Remember when Frederiksted’s streets had yet to be paved, area schoolchildren went to Frederiksted Junior High School, right on the waterfront, and that empty, hulking, dilapidated building—next to the newer, also-empty Frederiksted Health Center—was in everyday use as Frederiksted Municipal Hospital?
Longtime Frederiksted area residents George Flores and Frank "Frankie Pete" Petersen do.
Petersen has lived at 43 Queen Street, Frederiksted, for 85 years now, in the same house where he was born to Hugh and Petrina Petersen. Flores, 79, came to St. Croix from Vieques as a child in the 1930s. Sitting Monday morning at one of the outdoor benches in the park across from the Frederiksted Fish Market, Petersen and Flores recalled how things used to be.
"I went to junior high school there," Petersen said, pointing in the direction of the Athalie McFarlane Petersen Public Library. The building, built in 1803, housed the public school for many years, and in Petersen’s day was Frederiksted Junior High.
"Back during World War II, we had blackouts at night," he recalled. "You couldn’t light a candle or have any lights because the German U-boats were out there. One time the Navy hauled in a ship that had been torpedoed. They built a dry dock, and the Navy crews came in from Puerto Rico and pumped it out to work on it. And we had blimps in the sky then."
The blimps were there to keep an eye out for German ships and fighter planes, he said. This was long before what is now Henry E. Rohlsen Airport was built. Back then, the beach at Sandy Point extended out further, and military planes landed there, on runways of metal screen laid upon the sand, he said. "Fighters landed, no bombers," he said.
Flores said the slaughterhouse used to sit on the concrete foundation that juts out over the rocks just to the north of Sandcastles on the Beach hotel. Asked by Flores when they tore it down, Petersen replies that it must have been in the late 1960s.
They used to dump the material from the slaughterhouse into the sea, he recalled. The existing, run-down Frederiksted Fish Market is not the original building, but a fish market had always been on the site, also dumping its material into the sea. On top of that, everyone had an outhouse, and Public Works would come and collect the "night soil" into drums and dump it out at sea. All this attracted sharks, which were a common sight back then, he said.
Talk with the two then drifted to current politics, the state of the currently closed Frederiksted Health Center and rundown buildings. "I once counted 64 empty, ruined buildings in town," Flores said, expressing hope that talks with Lt.Gov. Gregory Francis on how to fix up the town would bear fruit.
The large, dilapidated building next to the health center is the old Frederiksted Municipal Hospital, where, Petersen said, he went to work straight out of high school. He retired in 1979 as supervisor of X-ray services after 38 years in health care. After a course of study in health and public hygiene at New York’s University of Rochester in the 1950s, Petersen came back energized to improve his home and worked successfully to get rid of the old system of sewage disposal, according to a profile of Petersen in Richard Schrader’s book "Under the Taman Tree." He also helped organized the first blood bank on the island.
And Petersen was the first publicly elected V.I. Democratic Party Chairman, and he fondly remembers serving as a delegate to the party’s national convention when Lyndon Johnson ran for president.
In the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, there were more fishermen, but there was no boat ramp or boats on trailers, as there are today, Flores said.
"They’d put a chain around that big tamarind tree and haul the boats out of the water onto the shore, using round pieces of wood as rollers" Flores said.
Born on Vieques in 1931, Flores lived there for the first two years of his life before moving to St. Croix.
“We lived by a creek, and my mother would wash the clothes in the creek, and I used to go around bare-ass naked, playing in the creek. It was the Depression then. Times were hard and we were poor. My mother moved to St. Croix hoping for better prospects. In 1933, when we came over, the only transport for most people was a boat hauling bananas and oranges and such. There weren’t many Puerto Ricans here then and moving from Spanish to English, it was a struggle to communicate,” Flores said in an earlier interview.
Back then sugar cane was the business of St. Croix. There was both the Bethlehem sugar factory and a smaller one at La Grange, he said.
Flores went to St. Patrick’s School in Frederiksted in the late 1930s and early 1940s and saw his first movie in the movie theater in Frederiksted on Strand where VI FirstBank is now.
Back then Strand was part dirt, part stone, and on holidays, on the Fourth of July and New Year’s there were masquerade marches in the streets and donkey races from the fish market to the fort, Flores said.
With the New Year coming up, Petersen said there is no such thing as New Year’s Eve in the Virgin Islands, but rather "Old Year’s Night."
"It was like Halloween. Young men would go out and smash up the plants from peoples porches and get rid of everything old," he said.
Flores laughed at this, saying he did it, too, as a child. "We would go out causing trouble," Flores said. "Some people would even dig a hole in the bottom of your boat if it was old, to make you get a new one. I had a BB gun, and I’d shoot out lights on your porch," he said with a sheepish laugh. That was donkey years ago, though, and the statute of limitations is surely expired.
Years after, in 1950, at the age of 19, Flores moved to New York, joining the U.S. Navy in 1951 at the height of the Korean War. Flores left the Navy in 1955 after two tours of duty and went back to New York, where he worked in several factories and began a lifelong commitment to the labor movement, both stateside and later, for more than two decades, back on St. Croix at what was then the Hess refinery.
Since his retirement, he has often held public officials’ feet to the fire, spearheading a successful campaign to have Frederiksted’s Fisher Street boat ramp repaired, getting substandard work at the Frederiksted waterfront renovation quickly replaced, pushing for road repairs around White Bay, White Lady and Two Williams, bringing the media in to pressure the Department of Human Services to address access problems at the Frederiksted Food Stamp Office, among other causes. Today, Flores is pushing to have the Frederiksted Fish Market renovated, the ramp repaired again, the nearby restrooms fixed up and maintained, and generally pushing for improvements to the West End of St. Croix.
As the morning fades toward midday and we wrap up our conversation, one thing becomes abundantly clear: Frederiksted could definitely use more residents like Flores and Petersen.
