Gaines Street Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Binghamton-adjacent

Rev. Alphonso Whitfield

These are random Binghamton-adjacent pieces.

ITEM: An old friend from high school sent me a clipping from the Broome County Office for Aging’s Senior News. Specifically, on page 15 of the February 2026 issue was a story titled LOCAL HISTORY. “In observance of Black History Month this February, we are privileged to dedicate this issue to celebrating the profound and essential contributions of Black individuals in shaping Broome County.”

Four people were highlighted. “Gentleman” Joe Taylor (1923-1995), I might have met but did not know. My father, though, absolutely knew him. The well-regarded boxer, after retirement, opened Gentle Joe’s restaurant on Susquehanna Street.

Dr. Beverly Housten Dorsey (1925-2023) was married to Beverly R. Dorsey, MD (1922-2011) for about 60 years. One black doctor provided a sense of community pride, but two? Wow! Beverly Housten’s resume is astonishing. My great aunt Deana Yates, my maternal grandmother’s sister, did some cooking, cleaning, or sewing for them.

Midgett S. Parker (1925-1999). His first name was pronounced Meh-JET. I didn’t know he was a chemist. But he was a leader at Trinity AME Zion, which I attended for many years.

Alphonso Whitfield (1903-1999) became “a charter member of the Interracial Association,” where my father worked in the 1960s.
He was a preacher at the AME Zion Church. He and his wife, Constance, were my godparents. My parents became the godparents of his grandson, Walter Jones. Alphonso and Constance’s daughter, Marcheta Hamlin, I wrote about at length HERE. I remember annual car trips to Utica to visit my godparents, when Rev. Whitfield was serving there.

13 Gaines Street?

ITEM: One of my friends from grade school sent me this Zillow listing, purportedly for 13 Gaines Street, and wondered if it was the house I grew up in. No, I lived at 5 Gaines Street.

But Gaines Street was only a block long, between Oak and Front Streets, so I knew the houses. That did NOT look like 13. I went there quite often because Lawrence and Dorothy Greene lived at 13, and we would get each other’s mail. Per the Binghamton City Directory of 1960, which I accessed on Ancestry, one or both of them worked at Ansco. And their son, Danny, would play in our yard periodically. But 13 was smooth and green and white.

Finally, I called the listing agent. The address SHOULD be 1 AND 3, not 13. THAT makes sense. It’s the house next to 5 Gaines that a tree crashed into. The red corner convenience store his gone in favor of a parking space, and the yellow house to the left represents newish construction on Front Street that wasn’t there 30 years ago.

Remarkable

ITEM: I came across online on International Women’s Day, Remarkable Women From Binghamton Who Made History. One of them I’ve known all my life. “Born in Binghamton in 1940, Frances M. Beal, better known as Fran Beal, is a feminist and peace and justice political activist. Beal was a founding member of the SNCC Black Women’s Liberation Committee, later called the Third World Women’s Alliance. Fran Beal is most well known for the book she wrote, which is called ‘Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.'”

She’s my mother’s first cousin, daughter of Ernie Yates (my maternal grandmother’s brother) and Charlotte Berman Yates. I wrote about her HERE. Even though she’s been living in California, she’s still famous in her hometown, as I discovered HERE

Dad and the neighbor’s tree

Wizard of Oz

Here’s the story about Dad and the neighbor’s tree. The photo above was taken in August of 1969. My baby sister says she remembers the picture but not the incident, whereas my recollections are the opposite.

Let me tell you about that tree. I saw it from my bedroom at 5 Gaines Street, Binghamton, NY, looking towards the tree and the house at 1 Gaines. The photo was likely shot from our driveway.

The tree weirded me out. It reminded me of one of those mean trees in the Wizard of Oz movie: gnarled and sinister. Sometimes when I woke up from a dream, I would see an ominous face on the tree.

Sidebar (1965)

Here’s something only tangentially related. In 1965, when I was a 7th grader at Daniel S Dickinson Junior High School, there were some new kids in our class. One of them was Dawn, with flaming red hair. Based on a note her friend Bernadette passed me, Dawn seemed romantically interested in me. I was 12—she might have been a year or two older—and I had no idea what to do with this information, so I did nothing.

