Across Greening Bay toward Flying Mt. & Somes Sound

A short walk along the rocky shore from the house we recently stayed in is a point of land dividing Greening Bay from Southwest Harbor. Seated on a rock above the point I can look left across Greening Bay to the deep cleft where Acadian mountains divide, and water flows into the glacial loch that is Somes Sound. We climbed the mountains along the left edge of the opening and hiked along the ridge above Somes Sound. Looking right from my seat at the point the view is across the mouth Southwest Harbor and between islands to the open sea. It is still June and there is little traffic in or out of the harbor. The docks are loaded with lobster traps soon to be set.

 

Fleur-de-lis Swamp

Less than a week ago a few yellow irises began their annual show, poking pointed tips, like candle flames, up through the water. Like most of us, they are invaders in America from Europe, Asia and Africa, but they feel very much at home in the swamps around Little Pond in Litchfield, CT. , and, in any case, once established they are difficult to eradicate. The irises are, in fact, beneficial to the water quality and are used sometimes as water treatment to remove excess nitrogen and phosphorus. 

 

Today the flowers were in full blossom and the shallower areas of the swamp had become fields of yellow irises.

 

 

Cabbage Light #2 — "Solar Sail"

 

 

Cabbage Light

 

Cruising Upstream in Cabbage Soup

 

Not Just Cabbages, Little Pond, Litchfield, CT, May 11, 2023

 

Today's Cabbage #3

Even as new skunk cabbage continue to unfurl, the pond is turning to soup & salad.

 

Today's Cabbage 2

 Actually, now this is yesterday's cabbage. 

Today's Cabbage

 

Farrel Machine Tool — Sand Elevator from Powerhouse

 

Farrel Machine Tool — Face of the Sand Elevator

 

Farrel Machine Tool's Sand Elevator in Ansonia, CT, has always seemed to me like a giant face. For many years I wondered what was inside but never dared to climb the rusting stairs dangling from its chin. It is one of the most distinctive monuments I know to Connecticut's industrial past.

Abstraction Begins with a Rectangle

 

Moments after the northbound train leaves Ansonia Station it passes beneath the red Farrel bridge through a ring of worksheds. Here, before the Civil War — even before the railroad laid the first track up the valley, Farrel Machine Company were casting iron and steel parts. The powerhouse at the back of the yard powered the operation and remained intact until 2021.

 

Cape Cod Memory, 2018

 

RIP2

 

Farrel Foundry RIP

The historic Farrel Foundry, built in 1890 and the largest facility of its kind in New England, was demolished Friday. The first picture below was taken June 17, 2011 on my first visit there when the Foundry was filled with used industrial electronics from dismantled factories. The building had been recently sold, and the prior owner was beginning to empty it. 

 The second photo was taken Sunday, Mar. 5, 2023 after crews had demolished the building. The second photo was taken from a position well to the right of the first photo but looking the same way. The large girder in both photos is the same member.

Unnamed

 

Naugatuck Green, Dec. 20

 

Education in Naugatuck (#4)

When the time came in 1901 for the town to replace Naugatuck's aging high school, the design was again given to the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, and an appropriately lofty site was chosen further up the hill and with a more commanding view over the Green below. It would open in 1905. By then MM&W had designed many of the buildings that give the Green its character. They were the preferred architects of railroad president and industrialist John Howard Whittemore who, advocating “City Beautiful,” had, over many years, paid to make Naugatuck a showplace of the movement.

The high school MM&W designed on the hillside site is nothing, if not disciplined — a granite, marble and brick, Ionic, 3-story Classical temple, restrained from any hint of wayward Beaux Arts eclecticism. It is a buff-colored temple fit for Athena and for the education of Naugatuck’s next generation. Carved above the marble of the entablature is a cartouche quoting Charles William Eliot, “The fruit of liberal education is not learning but the capacity and desire to learn — not knowledge but power.” It’s probably safe to assume Whittemore had considerable say in that choice.

Charles William Eliot was president of Harvard through the transformational years 1869 to 1909 and was a leader bringing profound reforms to American education at all levels. He raised public school graduation standards and broadened high school curricula to include teaching of the sciences and of foreign languages. Eliot served as president of the National Education Association and on a ten member national commission whose 1893 report influenced schools and school boards everywhere, beginning reforms leading to the creation of the first “junior high schools.”

“…not knowledge but power.” I’m still wondering exactly how to understand that.

Salem School, by William Rutherford Mead (#3)

 

McKim, Mead & White were celebrity architects serving America’s elite. William Rutherford Mead was the cousin of President Rutherford B. Hayes, he was involved with the American Academy in Rome, was a man of substance, wealth and contacts. Mead, described as "authoritative" and "quiet," was known as, “the center of the office,” hiring and firing, overseeing the jobs and production that are even more the task of architects than flashy design. Mead is credited with relatively few original designs, but the central building facing onto the Naugatuck Town Green, the Salem School, was primarily Mead's design. 

