GOSHEN — Tonight, Goshen’s past fascination with cruising will be resurrected for a few hours 30 years after city officials put an end to the popular pastime with the hanging of a few road signs.

First Fridays Cruisin’ Reunion is expected to draw classic car owners and their vehicles to downtown streets and along with them, thousands of people to watch the spectacle on wheels.

As Main Street sings each July to the sounds of burning rubber, sizzling barbecues and the ruckus chatter of a town smack in the heart of summer, time seems to turn on its head during the cruise-in, offering revelers a rare glimpse of the Goshen once known as the “Cruising Capital of the Midwest.”

The hugely popular pastime, a fixture of teenage life in downtown Goshen from as early as the 1940s, officially met its end 30 years ago this year amid concerns by city residents and leaders that the pastime had grown beyond the city’s ability to control it.

Mike Puro, a 1967 graduate of Goshen High School who would go on to lead the city as mayor from 1988 to 1997, counts himself among the Goshenites who experienced the pastime in its tamer early years — a time he described as almost quaint when compared to the massive spectacle it would eventually become.

“It was unfortunate what happened, because in its earlier form, it was a really nice thing that kids could do downtown,” Puro said of the year-round pastime. “It was the type of unsupervised activity that teens love, it wasn’t particularly expensive with gas prices as they were at the time, and it was really pretty harmless as far as these things go.”

By the arrival of the 1980s, Goshen’s cruising scene had grown exponentially, with thousands of teenagers flooding the city’s streets on any given weekend. Crime and vandalism downtown spiked dramatically, with most downtown businesses shuttering their doors during evening hours in order to avoid the chaos.

Faced with what he felt was becoming an unmanageable situation, then-Mayor Max Chiddister in early 1986 announced plans to curtail or eliminate cruising in Goshen.

Chiddister’s plan was officially put into action in the spring of 1986, the first step of which was to restrict Main Street’s two center lanes to emergency vehicles only during evening hours. Within weeks of the restriction’s implementation, Goshen’s cruising scene breathed its final breath.

As for the emergence of the First Fridays Cruisin’ Reunion, Rose said he couldn’t be more supportive of the idea.

“With the cruise-in, I think we’ve just exchanged something that was kind of unmanageable for something that’s more manageable, which I think in the end has definitely been a good thing for the city. So I’m all for it,” he said.

Source: GOSHEN NEWS