On Saturday Allentown will hold a Cruising Event, celebrating a rite of passage from the Fonz days. Kids would cruise the circuit down Hamilton Street, back up Linden Street, and end up in the Fairgrounds at the Ritz. The small town activity lasted well over twenty years. Although the Morning Call article mentions it being banned in the 1980's, I was a participant in the early 1960's.
While the newspaper does a good job reporting on the upcoming event, and the history behind it, this post concerns our changing times here in Allentown. I suppose we can now romanticize an activity that we once outlawed as the good old days, because the present is so much more dire. Driving by and whistling at a girl is so much more innocent than drive-by shootings. Driving around a loop is so much more innocent than drivers now being harassed and terrorized by gangs on dirt bikes, ambushing out of an ally in downtown Allentown. Let up hope that we never get to the point of romanticizing those things.
artwork by Mark Beyer, underground comic artist and native of Allentown
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ, really? Someone thinks this is a good idea? It's this kind of stuff that makes me rarely want to attend anything Allentown.
ReplyDeleteThe circuit was largely killed by the Hamilton Mall. That and the demise of "muscle" cars in the 1970s. By the 1980s, when City Council officially "banned" it, it was dead anyway. Also the parking lots on Linden were developed, and there was no where to hang out with friends either.
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