If one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, then the Clark Recycling Center was the University’s Fort Knox. Located in a once-stately home at 5 Hawthorne St., the center opened in the early 1990s and became the halfway house for literally tons of stuff waiting to be repurposed. As a hand-scrawled sign hanging on a wall quipped, “Give us your poor, your tired, your plastics 1-7.”
Unfortunately, 5 Hawthorne Street had seen better decades, and on August 10 the structure was demolished, with Clark’s recycling operations relocated to new digs at 501 Park Ave. Pieces of the old recycling center are themselves being recycled; Preservation Worcester salvaged elegant woodwork and hardware, and a Clark student group pulled some lumber with the hopes of fashioning campus recycling bins.
Lost for good, though, are the nearly 20 years of newspaper clippings, graffiti, defaced photos of random celebrities (take that, William Shatner!), student IDs, bad poetry, and worse jokes that were either scrawled or posted on the walls in a time capsule/avant-garde art mash-up. Few student recyclers seemed capable of passing through the house without staking claim to a small patch of plasterboard or exposed wood and leaving something there for posterity, or just to get a laugh.
Emerging from the mist of the ’90s were hanging Rolling Stone covers of the “X-Files,” a pre-pirate Johnny Depp, pre-Cruise Katie Holmes, and pre-death Kurt Cobain. A student with a Sharpie recorded the happy message, “Feb. 23, 1999, 5:20 p.m. David Kelly finds a $100 bill in the paper bin.” Below it on the same wall was the rejoinder: “9/13/04 – Joe and Mike find 20 cents.” Apparently, times had gotten that much tougher.
A magazine advertisement stapled to the wall practically screamed the attributes of the “Bulgin’ Belly Burner — As Seen on TV!” and a front page of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette proclaimed “Hallelujah” in celebration of the Red Sox’s 2004 World Series victory. Letters from parents to their Clarkie offspring, discarded license plates, original limericks, and stenciled etchings all added to the do-it-yourself decor.
Can the new center ever hope to exhibit as much personality as its predecessor? As long as there is paper, glass, and plastics 1-7 (and beyond), and a few imaginative Clark students with some time to kill, the odds are pretty good that it will.
