Friday, April 3, 2015

Attic Pigeons



PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Friends tell me houses are haunted by spirits who dreamed their lives there, but old factory buildings are haunted mostly by pigeons. I’ve learned to be wary of the sudden flash and brush of wings urgently scooping air out of the shadows. They were my constant companions, dimly cooing, as I explored and photographed in the attic of Holmes, Booth & Haydens lampworks, and more than once I photographed their attic graves.

Until December of 2013 the 1880, Holmes, Booth, & Haydens lamp works, in Waterbury, was still part of an active brass mill, the last in Brass Valley. I learned yesterday it is to be demolished.

Holmes, Booth & Haydens developed this site before the Civil War. It straddles the original roadbed of the Naugatuck Railroad in the South End of Waterbury. Israel Holmes is the one who in the 1830s unlocked the secrets of England’s brass industry, smuggling the workers and equipment who built the brass industry in America. Hiram Haydens was a mechanical wizard, photographer, sometime artist who held more patents than anyone in Brass Valley. His machine to spin kettles transformed kettle-making. He held patents for oil-burner designs for oil lamps and patents for photographic processes including what is probably the first successful process for photographing directly onto paper. This is the last building standing from the Holmes, Booth and Haydens campus.

The building has three floors and an attic and two stair towers. It is structurally sound and could be used as the cornerstone of new development on this beautiful, but polluted, riverside site.

I know that it’s easy to stand on the sidelines and call for preservation with no real knowledge of the underlying difficulties and costs involved. I also know and respect that most people in the neighborhood look at the old wrecks of factories, and they properly see only blight and danger. It’s hard to discern the gem from the trash. This is a routine mill building, but it is honest masonry laid at the same time as nearby St. Anne’s. Age has given the Holmes, Booth & Haydens Lampworks character and history; it could be a gem if given a new setting. It could be a living link to our past.

Here is a photograph of the exterior of the building that appeared on this blog awhile ago: