Midnight: What is that noise

[Deleted]

Well of course the Cities street cleaning machine driving up Bleecker St vacuuming up peoples butts and litter. 

[Clipper]

I wonder if that thing is equipped with bullet proof glass for cruising some of the city's neighborhoods at night. lol More than once when I worked at the OD I had a bundle delivery driver call in on the radio and tell us that he heard gunshots in Corn Hill and was going to skip a stop until after daylight.

When we lived on Herkimer Rd across from the Fastrac store on the corner of Keyes Rd, we were always happy to hear that sweeper go by in the middle of the night. It seemed that the gutter in front of the house was a repository for all the non-winning scratch off tickets, and other miscellaneous debris, tossed by the ignorant as they left the parking lot. In winter the plow would pick it up from the gutter and roll it into the snowbank of our lawn where I would have to pick it up in the spring. Kathy moved there when there was a simple Gulf gas station there that closed at 9 or 10pm. The noise and litter became an annoyance when they built the convenience store and it was open all night. We were fortunate that the bedroom was located on the back of the house, but the loud radios and car noise could be heard in our living room.

[Ralph]

   We haven't had the street cleaner come up our street once this year.  I think it went down on the UFA side once, but that's it.
There is an easy 1" x 6" layer of stones and grit next to our curb from one end of the street to the other.

[BHU]

It went down my street Monday morning 9 or so with the vacuum hose up. Couldn't make another pass while you're at it? Guess not.

[Deleted]

lol

So Clipper you lived across from Fastrac on Keyes Rd. I have to pay more attention to the area when I drive by.

[Deleted]

They may come down Bleecker St from up near RCIL across from CENTRO. The workers at RCIL who smoke ( and there are many of them) throw their cigarette butts on the sidewalk and street many times a day. I was wondering who cleaned them all up at end of the day. That might be a benifit for moving downtown after MHVHS took over that area. 

[Clipper]

Nov 26, 2019 20:29:56 GMT -5 @turd said:

lol

So Clipper you lived across from Fastrac on Keyes Rd. I have to pay more attention to the area when I drive by.

We lived in the L shaped duplex on the western corner of Domenica Court. We lived on the Herkimer Road side and Kathy's mom lived on the Domenica Court side. It was Kathy's house. She lived there when I met her. The last time we drove by the house they had fenced the backyard and had big dogs running in the yard. It looked as though had not mowed the lawn in weeks. It just was not being kept up the way we kept it up.

The Fastrac Store is where my dad ran a Gulf Gas station in the late 50's. A fellow named Smitty ran it when we moved to Jamestown Avenue, off Keyes Rd. Smitty went to prison for credit card fraud. He was forging credit card transactions on Gulf Credit cards with the old fashioned machine that you rolled over the card to imprint the invoice and receipt. My dad went into partners with a Utica cop named Vic Tollerton. Dad ran the gas station during the day and worked at CP on the afternoon shift. He contracted contact dermatitis from the cooling solvent used in the machines so the state paid to retrain him. He went to MVCC (MVTI at the time) and took his engineering courses. He eventually got out of the gas station and went to work at Univac where he completed over 30 years, moved with them here to Tennessee, and eventually retired as the senior manufacturing engineer in their engineering department.

The station belonged to Hugh's Oil, a Gulf Oil Distributor. When Dad and Vic cancelled their lease a fellow named Joe Bader leased it for many years. When he left they tore down the old gas station and built the convenience store. I think it belonged to Bull Bros. from Herkimer Petroleum when it was built.

Back then there were a whole bunch of gas stations in N Utica and all the operators knew each other and would trade parts or help each other out if they needed something. A guy named Newman had a Texaco just North of the thruway bridge next to Bernie's Big M market. On Deerfield Corners there was Tom Welch's Mobil, Arnie Duel's Gulf, an Esso on the NW corner but I can't remember the fellow's name that ran that one. Going up Trenton Road there was a Shell ran by Bob Bumbalo, and going East from Keyes Rd on Herkimer Rd there was a Sinclair at the city line next to the bus loop, across from Buttonball Trailer Park. Any brand of gas you wanted you could get at one place or another within a couple of miles.

The entire city was vibrant and thriving back then. That is why it seems so sad to me to see how it has declined.