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.

Behind TIme

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: "The Men Who Warped Time"

We thought Time was our natural inheritance, god-given and not subject to earthly tampering, but Time was the first to change. The clockmaker's wizardry looks intricate consisting of astronomical calculations and tedious tinkering with gears and escapements, teasing out tiny efficiencies and tuning verges to mimic the heavens and meter out our moments precisely. We scarcely understand or remember how the clockmakers came to possess and warp time, nor do we recall tattered circadian harmonies.

Clockmakers were in the Naugatuck Valley early, working in wood even before the first brass mill rolled metal, and it's hard to overestimate their influence. In 1801 Eli Terry registered the first United States patent for a clock mechanism. It was a clear sign of genius. The mechanism called, "an equation clock," modulated the flow of minutes to mimic sun time, perceptual time, time as it was given by the heavens. 

It was no simple thing to get a clunky machine to figure the tilt of the earth and the living flux of days as they varied in length; to get escapement and verge to lay down 86,400 moments in the ever-changing span between every sunrise and sunrise. Today such a clock would be an antique, always hopelessly wrong.  It measured old time, the time most people knew, but it would never have made Eli Terry famous or wealthy in the times ahead.

Most of Eli Terry's clocks were not equation clocks. They were ordinary clocks that beat in even moments. His clocks became famous because they made time cheap. In 1806 he accepted a contract to make 4000, wooden, 30 hour, shelf clocks in three years at $4 each. Creating a 30 hour, shelf clock in wood presented technical challenges, but skeptics laughed at the thought of producing any clock for $4, and nobody could make 4000 of them in three years when the most a single clockmaker could turn out in a year was under a dozen. Clocks were expensive tech toys for aristocrats, or they were purchased as a common community resource.

Terry formed a partnership with two young joiners and spent the first year designing the clock, and the systems and jigs to mass produce it. If parts could be uniformly made, much time could be saved in precision finishing. The partners spent the remaining two years refining methods, and producing the required number. Terry was mass producing time and delivering it to the masses; it was a milestone in mass production comparable to Henry Ford's a century later, but Terry had learned enough to know what to do next.

He sold his share of the business to his partners and took all he had learned about mass production and clocks and applied it to the design of a wholly new, made-for-mass-production, 30 hour, shelf clock, and in 1816 began manufacturing the first machine of any kind made from wholly interchangeable parts. By 1825 Terry held 5 distinct patents and his clock delivered time to the rest of us and dominated clockmaking for 25 years. In 1833 Terry retired wealthy from labors. He spent the next 22 years quietly making unique, fine, precision time pieces the old-fashioned way, fitting each wheel to it's place in a unique clockwork.

It was for Terry's partners, Seth Thomas, Sirus Hoadley, Chauncy Jerome and others to ramp up the production of Terry's clock and fix us firmly in the gears of clock time. Chauncey Jerome was an innovator, and after the railroads came through, he took Terry's methods and translated them for manufacturing clocks of stamped metal. He made time even less expensive and more accurate, and he was widely imitated. 

In 1813 Seth Thomas, another partner, went over the hill from the original Plymouth shop and began manufacturing Terry's clocks in the part of the Valley known then as Plymouth Hollow. His success was in making Terry's manufactured clocks look hand-crafted. Now everybody could dream of having a parlor, and Plymouth Hollow became Thomaston. Of influential clocks in public places, few can vie with the famous, four-sided clock that sets the pace in the center of Grand Central Station; it is a Seth Thomas clock. Although the Seth Thomas Co., continued making clocks up until 2001, they never made an electric clock.

When clocks were wooden they spent half their time in darkness; before the Civil War we had not lit night to resemble day, but we were already leaving Circadia. In 1850, we agreed to standard time zones so that railroads could make timetables, and more and more we needed clocks.  The hands of Seth Thomas's Grand Central clock still gracefully circle like planets orbiting a star, as we circle round the clock's faces toward our trains and planes and cars. How are we changed by glimpsing digital watches blinking our disconnected seconds as we wait for the train to move? How do our tools change us? 

