“Of Midgets and Albinos”

“Midget Village”. That’s what my friends and I called it. In today’s social climate, it would be extremely “politically incorrect” to refer to it that way. I don’t remember if I knew back then whether people in Edgewater called it that; maybe nobody else in the world except me and my friends called it that. Then again, as I recall, my older brother and his friends used to call it that, too.

With “The Prophet’s Song” by Queen cranking out of the car’s 8-track stereo, someone would shout out, “Want to go drive through Midget Village?” Just the mention of the name alone would evoke a sense of mystery, and bring trepidation to an otherwise swaggering teen, with its spectre of danger.

If you don’t already know, the area I speak of is of course the Edgewater Colony. In my teen years, there were colorful tales of an all-midget community there: an enclave of little houses, with little tiny doorways for those little tiny people. We’d heard that it was a challenge to drive in there and get out safely, because whenever a strange vehicle would enter their sequestered community, the midgets would all come running out of their little houses, through their little doorways, and pelt your car with rocks. As I’m writing this, I’m thinking to myself, “How sick is this?” But these are the urban legends that are part of one’s youth, and no doubt my children will have their own twisted myths and legends.

I almost forgot: albinos. There were albinos in there, too. One night as we drove along River Road past the Colony heading into Fort Lee, my friend Dave-O got all excited and jumpy, telling us how he’d just seen an albino run into the trees. Must have temporarily ventured out of Midget Village and was scurrying back home, we figured. And as the Johnny Winter (himself an albino) album title informed us, “They Only Come Out At Night”, so it wasn’t totally unbelievable. The possibility that Dave-O’s judgment may have been impaired at the time never entered our minds.

I don’t know when it was exactly, but it wasn’t until some time after I moved back to New Jersey from Boston that I finally learned that “Midget Village” wasn’t full of midgets at all. It was just a little community within the larger community of Edgewater. But myth, rumor, fear, and suspicion formed the basis for me and my friends to draw certain conclusions. Myths are like that.

Today, there is a good amount of concern about development in Edgewater. And mixed in with that concern are projections, oftentimes stated quite definitively, that the last vestiges of the Palisades will soon become fodder for developers, or that the waterfront will be laden with high-rises blocking the breathtaking views of New York and the river. Truth is, we can’t always distinguish the fears arising from rumors from the fears that are grounded in fact. The problem with the former is that they can needlessly distract us and misdirect us from focusing on the more pressing and legitimate concerns we should have about things happening presently, perhaps undetected. We can all get caught up in looking at a thatch of trees, excitedly pointing and saying, “Look! Look there!” to our mates, who then strain to see the same thing that we think we perceive.

3/30/00

Past Editorials:

3/1/00: True Confessions of a Former Audubon Society Member

2/22/00: Edgewater, Now and Then