 

That a school was central to the new City Beautiful to be built, and at the top of the green, looking down the Green's central axis toward the commercial center of town suggests the importance the creators of Naugatuck and the architects placed on education.

Planning the City Beautiful with McKim, Mead & White (2)

The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was transformational for the town of Naugatuck. However, it began long before the fair had begun, in November, 1891, McKim, Mead & White had commissions in the town. Among them to design a new school on the hill above town and to design a formal town green below the school, between the Episcopal and Congregational churches where a stream from the hillside flowed east toward the river across a level plateau that had always been an informal green. The first town meeting had been held on that green almost a half century earlier, and a Civil War monument had been erected there in 1888. 

 

At the center of the formal Green, in an age before automobiles, MM&W, under the direction of William Rutherford Mead, would design a water fountain to bring cold, fresh drinking water to those who passed. Architecturally, the fountain established a formal axis from the head of Maple Street in the east, across the center of the level square that formed the Green, and up the hill, climaxing in the symmetry of the proposed Salem School. This core of Naugatuck’s future City Beautiful cityscape would be in place by 1895. Over the next quarter century McKim, Mead & White would play a major role in designing many of the buildings that surround the Naugatuck Green, the only green in Connecticut designed entirely by an architectural firm, truly a product of the City Beautiful Movement.

Naugatuck City Beautiful 1 — Henry Bacon's Train Station

Naugatuck is the next town south of Waterbury along the Naugatuck River’s path to the Housatonic. It’s small size and history as the corporate center of the American rubber industry made Naugatuck a showplace for architecture and small town planning that resulted from the City Beautiful Movement. By 1910, for travelers who got off the train there, the town's gateway was a new train station designed by, architect, Henry Bacon who was then also at work on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.

Henry Bacon had worked earlier for McKim, Mead & White, was mentored closely by Charles McKim and was his personal representative at the 1889, Paris Exposition and the, architecturally transformative, 1893, Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The Naugatuck Station's style has been described as “Spanish Colonial” and “Italian Villa,” though my own sense is that it is eclectic and original.  

(Note: The entry projection on the front is a recent addition)

Ghostly Letters on the Power House Wall

When Charles Benedict looked out from his “cottage," high on the hill north of Waterbury Green, he might often have looked to this spot below him where the Naugatuck River flows between the brass factories of Holmes, Booth & Haydens on this side of the river and the factories of Benedict & Burnham, across the bridge. Not so much competitors as conspirators, the two brass companies had divvied up the market and brought wealth to Waterbury. After WW1 they would all be part of a combined operation known as American Brass Company, and the entity once known as Benedict & Burnham ceased to exist. However, on the side of the old Benedict & Burnham power house, until the day this past summer, 2022, when the power house was demolished, you could still read the forgotten name, "Benedict & Burnham,” painted large in ghostly letters on the power house wall, though the company that went by that name hadn’t existed for more than 100 years.

 

 

 

 

Carrie Welton's Revenge

 

They say Carrie Welton, daughter of brass company partner, Joseph Welton, rebelled against a succession of private schools to which she was sent, but was known for her love of animals. She would have been 21 in 1863 when the family moved into Rose Hill, where she kept cats, dogs, rabbits and a black stallion named Knight of the Woods. She and Knight became known for galloping through town and frightening Waterbury pedestrians. When Carrie died she left the much of her estate to the ASPCA and the rest for the creation of a fountain, "for people and horses," and with a bronze statue of Knight at the head of the Waterbury Green.
 

Rose Hill Overlook

An earlier post discussed Wm. H. Scovill of Scovill Brass who once owned this house (http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2022/11/union-station-from-cast-iron-gate-to.htm), once the finest in Waterbury. Style is the outer form of spirit and it has always seemed to me that Rose Hill might well have emerged out of the pages of a Hawthorn short story. Perhaps part of that comes from its apparent stubborn indifference to the changes happening all around it and to the untended hillside hump on which it sits and from which it overlooks the city. Carrie Welton’s time in the house adds a plot line: https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/carrie-welton.

Charles Benedict's Prospects

The architects of Charles Benedict’s hilltop fantasy cottage were Palliser & Palliser, champions of Queen Anne or “Stick Style” architecture. The house sits proudly atop an expansive lawn positioned to ensure that nothing encroaches on its commanding prospect over Waterbury. 

