We often see houses of worship as fixtures on the landscape and in our lives. Yet over a score of them in Connecticut’s urban, suburban, and rural areas are for sale or seeking new uses because while
pulpits teach that God is eternal, places consecrated for prayer are not.
Frequently located in town centers, religious structures are typically focal points of community activities. Even non-members and non-believers visit occasionally for weddings, funerals and other life events of friends and relatives. Such buildings range from storefronts to grand stone edifices with steeples or domes and elaborate columns. But whether as a white clapboard meeting house or a contemporary with multiple gables and glass walls, they remain signature place defining institutions.
At the corner of Howe not far down New Haven’s Chapel Street from the Yale Repertory Theater and the university’s art galleries is a gleaming 1950s style steel diner with big plate glass windows. If you’re hungry after hours devouring culture or just walking by at mealtime your mouth may water for
Yankee pot roast, meat loaf, a grilled cheese sandwich or some other traditional diner comfort food. But though the classic eatery looks almost pristine and is open for business, you’ll not find such roadside delicacies. Instead of stepping inside to the smell of home fries and the sound of rockers like Bill Haley and the Comets, you’ll be greeted by the smell of curry and saffron and the sound of sitar music. Looks can be deceiving, and beneath the old timey diner exterior Tandoor is a fine Indian restaurant.
Rooftop television antennas are becoming increasingly uncommon. A generation ago, tightly packed
neighborhoods featured forests of them, perched on ridgelines or clinging to chimneys. A kind of household radar, they picked up sounds and images from distant and invisible places and brought them to life in living rooms, kitchens, dens and bedrooms. With cables now snaking into our houses or small satellite dishes bolted to clapboards or roofs, the dominant age of the TV aerial has largely gone by.
A fiddler on the roof sounded a little crazy and precarious to Tevye, the milkman narrator of the famous Broadway musical, but how about a golfer, a cow, a sailing ship, a locomotive, or a fish. Even
more bizarre, no? But look around your neighborhood, peer at the rooftops on your commute to work or when you run errands and you’ll find such things all around us, perched high on buildings where we rarely look. You might associate weathervanes with barns and old timey buildings like the grasshopper atop Boston’s Faneuil Hall, but weathervanes are common on many recently built buildings from homes to shopping centers. In an age that eschews architectural ornament and abounds with high tech means of obtaining wind direction, these decorative pointers have remarkable staying power.
It may be the last working phone booth in America someday. I certainly hope so. A block from my home and located in LaSalle Market, the sturdy red communications cubicle lends this eatery and
convenience grocery an old timey feel as much as the tin ceiling. It’s the real deal with a bifold glass door that closes easily, an overhead light and fan, a seat, and a telephone that takes coins. It’s a sung place where outside sounds are muffled and a phone conversation can be held in privacy.
Common less than a generation ago, phone booths were typically found in movie theaters, at gas stations, pharmacies, municipal parks, on busy street corners and elsewhere. By the 1980s, booths began giving way to pedestal style public phones because they were easier to maintain and less subject to vandalism. Today, even these are disappearing, victims of ubiquitous cell phones which, depending on coverage, enable individuals to make calls from wherever they find themselves without the effort of reaching into a pocket for coins.
Have fun reading Moby-Dick? Surely, I’m kidding. Most people would dismiss me with a laugh and perhaps some choice profanities if I seriously suggested they plunge into the deep prose Herman
Melville’s epic novel. But what if you could hear it read aloud, combining some of the magic of childhood’s first books with the drama of a stage performance? Then imagine you were transported to a nineteenth century seafaring town where a forest of wooden masts pokes the sky. Suppose you could channel the book aboard a wooden whaling ship like the one described in its pages. What if you were challenged, like a mental triathlete or an eating contestant devouring words instead of hot dogs, to participate in a twenty-four hour round robin reading of the entire book with just a select few die-hards who are up to the task? All this is possible at Mystic Seaport’s annual Moby-Dick Marathon held in Mystic, Connecticut to celebrate Melville’s August 1st birthday.
A dark green cannon stationed on a triangle of grass beside a flagpole and granite slabs inscribed with the names of war dead is just a minute’s walk from my Collinsville home. When my children were little
they liked climbing it. Standing on wooden wagon wheels treaded with metal, information on the muzzle indicates it was made in 1916 by the famed Watervliet, New York armory, but I don’t know much more. After several inquiries to the local historical society and veterans, I found no one who knew exactly what it was, how and where it was used, or how it got there. Unfortunately, it’s not an unusual situation.
On a hot day not long ago I visited Jeff Cone at his River Plain Dairy in Lebanon, a cluster of red barns beside a white clapboard house shaded with tall sugar maples and surrounded by fields. “Farming is
long, hard work,” the earnest, soft spoken 36 year-old acknowledged while some of his fifty black and white Holsteins lowed nearby, “but I know the land, the cows, and myself, and know what I can ask of each. I’m here to enjoy life.” Once common throughout Connecticut, dairymen and farms like Cone’s are increasingly rare in this long and thickly settled state.
