Death of a Trailer Park

May 2nd, 2007 · 19 Comments · Local, Oddball

Update: Tim Abbott has written a very thoughtful response to this post on his own blog, Walking the Berkshires. Thanks, Tim.

A tattered American flag on a flimsy stick stuck in the ground next to a pair of weather-beaten pillars is all that’s left of the sad legacy that was Sabo’s trailer park.

Last fall, while commuting to work at Millbrook School (my other job), I passed by the grim site and noticed some C&D dumpsters on Route 44 in front of Sabo’s. For some reason, I didn’t think much of it until, on my return trip to Lakeville, I saw that the trailers and Sabo’s two shabby houses had vanished.

I slowed down and pulled off the highway between Millbrook and Amenia, scarcely able to believe my two eyes. An angel must have descended from heaven to deliver both passersby and the residents of the park from the horrors of having to face that place every day.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, Sabo’s was one of the most ghastly plots of land imaginable — a hellish place where even rats had to think twice about whether they wanted to be associated with it. But over the years it was also a place where scores — perhaps even hundreds — of people of modest means lived because they couldn’t find any place else they could afford.

Of course, people weren’t the only residents of the park. Chickens could be seen clucking and walking around, no doubt disgusted that they couldn’t find a better place to hang their hats. Dogs and cats stalked each other among the junk cars and garbage, fighting one another just as fiercely as the human residents.

But inside one of Sabo’s “homes” was another breed of beast. On the premises, David Sabo operated something he called The New York Primate Center, Inc. There he kept several chimpanzees which he trained, rented out and brought out for all to see at every available opportunity.

Ann Linden of the Amenia Historical Society recalls meeting him and one of his chimps, Michael. “Sometimes he would bring Michael in to visit us,” Linden said of her co-workers at the Red Hen Sign Company, which she owned for several years. “He was very proud of the chimps. He was in every parade with them.” Sabo, she added, was “a very colorful fellow who rode around in a big Cadillac convertible. He called every woman ‘darling’.”

The chimps had appeared on Saturday Night Live and on David Letterman’s Stupid Pet Tricks. Tim Abbott of North Canaan grew up on the campus of Millbrook School, where his father, Don, was the headmaster for 15 years or so. He went by Sabo’s every day on his way to and from Amenia Elementary School in the 1970s.

“This was the same era when B.J. and the Bear was a hit on television — the show about the good looking trucker and his chimp,” Abbott recalled. “I always understood that one of the chimps at Sabo’s New York Primate Center had a role in that show, perhaps as a stunt double.”

“He had this big, colorful reputation,” said Alan Shope, the wealthy Greenwich architect who bought the place in November. “But the carnival-like facade was not consistent with the reality.”

Indeed, in 2001 Sabo settled a case of animal neglect and abandonment brought against him by the USDA. He lost his license as an animal exhibitor for 30 days and agreed to a $4,000 fine, most of which was to go toward facilities improvement.

“He was a bit eccentric,” said Heyward “Woody” Cohen, a local railroad buff and longtime Amenia resident. “He did things his way.”

Abbott recalls a “terrible fire that took the lives of five chimps at Sabo’s in 1981, caused by a kerosene heater, [that] was thought to have killed ‘The Bear’s’ double.”

Shope, who also purchased a good chunk of the old Wassaic State School several years ago, bought the one-acre site last November at a tax default auction held by Dutchess County, which foreclosed on the property. He had it taken down almost immediately.

Shope paid $90,000 for the property but had to spend even more than that in demolition and disposal costs. He plans to build nothing there, but wants to put a conservation easement on the property and give it back to the nearby Tamarack Preserve, the upscale hunting and fishing club that originally owned it before Sabo somehow acquired it in the 1950s after he fled Hungary during the revolution.

In its heyday, Sabo’s boasted 18 trailer homes, but in recent years Sabo had taken ill with advanced Alzheimers disease and had settled somewhere upstate. The chimps had also been relocated elsewhere in the state, but Shope was not sure where the animals were (or even if Sabo, now 80, was still alive).

“People were living in great conflict,” Shope explained. “They hated [Sabo] and he hated them.”

Since then, all but three of the trailers had disappeared. Shope said he gave the remaining tenants some money to help them relocate “so they wouldn’t end up on the street.”

The last time I took a good look at it, Sabo’s presented a dreadful tableau on an otherwise beautiful landscape. It was a shantytown that looked like it would be better suited to Bangladesh or Haiti than two hours north of the wealth and glitter of Manhattan.

By anyone’s reckoning (except perhaps Sabo’s), it was a creepy place. Septic systems overflowed into nearby streams; there were frequent power outages; rats the size of a Buick ran freely about. Rumors of items found inside Sabo’s house are too awful to repeat.

“The workmen who took it down said they had never seen anything like it,” Shope said. “It represented a collective failing of our society. I believe the community is relieved.”

Amen, Mr. Shope. And thank you.

