David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

On the Connecticut Jail Trail

Prison Afterlife
Electric lights hardly alleviate the gloom in this cavern of rugged and irregular rock that once served as a prison. Sixty or so feet underground with water dripping from the ceiling, darkness seems to absorb any illumination. I’m standing in a dead end passage where inmates were once chained to the floor. There’s still a rusting eye bolt embedded in the rock. When I speak to my companion there’s not only an echo, but a deep, eerie vibration that hums in the walls for a few moments. I feel a chill that has nothing to do with the moist, cool, 52 degree underground temperature. Despite the presence of tourists in sneakers pointing cameras and the exclamations of children, Old New-Gate Prison in East Granby is creepy.

With their heavy masonry walls, barred windows and unusual interior layouts, prisons and jails are not easily adaptable once their life as penal institutions are over. Macabre stories of mayhem, death and heinous behavior leave these buildings with a psychological pall. As a result, innumerable such structures have been demolished and their memory confined to images and stories. Those that survive remain indelible curiosities. They invite new uses that range from restaurants to museums, retail to housing.

Gas Station Eats

Stop for a gourmet meal at a gas station? You might think I have fairly mediocre tastes. But I’ve had some delicious food, rich coffee, and great craft beer recently at Connecticut gas stations. Actually, at former gas stations that have forsaken fuel pumps, car lifts, and pneumatic tools for kitchens, tables, and dishware.

Snack machines filled with candy bars and soda aside, it’s hard to imagine a place less conducive to having a bite to eat than a traditional gas station repair shop with its smells of vehicle exhaust and surfaces stained with lubricants. Even when new, they’re not the most attractive structures regardless of their architectural efficiency in serving the motoring public, but when abandoned they become among the ugliest buildings at roadside, not usually places where you’d ordinarily linger over dinner.

The Courage of Daffodils

And where you see clouds upon the hills
You soon will see crowds of daffodils
“April Showers,” B. G. De Sylva

Daffodils are a sweet, cultivated obsession. By mid April I see them everywhere in southern New England. No spring flower is more widely planted, along with  their close relatives narcissi and jonquils. Long extolled by poets and artists for their beauty, it’s the contagious courage of daffodils that I find most  endearing.

At mid month my wife Mary and I found ourselves in a sloping landscape threaded with lichen crusted stonewalls and rock outcrops where thousands of the flowers grew in clusters beneath mature sugar maples. In an area squeezed between dense woods and a cattle pasture we made our way down a grassy path to a pond where more flowers grew on small islands. Though we’d arrived in the middle of a weekday, we were among many visitors making a pilgrimage to Laurel Ridge Foundation in Litchfield, Connecticut where thousands of daffodils of every description have bloomed since the early 1940s when they were planted by farsighted Remy and Virginia Morosani.

It’s a peaceful sanctuary perched on the corner of wild and cultivated where elderly couples, young lovers, and parents with little children walked slowly and absorbed the quiet as the flowers swayed in a gentle breeze. Traditional yellow daffodils and white narcissi stood out among green grasses fattened by recent rains, along with seemingly endless distinct varieties, some with ruffled petals, orange centers, and other more subtle differences. They seemed so bright and eager, tender looking, a living and palpable metaphor for spring. We imagined they had faces and wondered if they were speaking or listening with their trumpet-like tubes surrounded by six petals forming a star-shape.

New Lives for Old Rail Stations

Orphaned Rail Stations
Orphaned railroad stations are transformers, changelings. If not, they don’t survive. Designed with a specific purpose in particular locations, new uses after railroad days are over may require inventive, even inspired redesign. When visiting an old rail depot reborn as something else you never know what you’ll  find.

From the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century these buildings were the principal portal to places large and small, lifelines to the outside world. Raw materials came in by rail and finished products were shipped out. Trains brought people from far away speaking myriad languages, bringing vibrant diversity and hands and minds to labor on farms and in factories, as well as visitors eager to see new places. Tracks are long gone in many smaller communities, and even where trains still run the stations are often vestigial structures in an age where there are no longer station masters, ticket counters, and baggage handlers.

A Piddling About Puddles

when the world is puddle-wonderful
    e. e. cummings

I delight in puddles. Even a macadam pothole or a muddy wheel rut in a dirt road holds bewitching fascination. Vernal or tide pools fill me with the vibrancy of unfamiliar and strange lives teeming in their waters. No puddle is the same. They can be reflective, transparent, opaque or turbid. Each has its own time  span of ephemeral existence. Many are subject to the vagaries of rainfall. Vernal pools are on an annual cycle, and tide pools emerge from the deep twice daily.

My Webster’s defines “puddle” as a shallow depression full of water, especially muddy or dirty water. It’s also “a little pool of any kind.” But a puddle is an elastic concept. It can be said to be a surface accumulation of water shallow enough to walk through, but not deep enough to float a boat. Limits on puddle size seem to be in the imagination of the beholder.

Looking at Lichens

The beauty of lichens . . . How they flourish! I sympathize with their growth.
        H. D. Thoreau

There’s a lot to like about lichens. Found in wild and urban places, from the arctic to the tropics, in deserts and on mountaintops, affixed to buildings and monuments, they are tenacious organisms unlike any other. Even on my quarter acre house-lot I come across lichens on tree trunks, the stone foundation of my home, brick walkways, fences, and the old cedar shake roof of my woodshed. Under our feet, out of sight, often fading to background, they can serve as reminders of remarkable and subtle natural forces all around us. They create mosaics of incidental and accidental beauty where least expected.

Combinations of funguses and green algae or cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), lichens are the essence of symbiotic cooperation. The fungus encloses the algae and supplies water, organics, and minerals from its surroundings, while the algae manufacture carbohydrates by photosynthesis. This self-reliant relationship withstands extreme temperature changes and can completely dry out without dying.

A Revered and Reviled Bird

Frequently encountered in urban areas, pigeons (Columba livia) evoke polar opposite passions in people who live among them. Called doves, they have an image of purity, harmony and tranquility. As pigeons (a French synonym for dove), they are often pejoratively characterized as dirty, stooges (as in stoolpigeon), and feebly passive. So common we hardly notice them in any detail, the birds generally fade to background.

As doves, pigeons are revered symbols of peace, like the white dove that brought Noah an olive branch sustaining his faith in a subsiding flood. Reviled as filthy pests, they are “rats with wings” as Woody Allen observed in his 1980 film Stardust Memories. City pigeons are fed by devoted fanciers in parks. But they are also poisoned and frightened away by governments and building owners because the average pigeon produces more than twenty-five pounds of droppings a year, and the acidic dung is both unsightly and corrosive. But love them or hate them, with a close look it’s hard not to marvel at their beauty and engaging behaviors.

Closed Openings

As they age, buildings tell stories about change. They may lack a mouth, tongue and vocal chords, but they speak in a kind of sign language, in hieroglyphs of structural and decorative alterations over time. A house may gain additions with the growth of successive families, or get new doors, exterior stairways, and   other features when market forces dictate that it be broken up into apartments. A church with a dwindled congregation may see new windows or ornamentation as it transforms into a mosque, office, or retail store. Old factories become apartments or commercial space dictating a variety of changes. “Age plus adaptivity,” wrote Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand, “is what makes a building come to be loved.” But loved or not, change is necessary for survival.