Back to the main story (1969)

The caption says the tree “accidentally crashed into the house… and the elm was being felled by the building’s owner when it tipped in the wrong direction into the building.”

My father is watching this young man, probably in his early twenties, work on this tree, ensuring it won’t strike our house. Dad told the guy that the tree would hit his dwelling. The fellow told Dad to mind his business as though this “old man,” who would have been in his early forties, was a foolish meddler. My father told me about this exchange before the tree was felled.

It “accidentally” hit 1 Gaines, which is technically accurate, but it was an avoidable incident. I don’t know the tenant in the photo; I suspect he lived upstairs, and the tree branches breached his dwelling area.

(Do you know how to “fell a tree” safely? If not, click here. This is from OSHA, which sister Leslie sent me.)

I think the owner lived downstairs with his wife, who I’m almost positive was Dawn from 7th grade, with a baby.

My father, an artist and floral designer, had excellent spatial acuity. He would have been 99 years old tomorrow.

PS: My sister

Getting to 5 Gaines Street, Binghamton

spray-painted

Les.Roger.backporch — Les and Roger Green, back porch of 5 Gaines St, 2nd floor, 1953

One of the facts I’d previously established is that Agatha Walker married McKinley Green in April 1931. But by 1936, they were living apart in Binghamton.

In the 1940 Census, they were still separated, with Mac at 98 Lewis and Agatha and her son Les at her parents’ house at 339 Court Street. My father’s last name had changed from Walker to Green, misspelled Greene in the Census.

By the 1941 City Directory, though, the three of them were all together at 10 Tudor. Not incidentally, that address doesn’t exist anymore, demolished to facilitate a bypass off of Riverside Drive.

The single useful thing found from a visit to the Broome County Clerk’s office was a record of the Order of Adoption of Leslie H. Walker, inf, [presumably infant, though he was 13 days shy of his 18th birthday] by Mr. McKinley Green. I knew this had happened, but seeing it in Book 22 of Civil Actions and Special Proceedings, page 572, was kind of cool.

Les was in the military in 1945 and 1946. I know from anecdotal information that he had a variety of jobs, including delivering flowers, before and after his service.

McKinley was a porter at Wehle Electric, but usually, he was a laborer. In 1947, he started at WNBF radio and Tv, as a laborer, and by 1956, as a janitor. He stayed there until he died in 1980.

No perceived miscegenation

My parents were married on March 12, 1950. They looked for a place to live in town but were thwarted. Potential landlords thought my mother, who is very fair, was white and that they were an interracial couple.

They subsequently moved to 5 Gaines Street, on the top floor of the two-family dwelling. It was owned by my maternal grandmother, Gertrude Williams, and presumably, her siblings, though she outlived them all. She and her sister Deanna (d. 1966) lived about six short blocks away.

Back in the 1890s, the resident was someone whose last name was Archie, which was a variant of the family name Archer, so it had been in the family for a long time.

Gaines Street is a single short block, notable growing up because the Canny’s trucks would go from Spring Forest Avenue, take a right down Oak Street, a left across Gaines, and another left onto Front Street and head out of town to NYC, Syracuse, Albany, Scranton, or wherever.

The directory says Les worked as a chauffeur at Niagara Motor Express, or elsewhere through 1957.

Meanwhile, by 1954, Mac and Agatha had moved upstairs at 5 Gaines, with my parents moving downstairs. This was likely predicated by the fact that my mother had her second child, Leslie that year.

New job

In the 1958 volume, Dad is an employee of the Interracial Association at 45 Carroll, not all that far from where he grew up. He’s listed as the assistant director the following year. The organization morphed into the Broome County Urban League in 1968.

I know Les was doing lots of other things in this period: arranging flowers at Costas, painting, and singing. By 1964, he was at IBM, a job he hated. So when my homeroom teacher, Mr. Joseph, told me my father was crazy for leaving IBM in 1967 for an OEO program called Opportunities for Broome, I shrugged.

When I’ve visited 5 Gaines Street in the past, I’d noticed that the hunter-green asbestos siding was now brown. What I didn’t notice is that the brown was sprayed on. And not particularly well on the side of the house, because the green is still partially showing on the side.

This was one of the first stops on the Roger Green magical history tour that I went on recently.

Several little blocks of Binghamton

Valley Street park

This is also for you, Carla.

