Bees' Noise

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  There are many ways to be a photographer.  Someone once suggested to me that each can be characterized by what it misses. This is the third photograph posted from the series taken while stalking the drive mechanism; each of my companions was simultaneously stalking his/her special "game."  I'll pardon my own self-indulgence in posting three; the point here is to set possibly redundant shots side by side, observe the paralax changes and think about how such changes influence meaning.

The problem I set remains the same. I have moved backward several steps and raised my tripod to look down on the spinning equipment, and I've turned my camera horizontally to try to take in more of the room's spaciousness. 

The first image in the series, although it is presented as a horizontal, was shot as a vertical.  Interesting to note that the first image could not be as well composed from either of the subsequent camera location. How does the moving photographer find such locations? Are there congruencies that can only be found once the eye has reached the critical spot?

I prefer to compose in the camera, so, in that sense, the shot was a failure of seeing. Why did I miss it while shooting?  Drive shaft and aisle were the main "players," with which I'd chosen to work. Vertical seemed to be the right way to limit compositional elements and focus on my subject, so most of my shots were vertical. Only occasionally did I vary my orientation to try and see what was there. As I moved forward, backward, up, down, sideways, I was always putting the wheel in relation to aisle, columns, ceiling, etc., I missed the abstract rhythms of the isolated aisle and machinery beneath the wheel.  It was much later, back at the computer that I found the forms of one of the images pleasing when cropped to exclude the wheel. 

The second image was the one that best fulfilled the challenge I had set, to tell the story of the power drive.  Time (spent bucket moving, tripod setting, lens changing) was the chief factor preventing me from taking on additional angles, my fear of missing other things elsewhere in the mill.  For purposes of framing, I try to shoot to set proportions.  Even afterward, the elements I wanted to include in the drive wheel story did not fit those vertical proportions, but I probably wasted a lot of precious time trying to make it work in the camera. I'd never be successful by the hour.

Now, a third image and I've spent 40 minutes and barely moved five feet!  In an exhibition, perhaps they are redundant.  Must one choose which story one wishes to tell? Is there enough of a story to tell?  In any case, while shooting the drive mechanism I was also looking for shots that could encompass the full architectural space. It is another quest not fully resolved on first visit, but looking back here will help when I return.  Any opinions from anyone who has read this far are most welcome.

As I was editing images from this shoot, I read an article in Lensworks Magazine about a photographer who went to the Yosemite Valley to assist Ansel Adams in a workshop.  There, amid glorious mountain peaks and heavenly light, he spent his time photographing old tent patches on weathered canvas and produced stunning images. There are many ways to be a photographer, and if we are really looking, many of the things leading our eye remain mysterious, distant voices.  Those are the things to pay attention to, I've found.   ...to try to see the stuff behind what's physically there while all the time still looking at drive shafts and machinery.  

  

Drive Shaft & Bobbins

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  I traveled to the old Klotz Throwing Company mill to meet four other photographers. From 1905 to 1957 "throwsters" "threw" silk and synthetics (they twisted or wound raw silk into thread) here. Silk, perhaps the ultimate luxury fabric, became a valuable commodity in the Gilded Age, and silk filatures, where silk cacoons were softened to make raw silk, became a growing U.S. industry. The factory and the process, which involves soaking and steaming as well as spinning, is described here. However, I knew nothing about silk processing last weekend when I had just four hours to take it all in and make something photographic of it.

I don't work well under the pressure of time; the photographic richness of the site and ticking clock could easily lead me to panicked image grabbing. After an initial walk-through of what I thought was the whole, three-floor mill, I had several "must-have," subjects for images. It was a plan to steady me, a way to manage the territory. One of these "must-haves," was the drive wheel and drive system that ran all the machines along the third floor aisle. Once all factory mills were powered this way. I've been in many old mills and never seen so complete a drive system.  Although the main belt was missing, everything else was intact down to the individual stations. The mill had for many years been water-powered, and it seems likely these linkages were once water-driven, though I saw no evident source of water power at the mill.  

