. I attended and graduated from public school there in 2002. The city is – full disclosure – the love of my life.

I find this article to be inadequate because it reflects the same insufficiencies of the current “revitalization” of Schenectady and of countless other struggling urban centers across America: a resigned acceptance of the destruction of our collective memory, and a craving for the “hip” as a savior in its stead. How exactly will a boost in Schenectady's “hipness quotient” transform the city? (I didn't even know Schenectady had a “hipness quotient” to boost.) Further, at what expense will the city be “saved”?

When I was growing up my grandmother often brought me downtown recounted its previous bustle and excitement; together we experienced downtown's continuing pleasures. I have long hoped for a Schenectady revival, as she has. And like any urbanist I value dense development. So, to me, some of what has happened recently downtown is laudable. But the reality of everyday life in Schenectady is that it is decentralized and largely involves the forced habitual use of one such product of industrialization, the automobile.

This article, like the Metroplex policies, focuses almost exclusively on downtown. A journalistic – and actual – tour of the city by car might better serve to illustrate the successes and struggles of the city's many neighborhoods, and the reality of the city's more recent, decentered past. (And it would certainly bring one to wonderful eating establishments like the Newest Lunch, Peter Pause, the Blue Ribbon, Gershon's, Petta's, and the Broadway Diner.)

The Metroplex Development Authority could use this tour. Like almost every urban proposal in history, Metroplex fails to accept the city as it actually exists today and to conceive of that (historically formed) existence as a point of departure for what the city might become. I appreciate that money is being invested downtown, but I hope we honor our neighborhoods, our historical development, instead of wholeheartedly following a nationwide downtown “arts & culture” trend that will no doubt see its final days before we experience our own.

And some of what has happened recently downtown is not so great. It seems that to revive the city's former downtown glory we must destroy it. A fellow Schenectadian recently pointed out to me that the Proctor's administration, in its haste to bring in big productions like “Legally Blonde,” demolished the theater's original dressing rooms and replaced them with bigger, brighter, characterless ones. This came as a particular affront – and small tragedy – to that former Schenectady resident, an actress and playwright currently living in New York City who grew up performing in Proctor's majestic auditorium and preparing in those unique dressing rooms backstage.

When the Hough Block (http://www.lostlandmarks.org/houghweb.jpg) is demolished to make way for this building (http://www.criterioncinemas.com/images/movieland-6b.jpg), we must question our motives. Is this what progress looks like? How are we to have communion with the past? Or might it behoove us in some way to forget that past?

Which brings me to the model train store. I may have an explanation, by way of Susan Stewart, for the popularity of these businesses in disinvested cities like Schenectady. Stewart writes that when one plays with, animates a toy “...it is the beginning of an entirely new temporal world, a fantasy world parallel to (and hence never intersecting) the world of everyday reality.... The mechanical toy threatens an infinite pleasure; it does not tire of feel, it simply works...”* She continues: “...automated toys find their strongest modern successors in 'models' of ships, trains, airplanes, and automobiles, models of the products of mechanized labor. These toys are nostalgic in a fundamental sense, for they completely transform the mode of production of the original as they miniaturize it: they produce a representation which itself is constructed by artisanal labor.”** To take this argument a step further: how could someone living in a deindustialized city – where there is a sense that happiness (if not for today, then at least at some point, and in this place) is somehow tied to the notion of, means of, and participation in industrial production – not be drawn to these toys, which offer the consolation of engaging with, reimagining a lost past? I loved playing with toy trains as a youngster.

I thank Carl Johnson for his many flickr albums of archival images of Schenectady (http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlsoldphotos/sets/72157594516130330/) and the Gazette (http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlsoldphotos/sets/72157603587124689/), and for his beautiful photographs of the city in recent days (http://www.flickr.com/photos/carljohnson/sets/72057594084438074/). They are sure to make any former resident – forced out of the resource-depraved city – homesick.

And, by the way, Charlie Kaufman wasn't the first to play on the linguistic similarity between the literary term and the city's name; Synecdoche was the title of my high school's literary magazine.

--
*Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 57.
**Ibid., 58.

Monica Gagnier

November 23, 2008 05:20 PM

Mr. Brancasi -- Obviously, a reporter passing through Schenectady is limited in her ability to soak up its history in a relatively short period of time. I didn't Google you, but based on your writing, I would not be surprised if you are an academic or a lawyer. (The footnotes give you away.)

To answer your question, What does raising Schenectady's "hipness quotient" achieve? It could make the city a magnet for young people who never knew the Schenectady that you and my college chum Carl Johnson remember. Perhaps a new generation might explore downtown rather than hang out at the mall. Of course, if young people were committed enough to want to live downtown, there would have to be some work for them.

I have a feeling that you can probably quote Lewis Mumford better than I can, but I do think creating a hub of excitement in downtown can't be a bad strategy for Metroplex.

I leave it to you and Carl Johnson to debate the merits of centralized vs. decentralized Schenectady. I'm a fan of walking, so a car tour didn't appeal to me.

Thanks for taking the time to write such a thoughtful and knowledgeable post. Best regards, Monica Gagnier

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