CORRESPONDENCE_2012 #1 (JAN-APRIL)

Home Browse Search

Old city dump site attracte nsients for decades -Lodi News-Sentin intage Lodi Page 2 of 2 Goddard was a gifted scientist who achieved developments that eventually made spaceflight possible.Two years after that article caught Wilson's imagination on the riverbank in Lodi,Goddard successfully launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket in Massachusetts.That rocket only reached an altitude of 41 feet, but it demonstrated that Goddard was not a kook. Today,in recognition of Goddard's revolutionary work, NASA named a space flight center facility in Maryland and a crater on the moon after Goddard. In 1920,the New York Times wrote an editorial mocking Goddard's torpedo ideas. Forty-nine years later after the launch of Apollo 11 in 1969,the New York Times printed a correction to that editorial.And on the Apollo spacecraft, men landed on the moon. From the 1920s into the mid-1940s, Lodi continued to dump its trash at the site next to the Southern Pacific trestle. By about late 1948,according to a Lodi News-Sentinel article on Dec. 19, 1949, Lodi began taking its city garbage to a new dumpsite on Harney Lane east of Jack Tone Road.This is the current landfill still being used. The city's old dump site continued to be used on a lesser scale for a time,according to a retired employee.And the transient population continued to live in a makeshift settlement still called "the jungles"on the other side of the trestle from the dump. In late January 1950,a resident of the jungles was stabbed to death by another drunk resident.That murder prompted the Lodi News-Sentinel to write a series of articles about the jungles. About 35 men lived in"the slum development"on the Community Winery property(today's River Pointe subdivision)just north of the city limits then.They built dwellings of old tin and whatever scrap they could find in the old dump site. Paths were worn under the trestle to go from the jungles on the west side of the trestle to the old dump on the east side. The settlement was described in those 1950 articles as"a 20-to 30-year-old community." Many of the residents had lived there for years and developed their own codes of conduct. Police said the problems came from the transients who just stopped for a little while in the jungles.The January 1950 killing was the third murder within five years there. The newspaper articles concluded that it was"unlikely that anything will be done soon to destroy or rebuild the settlement." In March 1982,the Lodi Planning Commission rezoned the"Scenic Overlook"for residential use. It was called then"a former city dump of questionable quality."It had been"dead weight"for the city for the previous 10 years and was used to dump leaves. With many uncertainties about the soil quality and possible contamination from waste, no residences have been built on the old dumping grounds.Thoughts of turning it into a city park also were dropped 20 years ago, but recent talks about a river access point have been raised again. The land east of the trestle remains city property surrounded by the river, railroad tracks and residences.The city no longer dumps leaves,and the land is unused. But in hot weather,youths often sneak back along the railroad tracks and reach the river for swimming and jumping off the trestle. And occasionally the old city dump is the temporary camp for homeless people like George Wilson and many others over many decades who have called "the jungles" beside the tracks and the river their"home." Vintage Lodi is a local history column that appears the first and third Saturday of the month. http://www.lodinews.com/features/Vintage_lodi/article 2c54a836-Of62-511f-aca6-894999... 1/27/2012