Here’s a map of part of Binghamton, NY. My life growing up, for the most part, was contained in several little blocks. The borders were Prospect Street to the north, Clinton Street to the south, Front Street to the east, and the end of Spring Forest Cemetery, that big green area at Prospect and Mygatt, to the west.

Let’s start at 5 Gaines Street, where I grew up. Gaines St is that one little block between Oak and Front. It is not to be confused to the more interesting block just south, which is Winding Way.

Here’s the Zillow page for 5 Gaines Street. It is brown. and has been for some decades. But when we lived there, it had a GREEN asbestos siding. (The Greenes, at 13 Gaines, had a white house with green trim.)

But looking at pictures at that property, and more so the Realtor pics 4 and 5, there are several things striking. One is that back yard is terribly small. When we would play kickball, the ball might slice over the fence to the rear of the property line.

That fence was wooden, and the property felt as though we were in the woods, going downhill, a gorge, really. Someone’s filled in that ravine and put parking spaces back there. When did THAT happen? Maybe when some of those Front Street properties were renovated in 2016. Next time I’m in town, I’ll have to see this in person.

On Front St, near the corner of Prospect, was the G and H Diner. We ate there a lot, especially during the six-year period when dad was working nights. Or so I recall. Their homemade pies were particularly fabulous.

Recreation

I had to look up the name of the miniature golf course at 296 Front Street. It was called Front Street Miniature Golf and it was just south of this white behemoth of a building called Cutler Ice. We played minigolf a lot in good weather. I guess it closed around 1968 after about 35 years in business.

We used to play in Valley Street park, the small green area off Front Street. It was your standard playground near the street, but a baseball or softball field farther in. I have two specific memories there.

One was a pickup game of involved playing tackle football. Mike, on our team, caught the kickoff and was slowed by a couple of guys on the other team. But he was big and strong, not easy to bring down. When he was finally tackled, the opponents discovered he didn’t have the ball. In the scrum, he had handed the ball to me, and I scored without anyone noticing. Later that game, we did almost the same thing. This time, someone eventually saw that I had the ball, too late to catch me.

The other event was a baseball game. I was pitching to this girl named Aline, a couple of years older than I. She smashed the ball right back to me, striking me in the left temple and knocking me out cold. When I was revived, I walked home. My mom called the doctor, who said I might have a concussion. The protocol at the time was to not let me go to sleep for a time, lest I die. So my mom kept waking me up all night. And I didn’t die.

Les Green was a “rare folk singer”

I figured Ed Link and Les Green met at one of Link’s business locations by the airport or maybe elsewhere, or through Link’s involvement with his charitable foundation

Les Green is rare folk singer I will always remember a visit c. 1985 I made to Charlotte, NC, where my late dad Les Green lived since 1974. I was SHOCKED to discover that he talked about me to his colleagues about how smart I was, how I would look up things I didn’t know. He talked about me? He LIKED my intellectual curiosity? I had always thought that it had annoyed him.

It was an intellectual curiosity that led me to this photo. You may recall this post from February, featuring a photo of my late mother, my sister Marcia and me standing in the driveway of 5 Gaines Street, Binghamton, NY. It was almost certainly taken by my dad.

I posted the photo on one Facebook group, trying to identify the building in the background. It is a red brick factory that never had particularly identifiable signage that my sisters and I could recall. I since learned that early in the 20th century, it was the home of Star Electric. In 1918 it became Barnes-Smith Co. cigar manufacturers. After being the Bonnie Silk Mill in the 1920s and ’30s, it was one of the first plants of Link Aviation.

WHAT? My father often spoke of his admiration of and affection for Ed Link, who was “a pioneer in aviation, underwater archaeology, and submersibles. He is best known for inventing the flight simulator, commercialized in 1929.”

I figured they met at one of his locations by the airport or maybe elsewhere, or through Link’s involvement with the charitable foundation he and his wife started. Could they have met on the street where I lived?

In the comments, a woman named Kathi, who had attended the same church I did, posted “this awesome pic that was in the Binghamton Press of your dad, me, and my cousin Butch.” My father cropped this specific photo and used it in fliers promoting his singing gigs in the area for a number of years.

My curiosity about the factory across the street led to the source of the graphic for the Les Green one-man PR machine. Dad would have been 93 tomorrow.