My notes say "the Chopin Singing Society."
Bicyclists along the canal.
This explains a few things about the Country Day School where our Notre Dame High School Class of 1961 spent our senior year.
I was unable to enlarge this further.
Evidently, Utica Mutual had purchased the land for their home office and had no plans for the Day School on the property. They agreed to lease the school to what became Mohawk Valley Technical Institute (and then MVCC in 1962). Where on the property they planned to build their headquarters we don't know, but by the summer of 1960 when Notre Dame leased the property for a year, Utica Mutual's headquarters were built and had been in operation for a few years. In fact, in 1959 a tractor trailer lost its brakes coming down Route 12 and crashed through the front wall into first floor offices in the building one evening after most employees had thankfully left the building. Article below.
Perhaps the truck's brakes were last serviced at this place.
The Utica Park. Wish I knew more about it. While Summit Park was out west from the Busy Corner in Oriskany, I believe Utica Park was to the east toward Frankfort. I remember being quite young, maybe seven or eight years old, when my father took us boys on a hike and one of the highlights was walking on the roof of a wood building half submerged in a small overgrown lake. That may have been either Summit or Utica Park. I would appreciate hearing anything you might know about Utica Park.
This was a popular "kid's bar" in the late 1960s. Located on the southwest corner of John and Catherine Streets, it was steps away from the Observer Dispatch loading dock of the time. Before that era the place was Butch's Tomohak and I remember going in there occasionally on Monday nights after stuffing Family Weekly magazines into the Sunday Comics when I was a college freshman. Butch's most memorable feature was the men's room off the bar and under a stairway. You had a choice of sitting on a sickeningly dirty toilet seat or trying to stand up and lean backwards under the stairway while attempting to get close enough to the pot to not make a mess. Very difficult to do if you were not a Contortionist. Ergo, the dirtiest toilet in downtown Utica.
Below, the strip mall we called the Grand Union Shopping Center in the late 1950s. Before and After. Genesee Street a couple of blocks south of the Parkway.
At left is tje Our Lady of Lourdes parish school on Barton Avenue just off of Genesee Street. I spent grades four through eight there. Many of the my classmates went with me to Utica Catholic Academy. I've documented a bit more (not much) in my thread on UCA in the MoreStories Forum at:
http://morestories.proboards.com/thread/463/utica-catholic-academy
T.R. Proctor donates what will eventually become three parks: Roscoe Conkling, FT Proctor and TR Proctor Parks.
