“Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
“Had I from old and young!
“Instead of the cross, the Albatross
“About my neck was hung.”
– The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The demise of the former Everlon Building at the Cape May County Airport is closer than ever, not immediate, but close. Its doom was sealed after a long and rather unprofitable life.
What could easily be an indoor speedway or a world-class skating rink aches for a shot from a super-charged ray gun to vaporize the grand monstrosity.
Lacking such magical powers, Cape May County taxpayers will shoulder the $6 million burden that it will take to bring the cavernous, white structure to ground level. It’s been dormant for more decades than anyone, particularly those in office, wants to admit.
The Everlon Building has a lot in common with Coleridge’s albatross. It’s mostly white and black, black from the mold on the inside. It had huge “wings” of promise that made it seem a natural to be sited at the airport industrial park. It had more promise than a New Year’s Day diet and a treadmill. Then reality set in like a black cloud, like that diet that went astray Jan. 5.
Way back, when we still believed in fairy tales, we were sold a bill of goods that the structure would be the place to generate good jobs. Being poor and hungry, we believed the fable.
Best of all, its creation was done with great gobs of government money. No private investor would have touched it with a 14-foot bamboo rod.
Having toured the place first as Timme Fabrics, then as the Everlon Building, and finally with then-county purchasing agent Edmund Grant during one of those grand, no-longer-held county auctions, it was evident our county had bought a size 52 when a size 36 would have fit quite well.
Think back to those heady days. Money just wasn’t a problem; the government had loads of it and couldn’t find places to stash it fast enough. The pork rolled on an on.
To give the devil his dues, Timme Fabrics was a neat operation. It was an amazing place, a mill operation responsible for importing to this area some highly-skilled textile engineers.
But then, employees wanted to unionize and that, as might be expected, was one of the final nails in its coffin.
Everlon came along and made some good stuff; then its market dropped off and away went the company like an outgoing tide.
Somewhere in between, I can’t find any clippings, there was a seafood processing plant located in part of the Everlon Building, but that didn’t last long either. Soon it went the way of a goldfish in hot water, belly up.
It seems a spell had been cast over that structure from day one. Like those famed Soviet Union “five-year plans” its future was always brighter tomorrow. Another apparition appeared and, as Margaret Mitchell so aptly coined the phrase, “It was like a civilization gone with the wind.”
We would have it made in the shade tomorrow, if only. We would have good-paying, year-round jobs with a stable future tomorrow, if only. Just wait and see, we’ll prove it. This time it will work.
Like Charles Schultz’s cartoon characters Charlie Brown and Lucy, who held the football and always lured Chuck to kick it, promising to hold it, then whisked it away at the last second, we believed these stories every time. This company was here to stay, sign up, hire on before the plane takes off.
The image of a smiling Gov. Tom Kean handing an over-sized check for $1 million to a group of smiling county officials has vanished like last week’s paycheck. Whatever it was supposed to do it didn’t.
So here we are, facing a whopping bill to wreck the joint. Oh well, it’s only money. Why should I complain? What’s $6 million among friends?
That $6 million to tear down the albatross could go a long way toward fixing bridges, patching roads, or building a shelter for battered women and children.
It could help fund the COMPACT school.
It could but it won’t, it’ll bring the walls a tumblin’ down.
Out with the old, in with the new.
In viewing distance of that white albatross is a new business incubator at the airport. It offers the hope that unmanned aerial system (drone) companies will find a forever home at the airport. The incubator is just that, a place where fledgling companies can hatch ideas and sprout wings. We can only hope they don’t fly far beyond the county airport or all will be back to square one.
Drones hold hope for this county, unlike anything that has visited our borders in the past.
The testing of drones at the airport is not dependent upon transportation. That was one of the things that crippled prior industries. They required 18-wheelers to bring in material and haul out the finished product from 75 to 175 miles, not good.
This time it’s different. Drones aren’t “dirty” so there is no need to process sewage from anything they produce. They require brainpower and innovative individuals like those whose ideas put Silicon Valley on the map.
The county’s unique location, in the flight path of metro airports and its proximity to the bay and ocean, are attributes that few other places in the nation share.
We can only hope that this is, truly, a new day. Let’s hope history won’t repeat. The albatross has flown.