My aim was not merely to take a picture of the drive wheel, but to make a photo image about the drive wheel in the same way that yesterday's photo was about footsteps of throwsters.  I spent, perhaps, 40 minutes of my four hours shifting up, down, backward and forward within a few feet of this general location. I wish my images showed more of the belts that connect each row of machines to the drive axle, and I'd love to suggest the agitation of all the machines bobbing together, but I spent my time working out how to arrange the planes and surfaces from this general angle under spring light, such as it was, between 9 AM and 10 AM on June 22nd. Somewhere there has to be an angle, a lens, a quality of light that can capture belts and agitation, but it remains for another visit.

I was pleased to catch the round-bottomed, sand buckets that served as primitive fire extinguishers, but at about 10 AM I moved on to another must-have shot.

Footsteps

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  The words, "industrial age," naturally bring to mind images of tall, chimney stacks, grease, steam, and clanking steel, but I'm told when the machines were running here, hundreds of them on three floors of this silk mill sounded like a swarm of buzzing bees.  Now silence is filled by mere footsteps.

Bottle Glass and Bunting

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Derby's Sterling Opera House, though distinguished by the story surrounding its construction and the repute of its acoustics, is in many ways of the era.  City fathers sought a dignified building to fill multiple needs in a vision of harmoniously integrated civic life, corporate life, and government stability. 

In 1889 when the new Opera House opened its doors, the view from the third floor vestibule, behind the top balcony's hard pews, must have left the gents and ladies awed. At intermission there's just enough time to climb the stairs to the fourth story tower room, no higher spot in town and a full panorama. It was a place at the hub, above the original harbor where the Naugatuck found the Housatonic, where sailing ships took shelter and in times since, the source of Derby's industrial might. By 1889 there were lights at night in the city below, and people can be forgiven for thinking they saw the future.

Immediately below the window's bunting was the old town green, and it's still there, looking much as it did a hundred-and-fifty years ago. If this were a hill town, there would once have been sheep grazing there, the town's common livestock, but this was a "Valley" town planned for valley industry. The land had been a gift to the people by Sheldon Smith, the town's founder, the streets named for his daughters. Smith and Anson Phelps had also given land for building the Congregational, Methodist, and Episcopal churches there, around the Green, and the Green in the middle was deeded to the town as common land on the expressed condition that it be fenced to keep sheep and people off the grass.  Whatever it actually looked like, the idea was immaculate, Yankee Americana.

Smith and Phelps were gone when the town father's added vaudeville and politics to the Green and visits by Houdini and Amelia and eventually Bing, but nobody could have foreseen Bing.

The corner door at the base of the tower led to the opera house, but the doors to Democracy were on the central axis through a Classically columned, pedimented entry beneath a deeply shadowed, pedimented roof.  It's not clear if the town fathers paused to contemplate democracy before giving it form in brick and stone; the full exterior is a hash of contradictions in which observers have found Italian Renaissance, Venetian, German, and English details. How oddly the roof's pediment hugs the building's squat tower as if they were best friends who didn't really get along. The tower is topped by a Victorian, Federal, cupola confection behind a white picket fence. Such ecumenical heresies seemed unimportant. Maybe ethnic hash was the point, as old wooden democracy was rebuilt in stone to project new legacies into a new century that would stretch from crooning to hip hop. 

Whatever the meaning of the architecture, whenever Sousa came to town, thrilling, chilling, exhilarating marches shook the windows and filled the town green, and the mayor and his friends had front row seats as the band played before their new town hall. 

Imagine! It is entirely possible that a young Charles Ives, who would write music peppered with remembered marching bands in musical collisions, traveled south from Danbury or North from Yale to hear the March King play in Derby's fine new hall. Ives was finishing his teens and entering Yale in the 1890s, playing organ in church and experimenting with the sounds of a century nobody understood.  The spirit of a time is written in its art; here, perhaps, a curious intersection.

Seaside

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. "Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions."

Brass

Still-life at the D.L.Edgerton Fresh and Frozen Seafood Warehouse

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:   Holding the door, my friend said, "Step inside," and we entered the seafood warehouse. How slow the retreat! A broken window today and a door left open until the windows become mere formalities. A coil of wire hung on the wall cradles the leaves of an empty bird's nest. Baby mice squirm amid shavings in the pencil drawer, the rusty steel of the stapler safely contained two bins away.  Nuts, planted like grenades, dry and crack before they are ever eaten and the clawing grip of winter ice delves and rakes every crevice loosening mortar and all.