And when we first stepped from Circadia, was there shock? How did the harmonies change as we began to dwell in a "well-tempered" world with rigid, 24-hour intervals? There is a curious incident, a marker in the history of human consciousness that relates; in 1826 citizens of New Haven were outraged when Eli Terry set his new clock into operation on the town Green? What feelings prompted their ire?

Eli Terry was a master at wooden tower clocks, and one was needed on the New Haven Green to mark time for the daily firing of the canon by which the residents of the town set their sun dials. The clock that Eli Terry provided had a complicated mechanism that operated two sets of dials. One of these dials was operated by Terry's equation mechanism that varied the length of hours throughout the year in order to provide the correct sun time.  The other dial offered the clock time we use today.  

The New Haven citizens protested - wanted nothing of new-fangled, clock time - wanted it gone. Heated words and esoteric arguments were exchanged in the local newspapers. Terry himself contributed anonymously to the exchanges, but Terry still owned the clock. He showed his spite by removing the equation mechanism leaving only warped, clock time. Of course, in reality the matter had already been settled. It was decided by the many clocks of Terry's design that were already mass-produced, inexpensive and chiming the hours in homes and parlors for a decade before the protest and a half century before the lights came on.

Seth Thomas Tower

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

To Eli Terry and his Four-Dollar Clocks

We rode the even gait of time

like cowboys on the drive,

easy in the saddle;

or like turnips and beans

in the black earth.

Daybreak opened our eyes

as the cock opened our ears;

we made music

when there was moonshine.

Until the wooden wheels of time,

the even grinding of their teeth

reset the axis of the earth

so equal moments fill each hour,

snug as cans sealed in a carton.

We sleep while the sun shines

or party 'til dawn

or work the nightshift

to moonlight at daybreak.

Hiddenhurst in Sunset

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

House of Laughs

The illusion of sunset 

upends me, 

sends me 

reeling like 

a comet's tail uncertain 

of any truth but 

the sensation of a flight through time, 

my wild ride in the funhouse.

Resolute Hay Barn

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  

When I last visited, 

regimental ventilators 

still stood watch 

over truant cats

and the putrid carcass of a pig,

and the hay mow dreamed 

of mooing cows 

though the floors were gone 

right down to the undercroft.

I wonder what the Winter's wrought.

Hay Barn

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Like a Violin

Nothing so hollow 

as an empty hay barn

in a fallow field

Leaning like dry grass

Hunched against absent winds

the great ridge pole arching

in the tensile magnificence of wood

fibers stretched against decline

and the tortured harmonics

of its splintering

without song

on these Cartesian hills.

Factory Buzz

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  I visited the foundry in Ansonia this week and followed the old canal that was dug in 1845 a mile-and-a-half to the Kinneytown Dam.  The canal used to run through the middle of town.  Most of it is intact, but only old-timers know its there.  Three of the men were at the foundry, but one was making a social call, and it is still idle.  

Upstream in Waterbury, however,  tube, "in the pipe," so to speak, continues to be processed, and there's still plenty to be photographed. Here, George guides a bundle of partially finished tube to a rack near the draw benches, while Alfred waits in the crane for the signal to lower the tube into the bin.  

In the background, just behind the big, gray scale, you can make out the metal stair-ladder that goes up on top of the extruder. The large hydraulic pumps that drive it can be reached from a catwalk there.  The whole shed was constructed quickly in the build up to World War I and has a sawtooth roof and mechanical iron louvres typical of the period.  The extruder (operations photographed earlier) dates from the 1940s and WWII.

Alfred's day is spent in the crane shuttling up and down the central bay.  Here he has assistance in unhooking the straps, but he needs no such help. In the other bays and in this bay on other shifts, the cranes are operated from below.

What draws my camera, however, is composing the incredible detail and intricacy.

