Factory Lift

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  I guess I've always believed that there was something mystical about elevators. We get inside, and the doors close, and we stand still, and moments later they open, and we are somewhere else. They are Ferries to another dimension, but they are also places where anything can occur. In 1860 when the five story Grosvenor Hotel in London installed elevators, they were powered by city water pressure, and the visitors arriving from Victoria Station called them "ascending rooms."  However, even then elevators had been around for centuries, and we can be certain that from the moment men learned how to hoist the stones of ancient monuments, they also hoisted themselves and upon reaching a new plane, enjoyed the view. Whether we call them lifts, cranes or hoists, they are all elevators, and even the lowly dumbwaiter plumbs mysterious depths.

Perhaps the magic is a legacy from childhood in New York City. What city kid doesn't run to be first to the elevator for the privilege of pushing the button or remember being scolded for pushing the button too many time?  When I was little, elevators in new Manhattan office towers had just begun using magic buttons that sense body heat, and light green to summon the elevator.  Is that still magic for kids in the age of touch-screens?  Do they still test it to see how close they can get before it turns? Those were the elevators that started so quickly they left my guts on the floor and then stopped fast while my guts kept rising.

At about the same age I recall being amazed that there were elevators that opened on both ends and were so big that cars could drive on to them and get parked in upstairs parking, but they were nothing compared to the elevators at Madison Square Garden where sometimes the passengers were large elephants and the floor was littered with straw and manure. On newsreels I saw the elevators of aircraft carriers that lifted airplanes, but I knew the important magic was not size, but connections.

The ascending room I remember best was the one I rode each time I left or returned to our apartment on the 16th floor at West 86th Street. It had never been updated, as some buildings, to run automatically with no operator.  The room was paneled in worn wood the color of chocolate sauce, but it sparkled, the brass controls were original and polished by use. The ceiling light had facets that glistened and reflected in the large mirror on the back wall that made the room seem large. If it wasn't quite elegant, it seemed enduring, and so it has been. I can still hear the creaking wood as it began moving or came to rest, and the sense of foreboding at rare times when malfunction forced them to open the doors between floors and I realized it was only a box in a deep, brick shaft.

Normally the shaft was hidden by heavy, metal doors. Riding in the cab, I watched them pass at each floor- saw how they locked from inside the elevator with bars geared to fit heavy latches top and bottom. At every floor, but especially at the lobby, the latch bars were worn and shiny at the spot where elevator drivers had grabbed them over decades of opening and closing for passengers. Of course, to me it seemed the elevator operators I knew had always ferried people there, they were eternal, and I knew them all by name.  

I can still picture a tall, grey-haired man with a fading brogue and a black man named Willy and Henry. I especially recall Henry who had a German accent and a military disposition to match his cap and brass buttons. That was sixty years ago, and they still wore uniforms. Behind the metal doors was an accordion gate with two brass handles,  I never knew why there were two because nobody used the first, and the second always looked as if it might soon come loose from overuse. The gate rode in a track at the top and bottom of the elevator cab and it rattled playfully as Henry swung it open or closed, but when he let me try, it took all my strength to budge it an inch or two.  So Henry closed the accordion gate for me before relinquishing to my control the large brass lever that made the elevator go down when you swung it left and up when you swung it right, and, if I was coming home, with both hands I swung it right and began watching for the numbers at each floor except 13 because there was no thirteenth floor. Of course it all depended on if there were other passengers and who they were, but in any case I'd always watch the doors pass, and I learned to distinguish floors by the changes repairs had made to some of the closers and the careless ways the numbers had been applied and how they were chalked in where some had fallen off.  

One can be hypnotized as the floors go by, and elevator culture is a curious thing. Sometimes people strike up spontaneous conversations with complete strangers and at other times pause in silence with friends. People on similar schedules find themselves riding up and down with similar people and over decades never exchange a word or learn each others names, and other people arrive in the midst of a running narrative that finally trails off as the elevator leaves them at their floor, and nobody else says a word, though we have all shared the cross section of an opera with no beginning or end, only the closing door.

If I forgot to keep watching and counting and we got to fifteen, Henry would shift position and look down, and I'd know my stop was next.  If I could land the elevator within an inch of being level with the landing, that was pretty good docking, but Henry was always ready to nudge it up and down until the cab was perfectly level with the landing so no one would trip, before he unswung the accordion gate and pulled the bar to unlatch the door on the 16th floor.  I knew he could land it level in a single move, and I sought to match his control.