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19 responses so far ↓

1 fred // May 2, 2007 at 3:42 pm

terry… as a resident of amenia/wassaic myself you could not have been more correct about the situation and conditions that was over at Sabo’s.

I didn’t even notice it’s dissapearance until the other day myself.
2 Andrea // May 2, 2007 at 4:29 pm

Terry, I found your blog very interesting to me. I have been very familiar with this trailer park since I started to provide EMS to this region many years ago. I have never known any of the history involved with the park. What concerns me is that this trailer park is not really that different than many of the other areas in our region where people live well below the poverty line. We just hide it better in some areas than others. These people seem to live in these conditions for many different reasons. What I have found is that we have so few resources to help them change how they live. Many of them are proud and resent any intervention and yet how they live is unsafe. These people have inadequate heat in the winter and no means of cooling themselves in the summer. They are not physically well and do not have enough food to eat. I do appreciate that Mr. Shope tried to give these people what they need to relocate but I wonder if their lives will be better where they are now. Many of these people are not educated and don’t know how to make different choices. I am glad to see this eyesoar removed but for most of them life is not so different in their new homes. I still see them in my travels in the area and they will say they miss their homes at Sabos Trailer Park. How do we fix that?
3 Marshall Miles // May 2, 2007 at 5:27 pm

Several years ago, The chimps and their “master” rode in parades in a big, black “caddy” limousine!

On the side of the car was a sign..

Sabo’s Chimps..of NBC and Project X fame!!

If you rent the movie Project X with Matthew Broderick, the chimps in the movie were from Sabo’s Chimps!

Life is not always what it seems!!
4 Terrence McCarthy // May 2, 2007 at 6:59 pm

Great story, Terry.
5 Terry // May 2, 2007 at 7:05 pm

Andrea,

Thanks for your thoughtful comment. You are right on-the-money. The larger question is what to do with people in our area who are either down on their luck or are simply incapable of earning enough money to live somewhere other than a place like Sabo’s.

I wonder how many of Sabo’s tenants wound up in Oniontown, a trailer park on Route 22 south of Dover Plains that was so notorious that the people who live on Oniontown Road managed to get the name of the road changed.
6 Doug Richardson // May 2, 2007 at 7:35 pm

Good piece.

The story made me wonder when the land under Lakeville’s trailer park will become too valuable and its residents will be forced to move.
7 Mark // May 2, 2007 at 7:48 pm

Like Andrea I worry about the tenants. Those people and many more like them deserve an affordable place to live too, without being judged and scoffed at by those that drive by.

I’ve always found it remarkable that this bucolic area looks so nice out front, but having grown up here and taught school here, I know there are many severely low income here who live out back, and are not very visible. People who’s choices are slim. In fact, maybe I’m one of them, except I’m here by glad choice. There are lots of people struggling here that are just like those poor people in the southern Appalachians that so many jokes are about that they define the mountain chain for some. Only differance around here is that usually the poor people are tucked away on hills and in hollows behind farms and in the woods and are generally out of sight.

I had a conversation recently in LaBonnes with a woman of means who recently moved here (20 years ago) who insisted that one of the reasons she liked it here was that there weren’t so many hungry people around. I was apalled, and certainly had a lot to say to her about that, but came away thinking she would more likely believe me and be willing to do something about it if these people were more visible…. or maybe she’d move away, which would be fine with me.

But like you, Terry, I find I’m glad that the Sabo eyesore is gone, and I admit I do prefer the view of the pretty landscape that was the Salisbury Motel. Aesthetically it was depressing to me everytime I went by Sabo’s and the motel. I am glad that the landscapes will revert back to some semblence of natural.

I’m also glad in the case with Sabo’s that the long suffering chimps are in a better place. Times and fortunes had obviously changed at Sabo’s since that day back in the mid 60’s when I met Sabo and his chimps. My dad was working nearby on some project I can’t recall, and he and I stopped in. At that time things there didn’t seem so derelct.

All of us here need to remember it is a huge luxury to live in such beautiful surroundings with people who can afford to do what Shope has done at Sabo’s, but having that beauty is a double edged sword. Where’s the healthy diversity? The fancier this place gets, the less room there is for many people of value who need a place to live as well.
8 Terry // May 2, 2007 at 8:20 pm

Mark, Agree except for the following:
I think the trailer park denizens “being scoffed at” consisted mostly of Sabo himself, except on the part of people like the woman at LaBonne’s.
BTW, the more remarkable thing about that woman (the one who said in the NWC there weren’t “so many hungry people around”) is that she uttered those words at LaBonne’s, which is right next to several hovels.
Geez, lady, take a look just beyond the parking lot and you will see the dilapidated homes of people who are clearly struggling. They don’t come out on the street and beg but they are there.
9 Geoff Brown // May 2, 2007 at 9:14 pm

Terry, even though I’ve driven from Amenia to Millbrook many times and never noticed Sabo’s, I have to say this is one of your best posts. Notably, the responses are uniformly thoughtful and considerate - probably a “best” in that category too.