Benedict-Miller was designed to be a showpiece for its owners, so it was also a showpiece for promoting Stick Style and shaping American Stick Style dreams and fantasies as can be seen among houses on the grid of streets below and and in prosperous neighborhoods beyond. Queen Anne Stick Style as its accumulation of names reveals sought to look at once casual, rustic and graciously aristocratic.

In addition to designing mansions for the wealthy, Palliser & Palliser sought to bring Queen Anne Style to democratic America by publishing "pattern books” so those who owned no brass mills might have a peak and a tower, properly spread with timbers and a smorgasbord of brick and shingle patterns and rooms glittering with jeweled light through transoms of leaded glass.

 

Union Station Tower from Timbered Brass

From the porches and through the windows of Benedict-Miller Cottage Charles Benedict might have watched Benedict & Burnham thrive and Waterbury transform from farm town to industrial hub, a major junction in the busy railroad system that moved valuable goods and busy people. 

However, Charles Benedict died young, only occupying his new “cottage” for a very short time. In 1889 it was purchased from his daughter by Charles Miller, part owner of "Miller & Peck,” prosperous, Waterbury, dry goods merchants from 1860 to 1978.
 

 

King-size, Queen Anne Timbered Brass

 

Charles Benedict was Waterbury royalty, son of  brass industry founder and patriarch, Aarron Benedict, known widely as "Deacon Benedict,” and Charlotte Porter, daughter of Abel Porter, a founder of Scovill Brass and reputed to be the first person in America to mix copper and zinc to make brass. In 1879, at the top of the slope above their cousins' Rose Hill, and commanding a longer and broader prospect over the Naugatuck Valley, Charles Benedict built a king-size, Queen Anne, timbered, brick and shingle, multi-gabled fantasy soberly known as Benedict-Miller Cottage. Charles's father, Deacon Benedict's home is one of a dozen along Hillside Avenue, beyond the perimeter fence of Benedict-Miller's grand lawn, that face up the hill as if in homage to Charles Benedict's, Queen Anne palace.
 

Union Station from the cast-iron gate to Rose Hill, Waterbury

I know relatively little of the history of this cast iron gate except that it stands at the street before the front entrance to 63 Prospect Street, Waterbury. If it is contemporary with the house behind it, it was put here in 1852 by William H. Scovill, powerful citizen, sometime mayor of Waterbury and brass industry president, on a site with what was then the most commanding prospect of the town’s green spread below along the bottom of the hill. 

The home, known as "Rose Hill," would later be famously occupied by Scovill's descendants, so called, “barons of brass." Occupants would include eccentric Caroline Welton, only child of brass aristocrats, Joseph C. Welton and Jane E. Porter. Carrie's antics on horseback were topics for gossip. When she died she left money for to immortalize her black stallion, Knight, with a bronze statue at the head of the town green. Knight had, it was said, kicked her father to death.
 

Union Station #6 — McKim, Mead & White Details

Whether or not McKim, Mead & White approved of adding a 24-story tower to their Union Station design in Waterbury, their crisp terra cotta and brick detailing make it as beautiful up close as from a distance and, despite the views of early critics, I find the detailing makes the proportions pleasing.

 

Corbeling

 

Autumn Swamp Grass, Little Pond, Litchfield

 

Autumn Is Eye Candy #3, White Memorial, Litchfield, CT

 

Autumn Is Eye Candy #2

 

Autumn Is Eye Candy

All Hallows Eve

 

Making Hay on Rabbit Hill

 

Benedict & Burnham Powerhouse from Jewelry Street, June 29, 2022

 

The powerhouse of the Benedict & Burnham Brass Co. was newly visible from Jewelry Street in Waterbury in June after manufacturing sheds, that once crowded this tree, were demolished. Benedict & Burnham Brass Co, once the largest manufacturer of brass and copper appliances in America, was founded before the Civil War. Shortly after I took this photo on June 29, the powerhouse was demolished, leaving only the stack.

Union Station Tower #4 — Brickwork and Needlepoint

Bricks made from dried mud are among the oldest of building materials. Among the walls that tumbled at Jericho were some made of brick. Although bricks have been made in many shapes and sizes, the vast majority today are stamped with the maker’s name and proportioned to fit the mason's hand which grasps the brick, while the opposing hand, with intuitive precision, lays on mortar and torso pivots to add each brick to a lengthening row on a rising wall. Some specifications call for the binding mortar to be shaped to match the mason’s fingertip. Brick always tells a human story; it flourishes where communities gather. The highest brick tower rises one human handful at a time.

Even as human intellect makes the most practical of bricks, the human fantasy of McKim, Mead & White finds the most impractical ways of piling them; vertical surfaces are difficult to mortar. This brickwork on the arches of Union Station is to common masonry as fine needlepoint is to routine stitchery.