I suspect that elevator operators in that same elevator where I grew up are still training a new generation to land the cab in one move.  My niece and nephew, who grew up in the same building a generation after I did, may also have controlled the ascension room and recall operators who guided their navigations, and generations have followed since then. There are few buildings with elevator operators today; they've all gone automatic, and the space is not quite the same without the ferryman. Curious that in this most transitory of crossroads Henry and Willy have become welded to my soul while so many possible encounters were squandered between floors. 

Red, White and Blue

Idle Maple Swifts

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: All pinions and talons and things arachnid.  Here's a more sober description from 1919, production records of the Klots throwing mill: 

"To remove the sericin coating the filaments, mill workers soaked the skeins for several hours in warm water, with soap, oil, glycerin, perfume and other agents. Water was removed by mechanical extraction, or "whizzing," and the skeins were dried, and stretched around octagonal maple reels, or swifts, supported by elastic cotton bands."

Is that what was done here? How did porcelain guides align with swifts, and why are there swifts on both top and bottom.  How did the swifts look hung with silken skeins?  Who alive today remembers when these were spinning and yet so finely has the maple been turned, fitted, and balanced that the swifts remain straight and can still be set spinning with almost no force. Even the elastic bands are intact despite the leaking roof.  

The boxes with the three finger holes on each side are filled with delicate wooden spools. I wouldn't be surprised to learn there were a hundred-thousand of them; they are everywhere.  

And now I see it is a shot in need of one thing more to connect the work with those who worked here, something found among the abundant props on hand that might have been forgotten here or left for the next day's efforts that day before the strike. A worker who was 20 when the mill closed would be 76 today.

Spider Drive

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Whatever other magic may be found at the silk mill, for me it's unique beauty is the intricate delicacy of the works, and I suspect I'm not alone in this respect.  Along each row of machines my eyes followed the even line of porcelain glides that once guided silken threads. How did those filaments pass through the silk-works? How was it rigged?  Which parts turned; which jiggled, bobbed or wound when the works were set in motion, and one could watch the silk spin?  The beauties of the mill strike me as Victorian-haunted and appropriately arachnid, all pinions and talons ingeniously devised to weave a diaphanous web.

It is perhaps this more than anything else that has led me to finish these images in monochrome (in this case, slightly sepia-toned). It was a difficult decision as the mill is naturally colorful, and bare woods are beautifully darkened with age, and work harmoniously in most of the color photos,  In this image I've also bleached the high end tones to emphasize qualities of light and delicacy, and I've set the whole in a frame to contain the extreme divergence.

Brazen Ritual

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  While I was far away at the silk mill, I received word that back in Brass Valley, the brass mill was again casting billets.  I shot this last Tuesday. Willy has just removed one of the distributer cups that spreads the flow of liquid brass into the form below. In a moment, he'll pick it up and rest it inside the edge of the barrel.  With any movement the cups give off sparks.  

I've shot this many times, and the ritual is familiar, and each time it's performed I get to try again to perfect a proven angle or find some new ones during the key moments when the two billets are pulled and set to cool. The ritual is always the same and I keep shooting it because the moments are so filled with the unexpected. 

I was back at the foundry yesterday, but they have again shut down the furnace for a few weeks, and all faces are glum. I will go back again as soon as I learn they are casting. There are more silk mill images to follow, but I couldn't resist putting the orange chiaroscuro of the brass mill beside the B&W chiaroscuro of yesterday's shot in the silk mill.

Silk Throwster's Bench

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  One of the first things I saw when I entered the factory was this small bench.  Clearly, it was put here by previous photographers, and I've found web images showing the same pair of shoes in other locations around the mill. One can imagine a photographer months or years back arriving at this spot, props tucked under his arms as he kneels and arranges a pleasing still-life; perhaps it was a team effort.  Then came the followers adding, subtracting and remixing perfection, though to me the terrifying questions was how to approach the bench. It is a decision fraught with decisions, hulking consequences and immovable givens: windows, doors, light, shadow. I willingly did my part by moving one of the spools of silk and joined the list of others who photographed here.

After that, how far can the boundaries of photographic art be pushed before one has left photography altogether, or is it possible to slip back and forth across the border at will as if the photographic art of capturing the telling instant, and the digital technology that permits infinite reconsideration of every instant, were all one? When the medium can do anything, where does one find landmarks to chart a course through billions upon billions of pixels?

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.