Thank you!
10 Andrea // May 3, 2007 at 6:34 am

Terry, I am as familiar with Onion Town as I was with Sabo’s Trailer park. I understand that at least one family did move to that trailer park. As far as that woman at LaBonnes goes she does need to open her eyes to what is really here. I do fear that she represents an entire subgroup of our population. Our municipal agents tell us that each year those who have needs are increasing. They require more food in the food banks, more fuel assitance, and there is no money for gifts during the holidays. I look at the children who live under these conditions and my heart breaks. We are all so fortunate to live in such a beautiful part of the country, and we are for the most part shielded from having to face the realities of what is really here. Just because we do a better job of hiding these people behind beautiful landscape does not mean that these people do not exist here. There are things that we can do to help these people by working through our towns municipal agents but first we have to recognize that they exist.
11 Terry // May 3, 2007 at 12:42 pm

Doug,
Where is the trailer park in Lakeville? In back of the state line car wash or on the old ore mine pond on 44?
12 Terry // May 3, 2007 at 7:12 pm

Update: Tim Abbott has written a very thoughtful response to this post on his own blog, Walking the Berkshires. Thanks, Tim.
13 Doug Richardson // May 3, 2007 at 7:59 pm

Terry:

The one I was referring to is the one in back of the state line car wash. There are other trailers in town but not in “parks, ” per se.

The State Line one is not anything close to squalid (as far as I can tell) as the Sabo property is/was; it’s just that some one, some day, is going to sell to a “LaBonnes Lady-type” and and even more low-income folk will be forced out.
14 Jenny // May 3, 2007 at 8:35 pm

Great post, great comments. Eye opening! I work at the North East Community Center and we try hard to help folks with the kinds of problems that have been described here - the challenge is always how to find them, let them know what we offer, find out what they need, make that connection!
15 Walter Dufresne // May 4, 2007 at 10:57 am

One of the difficulties faced by poor tenants in both NYC and the tri-corner area is rising property values. Sooner or later, private owners in such places often choose to get out of the rental business, causing displacement. Neither Sabo nor Shope is obligated to maintain low-income housing.

Parts of upstate New York within 100 miles of Sabo’s in have experienced collapsing property values because of the collapse of old industries. But it’s never easy for a poor person to relocate anywhere distant, losing the resources and connections based on their long-term understanding of community.
16 Doug Richardson // May 4, 2007 at 3:41 pm

If someone here implied that Sabo and Shope were somehow obligated to provide low-income housing, I missed it.

I’m an Ayn Rand fan too, but we part company here: individuals ought not to be obligated to sustain or subsidize those of low-income or any other disenfranchised sub-group, but it is in the community’s interest to create a means of some sort for these people to live among them.
17 chrissey // May 17, 2007 at 7:01 pm

i lived on the land that u ppl r talking about it was not that bad u ppl r makeing things seem worse then what they where it really was not that bad we where not starveing at all and there was never dogs fighting and cat they where all tooken care of seeing as my dad worked at the dcspca they where carefed for and so was the ppl we would being sabo over ever night for dinner i lived there for about 2 yrs i worked ever day and helped out arond the park ins self the park was not that bad we clean the place up as bestwe could and if u ppl think over wise that is on u but i know that we where not starveing and none for the ppl there where we where low in come ppl but we worked throuw that and did r best
18 David // Jul 15, 2008 at 4:02 pm

Dave Sabo helped me when noone else in that area did. i know the place was not fancy, but you make it sound like it was hell. and some of your statements are wrong, like the backup for Bear on BJ and Bear…. it was the real Bear that was from Sabo’s and his chimp where in many other movies and shows as well, i often drove the limo for the chimps on parades also, and i did that for Sabo for free due to my admiration for what he was always trying to do. i wish i had known he was in trouble i would have come back to the area to help him, but i just became aware of this today..
19 Christopher Zaleski // Nov 11, 2008 at 11:40 pm

This is a very interesting article for me to come across. I just got back from backpacking with six friends of mine on the Appalachian Trail going from CT to MA and was looking for Sabo’s place to show one of my friends I was carpooling with but was unable to locate Sabo’s place. This article helped me understand why.
I am 42 and remember going to the Dutchess County Sportsman’s Show as a young child with my dad and I vaguely remember Sabo being there with his Chimps. Much of what I remember is a little foggy since it was a long time ago, but I though Sabo’s chimps were used in BJ & the Bear. In addition, there were time when a “non-Sabo” chimp would escape & the authorities would call upon Sabo to have his female chimp(s) lure the escapee male chimp back into “custody” for lack of a better word. I also remember hearing that Sabo being at the depths of despair due to the loss of his chimps in that fire. I never knew there was “issues” at his trailer park, but can certainly believe at least some of it being well within the range of possibilities. Can anyone else remember any additional details or corroborate any part of what I remember? Is there any additional information in particular, in regards to the author talking about “Rumors of items found inside Sabo’s house are too awful to repeat.”

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