Thursday, April 9, 2015

Brass



PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Final furnace fires were extinguished in 2013, and the fate of this corridor of industry is coming at us like a speeding train. A century and a half of expansion, adaptation, refinement and economics can be read in an anthill of sheds, workshops and passages where the greatest of Brass Valley furnaces cast metal into billets, blocks, and giant machine parts. 

The corridor follows the river and the rail through downtown Ansonia from Bridge Street to the power plant by 6th Street. This was the home of two companies that have been here as long as Ansonia. The giant calenders made by Farrel Birmingham built the rubber and sugar industries. The metal Mike is tending in this American Brass furnace wound up as large diameter tubes inside the Navy's atomic submarines.

Before the old mills are swept away and the ground under them leveled to anonymity, is anyone asking: What does Connecticut want to remember here? What does future Connecticut need to know about those who came before? Should any part of this place be salvaged to help tell its story or provoke a question?