The warehouse had been plundered. Two altars of concrete stood at the head of a long row of insulated chambers. I'd seen altars like that before. At one time there was probably a compressor anchored on each altar to drive the refrigeration. Compressors and pipe were gone, the studs that held them, rusted and bent.  A corner of the roof had collapsed, and spring sunlight splashed on the stained slab floor beside the altars.

By inside, we usually refer to a hallowed place where nature is compelled to follow strict house rules. Here nature rioted. We like to think that there is "inside," and then there is everything else in nature. Inside rodents and vermin are banished, and even plants must remain properly potted.  

A workshop held an assortment of rubbish that seemed to have little relation to seafood, but suggested real work went on here once, but even old saw blades and chisels were becoming mulch, the old order collapsing entirely; the distinction between inside and outside was almost gone. As we shot I'd like to think the spirits of those who had worked here were finally letting go of the old rubbish.

The D.L.Edgerton Fresh and Frozen Seafood Warehouse

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Imagine trucks backed up here, men unloading hampers of fresh eels and men with fork lift trucks taking them to coolers and freezers where they can be stored. Inside one can get the idea of what once went on here, but the roof is gone and the foundation is failing and D.L. Edgerton has moved on. 

We reached the D.L.Edgerton Fresh and Frozen Seafood warehouse late in the afternoon, and the sun couldn't have been worse for photography. That the wide range of tonalities could be reproduced from a single exposure testifies to the quality of current digital technology.

Crossing Delmarva

PHOTOGRAGPER'S JOURNAL: 

Flashback

There are times when the wind in the wires 

makes the steamy air crackle and flash in the night, 

but now all is dry and still.

For Sale, Delmarva Love Nest

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Oceanside. When I was there in late April it was just sprouting.  By now it must be blooming.

Blazing Springtime

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  I've always known how the sun blazes between hills here in the late afternoon, and I used to walk here often. How is it I never thought of it as a picture until yesterday? The air was crisp, clear and insect-free, and every weed was celebrating.

Light from Above

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  

Bird Seed

We passed snug dwellings, 

furnished rooms, 

where lives conceived like mice 

were spent in huddled anonymity, 

and we met a few wise, old mice 

carving intricate birds.

The Oyster Train

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  We were at the edge of the land and a long way from open water, and the oyster farmers had built a tiny railroad across the marsh to where they tended their oyster beds. Oysters like the brackish water in tidal estuaries. Chesapeake Bay is the largest oyster producing body of water in the U.S., and the population of oysters there used to be able to filter all excess nutrients in the water in 4 to 5 days. Oyster farming helps to preserve the quality of water in the bay for all of the traditional species.

Alas, we never got to see the beds, never got to ride the train.  The words of Jonathan Swift come to mind, "It was a bold man that first eat an oyster."

Bayside Geometries

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: We followed a long dirt path beyond the point where it could be called, "road," but it constantly promised to bring us to the bay's edge. Eventually, we came upon what looked to be a house under construction and still no bay.  We thought this would be another path with no payoff.  In fact, the two workmen we met, worked on an oyster farm. The building under construction was for the farm. When we asked if there was anything worth photographing, they encouraged us to continue.  The path went beyond where the car would go, but we followed it a short distance and saw the bay.

Boats

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  I have no idea what Delmarva is like once the tourists begin to arrive, but I suspect it has the same battered, half-populated look it had in April when I was there. The towns are working towns with too many shops for rent and good breakfasts. Of course battered and under-populated was what we were after, and with my friend Gary as guide, we pursued the likeliest roads toward the shore. That meant we were often on unpaved paths and eventually, always at a dead end. Those edges I yearned for can be hard find, constantly shifting.  In the end, it is not the edge we were after but convincing shots.

Cape Charles Chiaroscuro

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  There are few edges to life where I live. The Housatonic River and the ridge of mountains that follows it hint at an edge, but once one is there things are much as they were before until finally there is the Hudson. It is similarly so for an hour or two in most directions, and so, except when I hike, my navigational brain map has become a scattering of intellectually held points without ever quite feeling the lay of the planet under me.  Perhaps it is the result of having grown up in Manhattan where all you need to know is East Side and West Side, and you can get all over a geography neatly bordered by rivers.  Periodically it is necessary to find edges and honor them.

