Quote:
What a drag
Burnout contests, drag racing, loitering and littering: A culture clash on the Berlin Turnpike cruise scene has some yearning for happier days
Saturday,August 05, 2000
Written by Debra A. Aleksinas v Photographed by Craig Ambrosio
2000 Hot Rod
On summer weekends, cruise night at the Olympia Diner on the Berlin Turnpike in Newington draws hundreds of aging baby boomers in classic cars. Fuzzy dice dangle from rearview mirrors as Beach Boys tunes float from 8-track tapes.
The atmosphere is as American as apple pie. Spit-shiny Corvettes, Firebirds, GTOs, Mustangs and Thunderbirds share space with antique Model Ts.
Down the road, meanwhile, at the trendy 2001 dance club, hundreds of Generation Xers gather in a show of souped-up, high-tech Mitsubishis, Hondas, Nissans and Acuras. They look average until one peers under the hood.
By 9 p.m., the Olympia Diner crowd has folded its lawn chairs and called it a night, except for maybe a few drivers who take a leisurely spin in their classics.
But the night is just beginning for the younger clan of car lovers down the road.
Looking for a cool time in their hot cars, they will play cat-and-mouse with local police over the next couple of hours. Loiterers will be kept moving. Litterers will be warned. Speeders will be ticketed. Then, come midnight, all hell will break loose in a blaze of drag racing and burnout contests. It's not unusual for speedometers to hit upwards of 100 miles per hour during these races on the turnpike.
This culture clash of the old, middle-aged and young who converge on the Berlin Turnpike every weekend has generated a friction
Cruising veterans blame rowdy newcomers among cruisers that has spilled over to include police, residents and businesses along "the pike," as the busy, four-lane divided highway is known.
Car enthusiasts who for years have enjoyed these relatively tame summer cruise nights say rowdy behavior by the younger drivers is dampening the fun and giving the venerable scene a bad name. The young cruisers say they only want to show off their flashy cars and meet friends. Some admit to occasional drag-racing, but only when few drivers are on the road.
Businesses along the five-mile section of the turnpike from Berlin to Newington dotted with traffic lights every quarter mile are fed up with having to hire police to patrol their lots and maintenance crews to clear the garbage. They say the weekend revelers chew up the asphalt by "burning rubber," or spinning their tires to see who can create the most smoke.
And where there's smoke, there's trouble. Often, motor oil or household bleach is poured on the pavement to enhance the burnout show, destroying property and creating a legal liability for property owners.
Residents, meanwhile, complain about the roaring engines, the screeching tires and the loud music while the Newington and Berlin police departments try to resolve it all. "Somebody's going to get hurt out there" if the burnout games and reckless driving continue, said Larry Schubert, a Berlin police captain.
500 Hits' a Day
Jason Hassinger, a 30-year-old Waterbury native who lives in Meriden, has been up close and personal with the turf battle on the pike. Hassinger, who drives a gleaming 1997 Nissan 200sx SE-R, is not only a passionate participant of cruise night, but he is Webmaster for the Web site promoting the Berlin Turnpike cruise scene, which he calls "the hottest on the East Coast, bar none." The Web site
www.thepike.net gets 500 "hits," or visits, a day from car enthusiasts.
"Ninety percent of the people here don't cause trouble; it's the few bad apples. Some kids throw down bleach and start spinning their wheels, and the police will start ticketing everybody here," said Hassinger during a recent rainy Friday inside the Taco Bell in Newington, the heart of the cruise scene. He noted that the pike draws car buffs from as far away as Canada.
Hassinger has launched a "Cruise responsibly" campaign on his Web site, hoping to preserve a Berlin Turnpike tradition that has been around since the '50s.
"There's no reason you should be coming up to a person's bumper at 100-plus mph only to slam on the brakes and hope you don't hit them," Hassinger tells cyber-visitors to the pike.net.
"A lot of the younger guys are coming here driving like maniacs, but then they come on the Web site, and we pretty much put them in their place," noted Hassinger.
