Joe by Maria
May 1 2024
[copyedited]
M:Joe, what do you love about Rosendale?
J: It’s a quaint little town. I’ve been here since I was 14 and 64 now. My family is here. People I love. I have one question. I’ll be driving around from St. Peter’s and you go up and you give me the chance to become one of the choir boys. So before I started boxing, I played Pattersons.
M: Oh cool.
J I’ve been hired at Canada all throughout the state’s boxing fighting. I turn people around.
M: Do you have any ideas for Rosendale? Like that you would like to see happen? Do you ever think that there was something that you wished was here or wished wasn’t here or?
J: If you go down that street, you go up the bridge, opposite of James Street, you have to go up the road that is, Rosendale’s water filtration center. There’s all those houses that were started to be built. Quite a while though. And I don’t think they ever finished that project. I’d like to see that go. I hope it is. Maybe, I don’t know. I don’t go down that road much. That was a project that was here for a long time. You know, make houses. You know, complexes, Rosendale did the right thing by, you know, building the senior houses.
M: So some more more housing you would like to see.
J: Well, affordable housing, you know, that’s the purpose of the senior, senior place. You got a lot of people living in a condensed area, We don’t have any housing situation for youth. Main Street has houses and stuff like that. But nothing that the town is looking forward to, you know, to bring or help young families, you know, stay, stay here.
M: Yeah.
J: You know, there’s a pool. There’s other things. But there’s not a sense of outreach for, you know, the 20 to 40 year olds, you know, just starting to get married and children. And that’s a shame because I like Rosendale a lot.
M: So we are hearing that from young families that it’s hard for them to make ends meet here because of the high housing.
J: They’re gonna, they’re gonna get their taxes and money out of every one way or another. They know that about it. That’s the American system. So having a better housing situation, you know, there’s only so many single family housing here in Rosendale, you know, it is a quaint community built upon that. But it has to, you know, look towards, you know, its future and still build that building in just the community. I spent 15 years as a fireman here, you know, in service of others within the community.
M: Thank you.
J: You’re welcome.