So it was an exercise in planetary exploration to drive out of the hills, last month. From previous explorations, I could feel as I dropped south of Red Bank and left the security of having Manhattan close at hand. The coast line is  an edge to be relied on and it was out there to my left as population thinned through the Pine Barrens, and I was still not far from the fixed coast through which I had driven a year earlier, coming north from Cape May just ahead of Hurricane Sandy. This time I would steer the less traveled middle path through the Delmarva Peninsula. Although I had been this way before, this time I would have time to explore some of the jagged coast  and the small towns down the bay side to Cape Charles and back up on the ocean side.  Now that's edge.

I had come this way before.  I had driven north into Delmarva on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. It was a fine trip but it has come to seem a violation. That perfect lobe of land must have a proper end.  It was a violation I'd come to correct. This time I would have the satisfaction of putting myself at the end, the stopping point of the peninsula.  

Well, I never reached the National Wildlife Refuge at the geographical tip.  Perhaps that will be a planetary exploration for the fall. I did reach the tip, however, as far as transit was concerned, the Cape Charles train depot where freight cars are still loaded and unloaded from barges that cross Chesapeake Bay.  My camera had failed a couple of hours up the road.  I was glad I had a backup. At the end of a long drive and a good dinner, it was a great place to test the limits of my backup camera in the setting sun off the edge of the peninsula where the barges dock.

Cubist Composition

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL -  a curious note in an unknown hand found crumpled and abandoned in a brown, office waste can:  "I've been watching the small application inside my computer that monitors the functions of the computer's brain: the thought load carried by the central processing unit; the amount of shelf space left for remembering important people, places, sums, balances, dates; the number of in-out bins for facts and faces that can be quickly forgot. There's a special spot that monitors the all-important subconscious of the hard drives and activity along the neural passageways that connect to the outside world and sometimes produce tangible artifacts there. 

"The constant functioning of this application reminds me that, along with the megatons of physical waste we produce every moment, that thought itself produces a torrential overflow of data: ekg's, orders on Amazon, GPS positions, eye scans, electricity flow, blog entries, Google searches and the status of nuclear silos poised for earth's annihilation; waste which we call "history," and which clerks, librarians and statisticians constantly cull and cross cull, struggling to rescue it from nature and oblivion." 

Office of the City Erk, Sterling Opera House

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Perhaps no function says "civilization," so much as "clerk." The clerk is the active memory of the community. In some places before there was writing, the person who filled this office was called a "remembrancer."  Is it the first function of society from the times when everything was tribal and familial, the first, hard-won step out of oblivion?  We can imagine the gathering of elders by the fire and silence, maybe far off thunder, at the summoning of the remembrancer and his strange magic pictures or beads or knots or stones, fetishes that helped him wind back time and recall all they had previously settled and what disputes remained outstanding.

The sacred duty entrusted here is first, to record accurately from those seeking to deceive, and impartially from those seeking sway, all the business of the community; and second, to manage the paradoxical responsibility of protecting the privacy of all that should be private while providing quick and easy access to all that should be public and to do so while always maintaining, what we now call, "transparency," in all things.  When partisans rise to disputation, it is the clerk who must refer them to processes for resolving differences and must remain firm that due process is followed. When the dispute is not settled, sometimes the powerless bureaucrat who suffers blame from both sides is the clerk.

Soon after landing at Plymouth Rock, one of the first acts of the new colony was to appoint the recorder to thenceforth record all of the transactions of the pilgrims: births, deaths, marriages, production, consumption, transactions and treaties, and today we can know what they did and didn't eat and how they lived from the time they arrived.  What is it worth today to walk into a town hall and take in your arms the heavy bound volumes? Sometimes they flake and you can feel time's grime. You turn the thick pages and find the name penned in ancient handwriting where a clerk long ago recorded the birth, marriage or death of your grandparent there, in that place on that date.  And who were the other people listed there: neighbors, friends, colleagues, strangers? Or is the record of your grandparent lost, and you move on ignorant of any connection to that place, a stranger in time. 