On this particular evening, he said, were it not for the rain, hundreds of cars would be converging on the pike for a night of camaraderie and cruising.
Judging by the empty lots and sparse traffic along the pike on this stormy evening, however, it appeared that flashes of lightening are a more effective deterrent than flashing blue lights of a police car. Then again, those who spend time detailing their cars with toothbrushs are usually not keen on letting Mother Nature rain on their parade.
Olympia Diner, then Hooters
Roger Salley of Bristol, who grew up in Berlin, recalled cruising the pike as a 16-year-old "all the time." On this night, Salley, the owner of a harlequin-red 1948 Chevy, was joined by about 75 other classic-car buffs outside the Olympia diner in Newington at a '50s cruise night.
"We're meeting here this Friday night, and we're at Hooters in Wethersfield every other," said Salley, who revealed he spent $35 an ounce for the special paint for his impeccable sedan, which he has owned for nine years.
He said that burnouts, drag-racing and loitering along the pike is getting worse. "It's a different day and age," said Salley. "The young kids drive the Japanese cars, and they try to impress each other ..." His sentence was drowned by the roar of a yellow Chevelle pulling out of the parking lot.
The kids with their souped-up cars, "ruin it for everybody," said Al DellaFera of Southington, who, with his wife Jocelyn, relaxed in lawn chairs in front of his restored 1931 Model A Ford.
Nearby, a candy apple-red '69 Shelby GT350, owned by Bob Woynar of Kensington, gleamed under the streetlights in the Olympia diner's lot. Woynar, 53, a regular cruiser of the pike since age 16, agreed that the younger crowd is giving the cruise night tradition a bad name. "They're drag racing up and down the street, showing off. At least this business allows us to have cruise nights," he explained, referring to the diner's owner. Other places along the pike want no part of it, he said.
Strobe Lights?
A short distance away, another car show was under way in the parking lot of the 2001 dance club, jammed with splashy imports while music blared during a live broadcast by radio station WKSS.
By 9:30 p.m., the Taco Bell lot next door was filled, too, as more than 500 cars and a crowd of 1,200 created a mass of people and machines.
This cruise scene is the pike's newest, featuring mostly Japanese-built cars fitted with turbo kits, strobe lights in addition to headlights and neon lights under the cars' carriages that gave an eerie, ethereal glow. Some of these cars were outfitted with $15,000 to $20,000 worth of high-tech extras.
Not an import, but an attention-grabber nonetheless, a 2000 Chrysler Prowler, powered by a Dodge Intrepid motor, draws a crowd. The black and yellow two-seater is outfitted with three TVs, a VCR and DVD player and a neon underbody kit that make it look like a hovering spacecraft. Boomer McLoud, an electronics and car audio franchise in Enfield and a car show sponsor, owns the car.
The crowd's attention was momentarily diverted from the Prowler as a stainless steel Delorean, the futuristic car seen in the Michael J. Fox movie "Back to the Future," rumbled by.
Referring to the popularity of the bi-monthly car show at the 2001 dance club, Jay Cyr of Boomer McLoud noted that such shows were new to New England. The cruise tradition, however, has been around a long time, he said.
"My dad drove his '68 Chevelle here a long time ago," said Cyr, who noted that drag racing was as popular then as it is today. "The drag racing starts at midnight ... that's when it starts getting a little rowdy and the cops start booting everyone out," he said.
The painted, white flames on Chris DelRio's '94 Honda Civic give a sense of motion to the red car, which mesmerizes with its flashing strobes. "I've got about $30,000 into it," said DelRio, of Springfield, Mass., who, later that evening, walked away with the show's first-place trophy.
Nearby, Heather Wilcox of Stafford peered under the hood of her purple '93 Honda Civic VTEC, explaining that it had an advanced timing system and strut bars "that help balance the car if you take fast turns." The petite, 22-year-old admitted she regularly races "light to light" on the turnpike.
