The Superman of Puddle Dock

By Vintage Pics

The winning happy summer image this week comes from a huge collection of candids gathered during the 1982 Puddle Dock Reunion at Strawbery Banke Museum. Back then, some residents of the “lost neighborhood” still resented the incursion of urban renewal. 

Although the federal government had categorized the area as “blighted” and a “slum,” reunited residents recalled a close-knit neighborhood during the first half of the 20th century. Six small grocery stores operated in Puddle Dock during World War II, each eking out an income for a family living above or beside the small shop, exemplified by the reconstructed Abbot Store at the museum today.

At the reunion, Puddle Dockers told colorful, sometimes contradictory stories, of life among the junk yards, water towers, rotting wharves, coal pockets, ramshackle homes, and pocket gardens. For some, it was a childhood paradise of friends among a variety of ethnic and immigrant families. For others, there were “some pretty rough characters” who rented rooms along Water Street (now Marcy) for $10 a month.

Jack Zeidman, who was born in 1904 and inherited his father’s junkyard, said: “There was no animosity in any way, shape, or form. Nobody was envious of the next guy, that’s for sure. And nobody had that much money that they could be envious of.” Zeidman also recalled Jewish families swimming at “Palestine Beach” near Peirce Island in the South End, then dancing through all-night parties at Hampton Beach.

Today’s Kodak Moment represents the height of summer fun in the South End. Long before Photoshop, Puddle Dock residents Dickie Tibbetts and Joan and Doris Finnigan composed this clever special effects photo. A Xeroxed booklet featuring hundreds of gray-toned shots from the Puddle Dock reunion can occasionally be found among vintage books on eBay. It serves as a scrapbook of one more Portsmouth neighborhood, lost, but certainly not forgotten.

Text copyright J. Dennis Robinson. Image courtesy of Robert Pecunies and the Puddle Dock Reunion at Strawbery Banke Museum. A portion of this text was adapted from the book Strawbery Banke: A Seaport Museum 400 Years in the Making.