You’re eager for comedy, and we (the “editorial” we, not another kind) are ready to oblige
With added Trump joke at end
(This entry repeats and adds to one on my other blog, https://jnthetransient.blogspot.com.)
[Editorial addition 4/28/2023: IMPORTANTE 4/28/2023: Si Ud. habla el espanol, por favor, debe saber que yo NO tengo un blog, TikTok cuenta/sitio, Twitter cuenta/sitio, o cualquier otro sitio en el Internet que es enscribido en el espanol y fuere tener una fotografia de mi cara. Y no he autorizado el mismo, cualquier tal sitio que Ud. mire.]
If some of my readers asked, “Who cares about Barry Lakes, the little community you live in?,” they’d be missing the point of why I post this set of comments and link to copies of an old brochure. You don’t have to care about Barry Lakes, while the dated info here should tickle even people in Idaho and Montana, who would find the proposed cost for building a house unbelievable.
I found these pages in an old desk of my mother’s, and it’s been so long since I saw these—I very vaguely recall seeing these before—that I am “reminded, as if from a very long time ago” of the old Barry Lakes logo, which you see (on the first page, toward the right on the page if viewed normally) in a sort of circle-defined form. That logo appeared on signs around here, as I seem to recall.
The community was started, after an initial bit of a start by a local landowner named Walter Keogh-Dwyer, by a New York City set of developers, in 1964. My own parents bought land here in 1965, and my father started building a house here. He finished it in 1966. (I talked about some fine-grained facts tied to this in blog entries in 2018. I can get URLs for them later.) (Here is one, the first of a series: https://jnthetransient.blogspot.com/2018/04/house-proud-and-wind-buffeted-taste-of.html.)
My parents had seen the new Barry Lakes development advertised on a billboard on a roadway when they used to drive around, and checked it out. They opted to build a weekend house here—we as a young family lived in Wayne Township, in Passaic County, at the time—and about when my father finished the house in 1966, we moved into it as a permanent home. Thereafter started an amazing lot of family stories that ranged over decades.
If you peruse the busily-data-filled pages, you see such things as, in lists of enticing features on the third and fourth pages I show here, “construction-grade lumber” being used to build houses (to which some, who need not even know how to build a house, would retort, “Well, what the **** else would they build a house out of?”).
The two designs shown, a smaller house (the “Country Squire”) and a larger house (the “Manor House”), the latter L-shaped (and a good bit different from what the synthetic picture shows), were common designs used around here, and before long Barry Lakes also introduced a sort of split-level home, which you see many instances of here, too. The drawings of the two types of homes are a little distorted. And as it happens, many of the smaller-design houses had their carports filled in with additional rooms, as was a common practical way of going beyond the initial building.
I’ll let you peruse the rest of these brochures as you see fit. In those days, many of the customers were white people (blue collar or otherwise) from city areas (End note), not just the New York City boroughs but also New Jersey places like Paterson, Clifton, and so on. (My own father grew up in Jersey City, in the 1930s and ’40s.) The idea of Barry Lakes was pretty much in line with the old Levittown developments, such as on Long Island, where middle-class people were given the option to move into newly-built, rather-prefab suburban communities with a fairly uniform design to the houses. There were a number of communities like Barry Lakes that were developed in this township in the 1960s and later (some started in the 1950s, and Highland Lakes itself was started in the 1930s).
The photo you see of a lake viewed from a shore is, I believe, the biggest Barry Lake (there are several), from about where the “office” (for the developer) used to be, which is now a private home. The view is looking toward another shore about where the old tavern used to be; possibly the photo was taken in the late 1950s. The difference in how trees “shape” the area now is large, given the decades that have passed.
End note. I pointed out the racial makeup of those who moved here, for a couple reasons. First, that most were white was mainly just a function of who had the money and will to move here. There was no deliberate redlining by the developer, as far as I know. Second, the demographics were different then than now. If I said many moved here from Paterson or the town of Passaic, a modern-day, young person might say, “Oh, you mean a lot of Latinos [from Paterson] and Middle Easterners [from Passaic] came?” No, the demographics were such that many people moving from there in the 1960s were from European ethnic groups, like Irish-American, Italian-American, Hungarian-American, etc.
Another way to look at this is: The whites who came here from Paterson, etc., in the 1960s and ’70s were forerunners of the Latinos, etc., who seek a better life (from an urban area to another) in current times. Or, the Latinos in this position today are latter-day versions of the whites of 50 years before.
What was that sound you just heard? Some big, fat guy’s pants suddenly ripping at the seat? You turn and it’s Trump, evidently having just read the previous paragraph, and his eyes are bugging with shock like those of Archie Bunker being kissed by Sammy Davis Jr. in the famous ~1972 episode of TV’s All in the Family.