"It feels very good. The guys look over and they're so surprised to see a girl behind the wheel!"
Pavement Woes at Pep Boys
The parking lot of the Pep Boys parts store in Newington has been marred by burnouts. Black skid marks on the ground run the length of the building. A sign warns "No Loitering Police Take Notice."
Aaron Reynold, who works inside, said the trouble is evident on Friday and Saturday nights.
"You get a bunch of the younger kids in their imports and they put bleach down on the pavement and just smoke their tires. It's really bad," he said
Before the recent weekend rain, the situation was getting worse, he said. "There's a lot of trash the next morning. The cops come and chase them out, but when the cops go, they drive right back in. It's a cycle."
Captain Schubert said his 40-member Berlin Police Department has been deluged with complaints from businesses. Police tell property owners to post No-Loitering signs in their lots. That enables officers to come in and keep the crowds moving, said Schubert.
Police also have assigned more officers to weekend duty. The department had as few as three assigned, but that was not enough, Schubert said. "We had an officer in trouble Friday night," said Schubert, "and Newington had to help out" because other officers were coping with calls on the turnpike. "That's how bad it can get."
Schubert said the cruisers range in age from 16 to 30 and not all are troublemakers, but that groups who cause disturbances make life miserable for other enthusiasts.
And in Newington...
Steve Clark, a Newington police lieutenant, has a thick file on pike investigations dating to last summer and including videotapes of burnout activity, print-outs of notices and communications posted on the
www.thepike.net Web site and records of arrests and complaints.
While the number of arrests is not broken down by category that could link it to pike cruise activity, police said complaints have escalated.
Problems started to accelerate last summer and are on a continual increase this season, said Clark, who linked the timing of that hike in activity to creation of
www.thepike.net. "Our enforcement efforts have forced them to clean up their Web site," which used to offer a $150 prize in a best burnout' photo contest," said Clark.
Clark has worked with the state Department of Transportation, which has launched unannounced inspections on the pike, and with the state's attorneys' office.
But that's not all. "We've stepped up enforcement efforts on some evenings three-fold," said Clark, adding that more and more people who live near the highway are complaining. Complaints from businesses keep pouring in, too, and the refrain is usually the same: Loitering, garbage and oil dumped on the road. The latter offense, said Clark, poses a hazard to unsuspecting drivers, especially when it rains.
Accidents and injuries have been minimal, although Clark noted that a turnpike fatality last year involving a motorcyclist was linked to late-night drag racing.
Newington police have handed out tickets for unsafe starting, reckless operation, racing, speeding and traveling unreasonably fast. "This year our arrests on the turnpike have increased," he said. Police have gone so far as to block off access to parking lots when they become full.
Said Clark: "It turns into a cat-and-mouse game where we kick them out of the parking lot and they move to the next place. But we're not taking up our resources chasing these kids from parking lot to parking lot. If they're loitering and the business is closed, they'll get ticketed."
$42 an Hour Adds Up
Two businesses seem to be the focal point for the cruise scene McDonald's and Roy Rogers, said Tom Collins, whose company has owned Roy Rogers since 1995. Collins was also the manager of the McDonald's 25 years ago, so the cruise scene is nothing new to him.
As for his eatery's distinction of being a cruise magnet, "It's a mixed blessing," said the restaurant owner, who has had to fork out $42 an hour for police coverage at his Roy Rogers shop on weekend nights.
Said Collins: "There are the a lot of wonderful people who are cruisers. I'm 56 years old and people my age and older have been doing it for more than 30 years."
They work really hard on their cars and want to display them. But unfortunately younger, more aggressive, alcohol-drinking cruisers are not responsible, and thus a policeman is on duty Friday and Saturday nights. Because police can't discriminate between responsible cruisers and rowdy cruisers, all, including non-offenders, are booted out.
And on nights when a police presence is not there, said Collins, it's like radar the masses start to congregate. If only, he said, some of the troublemakers would stop causing problems, the cruise scene, "would be a wonderful thing."
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