The Weight of History

Carbonation, Cha-cha-cha

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  It might be a holy rite.  Like a thurible showering incense in ritual purification, each distributer cup showers sparks as Mike sets it aside so he can hoist the new billets from the furnace and set them down to cool.

Waltzing with the Runner Box

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Once the billets have been poured, the runner box must be removed to get at the billets.  It is a cumbersome task, attaching the crane to the runner box, lifting it while holding and working the controls for the crane in one hand, and holding the handle of the runner box and balancing its load and guiding it with the other.  Slowly Mike must back across the floor and set the runner box down to cool, out of his way as he goes back to remove the billets.

For an earlier shot of Mike scraping the runner box, click here: http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2012/03/scraping-runner-box.html.

Raking the Runner Box

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  The runner box is a heavy, steel channel in the form of a "T." When set in place on the furnace, the base of the "T" catches the pour which flows along the channel to the two tips at the top of the "T."  From there the metal flows through holes on the bottom of the channel into two distributer cups that help to spread the metal flowing down into the molds so no air pockets develop. 

The channel is lined with insulating cement, and before the pour begins it is covered in a layer of charcoal.  As the hot metal flows over the charcoal, the charcoal burns to keep the metal from losing heat while flowing to the molds.  Periodically Mike rakes out the channel in the runner box to keep cooling metal from clogging the channel.

Mike

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  I was back at the foundry again on Wednesday as I have been on and off with no notice in this journal. Immediately I was told there had been layoffs here and at the manufacturing plant in Waterbury. I had heard earlier that they had been hit hard by the sequester, that the work that had been done to bring in new contracts by adding a new alloy might be all undone by the stalemate in Washington. At least those were the rumors among the men.

Most of the men shrugged. A few said it was a good time of year to have some time off, but nobody knew if this was time off or time over - the last brass poured in Brass Valley. In any case, it was too immediate, too personal for anyone to think it might be the end of an epoch. Two billets were cast on Wednesday, and they told me the last two billets would be cast and pulled at 9:30 the next morning, Thursday. I was there, and it proved interesting in that the billets needed to be longer than usual.

I described the unusual manner of pouring the billets into rings rather than molds in an earlier post (http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/search?q=molds).  The usual manner of removing the  billets is to lower them beneath the rings and swing the assembly holding the rings to the side.  This time the billets were too long to lower beneath the rings so instead, they were cooled to shrink and then, first pushed up a couple of feet through the ring far enough to get a chain on the end so the crane could lift each one up the rest of the way through the ring.  A three-ton, singeing-hot billet dangling from a crane always looks precarious, but these were yanked up extra high in the rafters, and the chain was very close to the end of each billet.  

There's a moment in this process that I'm always ready for and always surprised by. It is when the billet passes by, and I feel the immense wave of heat radiating from it; how easily it might slip! I'm always ready with an escape route, and I'm always surprised by how hot it is and must stop myself from pulling back and losing the shot.  That this billet was gray rather than orange did not make it feel any cooler.  That made it even more surprising.

The billets cast on Wednesday and Thursday will be trucked to Waterbury for processing while the factory in Ansonia goes idle and in Washington, D.C., Congress claims to know how to create jobs but remains deadlocked and goes on vacation. On Thursday morning, March 28, 2013, two extra long billets were cast. May they not be the last.

At the Opera

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL, Ansonia Opera House, Part 2: 

Nothing happens at the opera house anymore. Most people don't even know it's here. It's a relic of its time and silent but for pigeons; except for those with the ears to hear more and the imagination to remember. 

The opera house speaks of the decade after the Civil War had boosted manufacturing. Factories increased production to turn out cannons and bullet shells for the war and swelled villages up and down Brass Valley. Transportation was good enough that performers were taking acts on the road and looking for good halls and new audiences.  In 1870 business leaders of the Borough of Ansonia, not yet a town, decided that Ansonia needed an Opera House. It seemed like a good idea. It would be the first in Connecticut.  It would make Ansonia a cultural Center.

