If Westbury is truly a village, consider Terry Cockerham the mayor.
Take a scenic drive on Arlington Road — or perhaps steer off Ind. 37 onto the private gravel driveway — and you’ll find a secret little city, of sorts, blossoming just northwest of Bloomington. Stay awhile. Bring a friend.
You won’t believe what you’ll find.
There’s a church, a child-care facility, a general antique store — even a miniature industrial sector. It’s all there, tucked away from the usual hotspots and attractions of Monroe County. Five simple little companies form the collective identity of “Westbury,” just five neighbors who could not possibly be any different, intertwined tightly by the dips-and-dives of their hilly, duned parking lots.
Pretty stellar for a neighborhood that was all-too-ready to be bulldozed 18 months ago.
Cockerham, the proprietor of “Terry’s Banquets and Catering,” moved into the first property on Canterbury Court in 1977, paying 21-1/2 percent interest on his loan. He formed a social club there — the “Westbury Underground” — and a few classic American businesses followed him into the lot: A hardware store, furniture store, a carpet store, interior goods and more.
Things were seemingly hunky-dory, but quickly turned over during the market crash of 1978, which wrestled construction and related economic growth to a standstill.
“The businesses just couldn’t survive,” Cockerham said. “But for some reason, we (at Terry’s) were able to hang on.”
The other buildings, which housed drapery businesses and interior stores alike, folded. Ivy Tech Community College moved in to lease the other buildings in the mid-1980s, but for some reason, Ivy Tech never wanted to lease Cockerham’s building. So Terry kept the faith, serving up catering and hosting parties — until the school relocated to the west side of town around 2004.
Then, for nearly a decade, Westbury stood nearly vacant. Quiet. Placid. It didn’t help that the state’s Ind. 46 construction and widening project from Bloomington into Ellettsville, completed in 2003, had rerouted much of the back and forth traffic that had passed Westbury onto the new stretch of road to the south.