Death of a Trailer Park

EDITOR'S NOTE: I originally wrote and published this story on my Lakeville Journal blog on May 2, 2007. That blog is now defunct, so I have re-published it here for anyone who might be interested. I will also republish the comments when I get the chance.

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AMENIA, NY — 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.

Ann Linden of the Amenia Historical Society recalls meeting David Sabo 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.'"

Alan 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.

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."

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.

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 the 1980s, caused by a kerosene heater, [that] was thought to have killed 'The Bear's' double."

Editor's note: Sabo was later fined $1,000 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for his role in the tragedy, which caused "the deaths of five chimpanzees by smoke inhalation, with other chimps dying later and some animals requiring reconstructive surgery," according to the International Primate Protection League.

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 had foreclosed on the property. He had it taken down almost immediately.

In its heyday, Sabo’s boasted 18 trailer homes, but in recent years Sabo had taken ill with advanced Alzheimer's 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."

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.