Remnants of early Bethlehem paved road still found in Normansville
In Bethlehem, the yellow-brick road doesn’t lead to the Emerald City. Instead, followers of what’s left of this golden-paved surface will end up under the Delaware Avenue bridge to Albany, next to the Normanskill, in one of the older settlements in the town.
While Normansville today is a sleepy enclave of homes, in the 19th century it was an entirely different place altogether, said Bethlehem Town Historian Susan Leath.
There was a whole really bustling community down there, she said. `All along the Normanskill it goes back really early because of the water power.`
In addition to mills and other industry, the Normansville beach provided a close getaway for city dwellers, and a resort town-type environment sprung up with a hotel, dance house and other attractions.
`People from Albany would take the trolley … and go to the beach down there and spend the day,` said Leath.
In the winter, the river was dammed and ice was harvested.
And the way to get to all this was for a very long time the Delaware Turnpike, established in 1805 as one of the many toll roads in the town built of wood planks or gravel. The road bridged the river, though that wood crossing was washed out in 1868, not to be replaced by the concrete `old bridge` until 1913.
It’s uncertain exactly when the turnpike was paved, but since the bridge still is covered in yellow bricks some think it was around the time of its installation. Today, the marvel isn’t so much that the road was paved, but the color of the bricks used.
Of course, the more ubiquitous Yellow-Brick Road is the one in `The Wizard of Oz.` Local legend has it Edgar Allan Poe saw the road on a trip to Albany and, having mentioned it in a letter, the reference was later picked up by L. Frank Baum, the author of the book `The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.`
This seems quite unlikely however, given that Poe expired in 1849, long before the road would have been paved. The theory was probably given credence due to Poe having supposedly done work on `The Raven` while at Yaddo Mansion in Saratoga Springs.
Another theory altogether is that the inspiration was the other way around. Baum’s book was published in 1900 and appeared on the stage a few years thereafter, so yellow bricked roads may have been in vogue. (The movie was released in 1939, by the way.)
But perhaps the most likely explanation for the road’s color has no connection to the land of Oz. Yellow paving bricks were not unique to Normansville. In the 19th century, red and yellow bricks were commonly used in early paved road construction, so it’s entirely possible Baum was inspired by a road in another place or simply wished to present something familiar to his readers.
In the novel, Baum also does not make much fuss over the color of the road; the film dubbed it the familiar `Yellow-Brick Road.`
Origin notwithstanding, the purpose of the yellow pavers was clearly to improve the condition of the road, and even after the installation of the higher Delaware Avenue bridge in 1928 it remained a viable way to cross the Normanskill until the old bridge was closed.
`Every time that we came home from Albany we had to take the yellow-brick road,` said former town historian Joe Allgaier. `The kids liked to go down the yellow-brick road.`
Allgaier was one person who served on the Normansville Yellow Brick Road Enhancement Committee that improved the walkway to the old bridge, adding plants, lamposts and two rows of pressed concrete designed to look like yellow bricks. The Town of Bethlehem maintains the area now.
The committee had high hopes of putting a garden on the bridge itself, said coordinator Virginia Acquario, but as the bridge is closed liability issues made that unfeasible.
`Given our difficult times and economic constraints, we never really could go forward,` she said. `We never did get very far with the bridge … but after we cleaned up our side of the bridge the City of Albany did the same.`
Still, Acquario said, there are hopes of getting the project back on track, so the yellow-brick road can be an even more enjoyable place to take a stroll.
If you don’t want to track down the remnants of the road in Normansville, there’s a strip of the original yellow bricks laid at the Four Corners in Delmar.“