It seemed like a good idea, a place for wholesome entertainment the whole family can enjoy; a place for performers to stop along their circuit: minstrels and medicine shows and opera stars on tour. A place they can play to paying crowds - not a theater for lowlifes but a cultural institution for the arts, a place our town can be proud of - a place also where borough meetings can be held or town meetings if Ansonia becomes an independent village. 

It should be a place that can be rented out for weddings and  jugglers and magicians and patent medicine salesmen. Think what crowds would pay if the great Jenny Lind made another U.S. tour and came and sang in Ansonia!  What a profound and uplifting impact that might have on young people especially!

It seemed like a good idea, an opera house on Main street, one with a row of shops on the first floor bringing in high rents, and a not-quite-grand promenade past suites of offices boasting the town's most distinguished address and similarly high rents to the more-nearly grand stair that folds back on itself as it reaches the third floor and patrons come face to face with the grand stage of Ansonia's own Opera House.

They built it in 1870. The men who had pioneered the brass and copper industry in the 1830s and 40s were in the 1870s becoming elderly and could look around them at towns they had built. Up and down the valley they sought to burnish their legacy with public buildings and infrastructure that would last.  What better investment than an opera house, a place to keep idle workers occupied and out of trouble? Not a music hall or a theater like you find in the sinful cities, but an Opera House to give the community culture.

The new Ansonia Opera House was run by Ansonia's leading citizens, investors in the enterprise who ran it so as to always turn a profit. When transportation improved so that audiences in Ansonia could easily travel to New Haven, New Haven stopped doing the Valley circuit. Even then the opera house could still take traveling vaudeville and novelty acts and more and more people were getting married and then there was the skating. Annually high school seniors took their diplomas here and it became part of their lives. In this manner the Ansonia Opera House continued to serve the community and profit investors through World War II.

After the war things were different. More and more people went to the movies or stayed home and most of the time the opera house was dark, except for the skating, until that stopped too, and the school had its own auditorium.  Everyone was getting cars and televisions, and the old place was feeling creaky.  We took to the road and the opera house was taken over by a community of pigeons.  Back in the 70s some people tried to start an art center here and chased the pigeons out, but there were battles with town officials. It was a new age for fire safety too. After one performance the effort lost its wind, and the pigeons were back. It was another twenty years before the opera house was sold off by the City of Ansonia for payment of back taxes. The new owner patches things as best he can, but now it's always dark and there are always pigeons.

Ansonia Opera House

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Skaters at the Opera House  

Everything important happened here,

weddings, graduations and town meetings. 

Romeo passed word to meet Juliet here, 

Mimi died,

Uncle Tom suffered dutifully 

while we held hands. 

We loved 

especially the magicians and their magic rabbits, 

Saturday afternoons everyone roller skated here, 

roller skating at the opera, 

and in the evening men sang and danced and juggled.

What spices can embalm the memories?

Will salt or smoke or drying make them last?

the voice cadances of childhood friends, 

this ones smooth assertiveness, 

that ones hesitation. 

a voice that smiled, 

eyes like kindling,

sometimes 

almost 

nothing 

we can name

yet a crystal cadence

etched on memory.

We fall nameless 

like oval photos 

from the flaking album, 

and our spirits return to the old opera house, 

eternally circling there as when we were skaters.

Composition in Primary Colors

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:   

Empty Factories

They are like cloisters

battered and broken,

time feels bigger here

space grander 

than walls imply

When time stops,

instants are eons,

and a drop 

of river's flow

is oceans overflowing

They are like cloisters,

I walk by stained and broken glass

ponder how things decay,

my tripod aligns and spreads the rowed columns,

my lens fixes each time-sculptured brick in its crystal grip

When motion ceases

silence rumbles,

by and by

the quickness

of black night

They are like cloisters

When it rains the ceilings run, 

and ducts and pipes channel fountains, 

and cascades from broken skylights fall 

to pools, and tin roofs thunder.