The Office of the City Clerk is at the front of the Sterling Opera House. As in most cities, it was the first point of contact for everyone with business to transact in town. This was the office of the City Clerk until 1969, and all the business of Derby passed through here.  Then they packed all the memories in boxes and carried them off to the new City Hall where, we presume, they can still be found.  It's no wonder the experts say the building is haunted.

City Jail

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  As it turns out the ambitions of the leaders of the Borough of Birmingham were prematurely swollen. The Sterling Opera House, that opened its doors in 1889, was attached to considerably more than a borough hall or even town offices for all of Derby. In fact, architect Henry Ficken had delivered to their specifications, in addition to the opera house, a city hall complete with offices for mayor, city council, and a city police station with a half dozen prison cells.

The vision of the town fathers was premature, but the building gives it lasting form in stone: The vision is of a metropolis whose extent encompasses the three shores where the rivers meet and where bodies toil, while the guiding spirit manages from atop the hill in the very center of the town square laid out a half century earlier by Sheldon Smith and Anson Phelps for their industrial village. Sterling Opera was at once town center, city center, cultural center, religious center and capstone of a democratically ordered and benevolently corrupt life; it would become a memorial to its creators.

Add whatever H.G. Wells visions they might also have imagined of a spaceport built after to gild their memories, and that is the City of Birmingham, Connecticut, that never came to be, but it would be a long time before anyone realized quite how wrong they were.

At the Sterling Opera House

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  

It is literally true, the opera house is no longer for skating. Wagner's principles of perfect site lines in theater design called for raked seating.  Inside the Sterling Auditorium one feels the aspirations of the town swelling, striving to grow into a city. It features a democratic seating plan. Although the inexpensive top balcony seats are only benches, hard like church pews unless you bring your own cushion, those seated there and standing behind them are promised the same unobstructed contact with the proceedings.

In April of 1889 the state legislature resolved the three-town dispute by making Ansonia a township, independent of Derby. The course was set; in 1893 Ansonia was incorporated as a city; Derby was made a city the following year. Huntington became a city in 1915 and incorporated with the town of Huntington as the City of Shelton in 1919, but by then, although they remained rivals, the three cities were cooperating on a variety of common needs, and the Sterling Opera House was booked regularly, and the current Episcopal and Methodist churches were taking up their axis points with the Congregationalists beside the  Sterling on the town Green.

Whether you came to see the latest melodrama or vaudeville show or to hear the great Caruso or the Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind, the master of ceremonies at the Sterling and in auditoriums everywhere was a new mechanical contraption of levers and strings stretched over a heavy, iron frame called a fortepiano, or loudsoft. They had to be loud to fill a concert hall and soft to caress a tear. Like clocks, pianos use many brass parts. Pianos became an important niche of the Brass Valley economy.

Look inside the fine houses on the Birmingham Green and along the town's central streets, named a half century earlier for Sheldon Smith's daughters, Caroline, Minerva, and Elizabeth, and for Anson Phelps' wife, Olivia.  There, inside the velvet and crystal parlors with their chiming mantle clocks, were pianos and often children practicing, and in Derby and Ansonia and towns throughout the northeast merchants and professionals also had parlors, and once you had a parlor, the next acquisition was often a piano with a bit of tatting and a ceramic or glass compote rattling on the top.

My grandmother was a pianist. Though my great grandfather was only a cigar maker in Hartford, she was good enough to be offered a scholarship to study with the great Horatio Parker at Yale which she turned down to marry my grandfather, a haberdasher. My great grandparents raised 6 children in half of a two-family house they rented from a cousin.  The story is told in an old letter of how my grandmother, Sadie, avoided chores by playing piano for her father as he read the newspaper in the parlor. Parker is most famous today for attacks against him by his most famous pupil, Charles Ives of Danbury.

The piano had become more than an MC; it was one of the stars of the show. The great age of the piano had begun and virtuoso pianists were striving to succeed the great Franz Liszt by performing feats of pyrotechnics at the keyboard, and they were followed by legions of fans; entrepreneurs staged Monster Concert spectacles with dozens of pianos shaking walls and trying to stay together.  The Sterling Piano Company had grown to occupy 15 buildings, and across the river in Shelton another manufacturer was offering inexpensive pianos with machines inside that let the pianos magically play by themselves, no lessons required. 

