Block That New Yorker!
BLOCK ISLAND, STATE OF RHODE ISLAND--In June each year the New York and Boston people come back here to their summer houses and the island population rises from 850 residents to 6,000 residents. Most hot days when the ferry is stuffed with people, who come over packed tight as asparagus bundles, there are 10,000 people on the island. Sometimes there are 22,000 here for a day in the country. That’s a lot of humanity on an island only 10 kilometers long and a kilometer wide. No wonder the pheasant population is down.
This week, to celebrate the return of the Summer People, the island’s only gas station has placed an advertisement in the Block Island Times weekly newspaper which shows the pump man standing beside his pumps wearing a sweatshirt of curious design. Letters on front spell out Have a Nice Day but they surround not the happy face symbol but the unhappy face, mouth curved downward. Beside him is a billboard reading WELCOME BACK! IT’S NICE TO SEE MOST OF YOU.
One summer resident claims that what he really means is it’s nice to see A FEW of you.
“The only reason he spoke to me when I gassed up last was that I was driving a car I’d borrowed from somebody who lives here all year, somebody genuinely a person.”
The island people have always been a bit different. During the revolution they couldn’t decide whether to fight for George Washington or King George. While trying to make up their minds, they sold supplies to both sides.
In the late Nineteenth Century the wealthy people on the mainland discovered this island, 30 kilometers offshore—so quaint, so natural, so country, so soso you know. Pierpont Morgan’s railway helped bring these strangers to the ferry docks with their dollars, their passion for cool sea breezes and their carpenters.
Two types of structure stand on Block. Some are immense Victorian Age wooden mansions and similar grand wooden hotels with gingerbread on the big front porches and many chimneys. Others are the typical fishermen’s houses of the Atlantic Coast, apple box architecture, great expanses of small, curling, unpainted spruce shingles, with small, two-paned sash windows spotted in the walls, few and far between as raisins in a poorhouse muffin; in a word, ugly.
Since the killer hurricane of 1938 drove the fishing fleet over to the mainland, where it remains based, most of Block’s economy rests on boutiques, bike rentals, art galleries, a yacht basin, gourmet restaurants and similar adornments of civilization.
The issue of the month is whether the Historic District Commission is going to relax its prohibition against using vinyl window frames in houses. Wood is traditional, but it doesn’t stand up as well against the salt-laden winds and some have suggested that the fact that vinyl is better is reason enough to permit it, particularly since it looks exactly the same as wood at the distance of five paces.
This island is, in fact, a study of what happens when you put too many people in one place, which is the problem in almost all the coastal territory between Boston and Washington, DC.
Among things forbidden here: exceeding 25 mph, camping anywhere unless you can get some landholder’s permission, sleeping in your car and operating a moped after midnight; also clambakes on the beach unhallowed by permit, taking shellfish without a licence; unleashed dogs, gas motorboats on ponds, stepping off the paths in the sand dunes and many other actions which disturb the peace and ruin the good order. Visitors with a sincere wish to fit in can get a list of things forbidden at the municipal office. It covers most things you might like to do at the seaside although the authorities have not yet spelled out their position on bawdy songs, mooning and adultery.
Both islanders, temporary islanders and off islanders seem happy enough to live in this Singapore style society, being convinced that Block Island is a place specially favored by the Almighty as well as the New Yorkers.
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set italic Second in a series of columns written on a trancontinental trip. end italics tr roman
May/03