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.

Union Station Tower #3

Connecticut’s Union Station tower landmarks Waterbury for millions of motorists traveling through the Naugatuck River Valley on Rt. 8 or across it on I-84. Standing 24 stories high is a masterpiece of design and of the art of virtuoso bricklaying. Although much admired from the outside, few people beside clockmakers have ever been inside. What is there beside the 4-sided, Seth Thomas clock? My thanks to the Pape family, owners of the Waterbury Republican newspaper, for allowing me to answer that question.

 

Upon entering the bottom of the shaft I found myself in a somber brick space surrounded on all sides by nothing but brick.  The tower wall is entirely self-supporting all the way to the top and unreinforced by any interior structure. Two wooden diaphragms divide the shaft into three roughly equal spaces. A metal stair clings to the brickwork as it winds in giant leaps through each space. Waterbury’s masons were skilled at the precision bricklaying needed to erect hundred foot tall masonry stacks that exhausted crud from the factories on the valley floor. However, the 245 foot tall campanile is a work of bricklaying virtuosity rising regulr and unvaried through the first two of the three chambers.

 

Reaching the third chamber I stood beside the pigeon-proofed hands of Seth Thomas; the top space, the head of the campanile, contains the clock, a tiny mechanism with thin metal arms that cross and link via tiny gears and a runt of a mechanism. On repeated visits to such clock towers I’ve taken few photographs of the clockworks which are always a visual disappointment. In this case I was distracted by the magical constellation of tiny windows which appear as subtly etched details on the outside but become a magic lantern inside.

 

Ascending into the top third of the campanile I passed eye-level with the clock. Unlike bells cast from refined metals and tuned to make one’s guts reverberate, I’ve learned that the clockworks that turn the magnificent arms of time on the outside look like little more than erector set parts at the crossing of two long puny bars on the inside. The ends of the bars disappear through the walls to motionless hands. It just isn’t a picture. However, the tiny windows of the head of the campanile, almost invisible on the outside, become a constellation of tiny lights whose beams I would pass through.

 

 

 

Union Station Tower #2

 Union Station tower is visible from almost everywhere in downtown Waterbury. McKim, Mead & White, who designed it, were the foremost American architects of the late 19th, and early 20th centuries and leaders of the City Beautiful movement. It had been in MM&W’s Classical temple to agriculture at the 1893, Columbian Exposition that Westinghouse and Tesla demonstrated the magic that would electrify the 20th century. The humanistic city of the future and its technologies were to be clothed in the venerable, architectural vocabulary of the Classical past. MM&W also happened to be designing Penn Station in NYC.

The initial Union Station design had no tower. The empty shaft was added to MM&W’s shaftless design at the insistence of an executive on the railroad board, we’re told. Or was it added so that Waterbury’s City Beautiful message might be seen above the soot? It stands 245 feet (24 stories) above the street, an enormous sculptural monument anchoring Waterbury’s importance and refinement along the Naugatuck Valley and the NYNH&H rail line to wherever it leads. The railroad board executive’s insistence on the tower assured his message would be a landmark throughout the valley and beyond, then and in the future. It also helped strangers to Waterbury get back to the station when their visits concluded.

 

 

 

The Last Stack

 The last smoke stack in Waterbury’s South End remains where once a forest of masonry and metal stacks and vents kept the valley perpetually capped in gray haze. If it seems small, that’s because the photo is taken from 24 stories up, on top of the Union Station campanile, now home to the Waterbury Republican-American. The three-story power plant that was once attached to the stack, was recently demolished. The buildings behind it are in process of demolition. It was all part of the Benedict & Burnham Brass Co, later to be part of Anaconda-American Brass. The last brass manufacturing in the valley ceased long ago, in 2012. It was the subject of my book, Brass Valley: The Fall of an American Industry. (Schiffer Books: https://schifferbooks.com/products/brass-valley)

I’m grateful wo William Pape, the Pape family and assisting staff of the Waterbury Republican-American for allowing my to photograph from and inside of Union Station Tower. More photos to follow.