Like the seating at the opera house, the distribution of swelling aspirations was similarly democratic with the toughest rump for those at the back but with prospects swelling for all. Once one possessed a mantle clock, the next essential tech toy was often a piano whether it was to play the old hymns, new rags, or strive for the Moonlight Sonata.

See previous blog post for link to source information: 

Ansonia Opera House interior:

 http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2013/03/at-opera.html

Welcome to the Sterling Opera House

NOTE:  Special thanks to Markanthony Izzo for his help in providing access to the old Sterling Opera House and for submitting to pose as the opera house phantom. Also thanks to Robert Novak for providing the background history which I have mauled for this journal entry. For a complete and accurate account of the valley schism, I recommend his article on the subject: http://derbyhistorical.org/Derby%20Division.htm

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It is 1889. One has only to step inside the vestibule of Birmingham's new Sterling Opera House to feel how aspirations have swelled since 1870 when Ansonia's Opera House was built. Some say the Sterling is unconscionably extravagant, the product of overweening pride. 

Others say it is civic pride, and lay claim to a kind of vision. They tell us Sterling Hall is a tribute to the memory of an esteemed citizen, the late Charles A. Sterling, and it is a natural partnership between the people of Birmingham and the Sterling Piano Company, a major Birmingham employer which has put up a good part of the money. The results speak, or rather, sing for themselves. The hall is acoustically perfect. It has been built following principles developed personally by Richard Wagner and his architects at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Germany. They say that in one step the hall is making Birmingham the cultural center of the whole Northeast. 

With a hall even better than Mr. Steinway's, on 14th Street in New York City, the greatest artists of the day are flocking to Birmingham. The Birmingham town fathers assert Birmingham's new status demanded the upgrades to public infrastructure and the town green that were recently made. The people of Birmingham, including many who run mills in Birmingham and across the Housatonic River in the newly incorporated borough of Shelton, envision a united Derby with the shining town green on the hill as its cultural center. When that happens, all Derby will benefit.

Across the river in the heavily populated hillsides of Ansonia, people are not so sure. They grumble, what good is an opera house where you can't skate? Our Opera House was designed for practical people and it is as good as it ever was except for the shows lost to the Sterling. It still earns investors a tidy profit. Common sense has made Ansonia the economic center of Derby. Will Ansonia ultimately pay for all the Birmingham frills when the debts come due in Derby township?  Mostly, however,  people are galled by the bombshell that dropped from the front page of The Transcript on the day after Christmas: Birmingham, it announced, is petitioning to become the City of Derby with Ansonia and Shelton made boroughs thereof. No one saw it coming.

People in Ansonia are shocked at the swollen arrogance of it all; in Shelton they are stunned.  Shelton has always been part of the town of Huntington, not the town of Derby.  Of course, all the land in Shelton is owned by the Ousatonic Water Company of Birmingham which built and runs the dam on the Housatonic River. They take the profits of the Shelton Mills, and, since the owners live in Birmingham, Derby is where the taxes get paid. Everyone in Shelton has known that the power company and their slick lawyers have always done as they pleased there with little opposition from the rural, hillside farmers who run the town of Huntington of which Shelton is a borough. 

In Shelton now they are contemplating all the mills on their side of the river and their outstanding record of growth, while making snide comments about the wisdom of Shelton annexing Birmingham some time soon when Shelton becomes a city.

It was a classically tumultuous year, 1889 and in the decades that followed. There were many parties of interest to the doings in the lower valley, and the whole region was soon embroiled. What you thought probably depended on where you lived. The Evening Transcript supported the Derby plan and editorialized, “United in one community we would soon advance to the front rank among the prominent and progressive towns of the State.”  The Sentinel opposed it and supported Ansonia's own petition for separation from Derby and incorporation as an independent town, unshackled from Birmingham's debt. Wherever you lived, you were entitled to claim moral indignation and outrage against the other side with certainty that high ethical principles were at stake. 

Of course there are also those who believed that it was always just about ego, greed and lust for power, and there are those who look back and wonder if it mattered much after all.   Up and down the valley town streets were being paved and lighted and new trolleys took a growing leisure class to places that had not existed a few years before. Whatever you believe, one feels the aspirations of the age inside this hall. The opera house is no longer for skating.