LPNY: The Hangouts.
These are segments, notes really, from places in my hometown and the various memories I have from them through the years. All can be found under the category: “home life.”
In the previous entry I mentioned the Board Walk, and where those of us who didn’t exactly fit into the grunge group would go and reside. This was, and would separate into other areas, stores where our friends worked, people’s rides, etc.
The Board Walk is above the band shell park, where when they weren’t having the orchestra there on Tuesday nights, we would hang out. Some of the skaters would try their tricks off the band shell, eventually leading to the cops not allowing skateboards anywhere near Main Street, but this was allowed for a summer or two.
One of the places where I frequently hung out, was at Mr. Mike’s Express. Pretty much everyone hung out in random stores and we all knew each other, so it wasn’t a clique necessarily, it was just depending on who was still working and those of us who were off would go keep them company in the various tourist trap stores that littered Main Street. For example me and another guy and one of the current top luge racers in America would hang out was Mr. Mike’s Express, which is a now a Chinese place. Mr. Mike’s was literally the only pizza place where any of us would have pizza. Well, that’s not true, it was the only pizza place in Lake Placid before the Bosnian mob learned how to make pizza from Mr. Mike. So, we hung out at Mr. Mike’s Express, which was a branch off the main store that was down at the four-way intersection in town. The Express where my buddy worked was on Main Street, and like many of us I was a freeloader. Still am. He would frequently offload slices to us, and we’d all hang out there until the next thing we would do which would be go down to the bowling alley and usually go off to either the Peninsula behind Howard Johnson’s, or out to the shooting range or what was called the Parking Lot. Those scenes I’ll get in to in a later post.
In later years, and before I was twenty-one, we would stick with these hangouts. Things never really changed, when we weren’t working we’d hang out in each others cars and do ATLs, which stands for “Around the Lake.” Lake Placid itself, wasn’t actually in the town, it was just off the road that circles Mirror Lake. So we would drive around the lake just to figure out something to do, mostly stopping and just talking to others to see where we were doing that night, if we were going out to the Shooting Range, to the Peninsula or to the Parking Lot. House parties were a rare occasion. Those happened only about a few times a summer and literally everyone under twenty-one in town would show up to them so they were almost always a shit show.
As things came along, we all moved and parted ways and Mr. Mike’s Express became a shitty Chinese place, and eventually found other places to hang out. As we got older, we gained friends who had their own apartments and the year I spent at home after graduating from college became something that we frequently did.
Afterwards, a favorite of mine was Aroma Round. This very Friends type coffee shop in the restored circular oval store that used to be a bike shop formerly known as Mountain Run, was a favorite hang out. As well as the Bowling Alley where we could get beers snuck to us by a friend, and I would play home run derby religiously.
In the end, thoughts like these are really not any different than others. These things were portrayed in Dazed and Confused, Mallrats, and many other works–there are some finite differences between those kinds of stories and this one. Different people, places, but pretty much the same thing: where we would hang out before going out to some place to party.
So many of the cafes where we used to hang out have changed. Things have changed quite a bit on Main Street these days. Yesterday, during a walk, they opened a cafe/sports bar near where the Bead store used to be and now my parents harumph at it calling it something “those New Jersey people dragged over from their state.” Suddenly all these retro free-trade outfitter stores, urban-esque boutiques and various other things are all over the place and now things aren’t as interesting. This town, since that thing that happened in the winter of 1980, has been a tourist town for as long as I’ve been alive. And continues to be so.
