The Torrington Company — 2

Does photographic beauty lie in the subject photographed or in the photograph itself?

Photographs such as this remind me of the compositional rigor that seems to drive my enjoyment of photography. For me, every photograph poses the question of the rectangle. How will it be cast over the forms that attract me? The viewers' eyes must be drawn along an interesting path that syncs the picture’s tempo, tensions, mood, and that makes the rectangle whole and complete. 

How the photograph is “finished,” is, as Ansel Adams, who played Bach’s Inventions on a piano, tells us, merely orchestration, and the original negative or RAW file is the score which can be re-orchestrated at any time. Digital technology has vastly changed the nature of orchestrating and displaying digital photographs.

 

The Standard Plant, Torrington Company

Even with a flashlight, it took a few seconds for our eyes to penetrate the murky darkness that extended like a mine shaft into a sequence of factory sheds indifferently spotted with the light from broken roof monitors. Variously, passages connected to similar sheds left and right, some glowing, others black as a crypt and all empty down to the walls and vacant. What went on here?

I’ve learned the first of the sheds was built in 1906 to house a spinoff of the Excelsior Needle Company (see: New England Pin Co. No.2). These buildings would serve the newly formed Standard Spoke and Nipple Company. Motor cars were still gadgets, but bicycles had become practical and popular, high-speed transportation requiring strong legs but neither hay nor barn. The new sheds would have been filled with machine tools strung together by belts and ropes to a hungry steam engine and the workers who knew how to use these to make products that wound include not just needles, bicycle pedals and handlebars, but metal tubing, machine screws, carpet sweepers, piano hardware, ball bearings, eventually spark plugs as well as bicycle spokes and nipples. At its peak the Torrington Company’s Standard Plant, as it would be known after 1917, would employ more than 1000 workers, tho nobody has worked here for 2 or 3 decades.

 

Washington Street Bridge

Iron bridges spanned the era between wood and steel. Those like the one on Washington Street are sometimes called “Pumpkin Seed” or “Bow String” bridges and were built throughout New England and beyond by the Berlin Iron Bridge Company. Officially known as lenticular truss bridges, they follow principles of a patented, “parabolic, lenticular, truss design employing paired elliptical arches connected at the ends and cross-braced between. The trusses which carried the loads used cast iron for compression members and wrought iron for tension. Berlin Iron and Bridge would build nearly 400 lenticular truss bridges throughout New England, NY, NJ, PA and as far away as Texas. The Washington Street bridge, built in 1879 when Berlin Bridge Company was still called the Corrugated Metal Company, is thought to be the earliest of them.

Interesting info here: http://next.owlapps.net/owlapps_apps/article?id=67923819&lang=en

The Mad River, Waterbury

The Mad River follows a ravine between Mill Street and River Street in Waterbury, CT, through what looks like a park but whose chain link border is a legacy of its toxic history. The river flows under two bridges beside where South Main crosses Washington Street, moments before its waters blend with those of the Naugatuck. The view is upstream from the historic, 1881, iron bridge on Washington Street across a modern highway bridge on South Main. Once this was the center of acres of furnaces and factories making the metal that would become buttons and pins, oil lamps, clocks, bullet casings and tea kettles. It’s a busy intersection of roads and rivers with an awkward jog put in place when traffic was horse-drawn wagons and laborers trudging to and from work in shifts. 

The odd intersection isolates a tiny, right triangle of real estate with legs along the crossing avenues and a Mad River hypotenuse. It is a site almost too small for a building, but a four story apartment house known as “The Louis Block" has stood there since 1890 with balconies buttressed out over the river to make its narrow plot more commodious. Delicate brick work on the front (not shown) of the Louis Block have caused speculation that it might be the work of Robert Wakeman Hill, sometimes called CT’s “State Architect.” Across the river from the Louis Block several bays of train trestle, hidden behind the foliage, are all that’s left of a timber structure that crossed here carrying rumbling, puffing freight loads of manufactured goods and raw materials through the Mad River Ravine. 

The Waterbury Companies was founded by Aaron Benedict to make military buttons for the War of 1812. It grew to be the Benedict & Burnham Brass Company making buttons, clocks and eventually making injection molded plastic parts. The Waterbury Companies is still making buttons that stylishly supply clothiers such as Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers. 

The iron bridge is the work of the Berlin Iron Bridge Company which also fabricated steel to build the historic Farrel Foundry downstream in Ansonia. 

from Washington Street upstream on the Mad River

up the Mill Street - River Street Ravine

from the Mad River Falls toward South Broadway

Looking across S. Main St., down Washington St. to the iron bridge

 

Strutting 3 — Between Hoods

 

Strutting 2

 

Strutting 1

...continuing the journey now to 2014 and once more reversing the view (see previous post) on the vacant Benedict & Burnham lot: The corner of the powerhouse is in the foreground. The offices are on the right, and the building in the center blocks our view of the other shed that stood on what is now the vacant plaza. The stair tower at its corner was structurally sound at the time, but leaks had rotted floor boards between the tower and the work floors at the heart of gloom which were bare.

 

Benedict & Burnham

The first shot below reverses the view from the photograph posted on June 16. It looks back at the Benedict & Burnham / American Brass powerhouse & corporate offices across the site of their demolished manufacturing shed. The second shot, taken eleven years earlier from near the corporate offices and before the manufacturing shed was demolished, looks toward where the first shot was taken.

 

 

 

 

Through Factory Windows 8 — Benedict & Burnham campus from the surviving powerhouse

 

Through Factory Windows 6 & 7 — Cherished Views from the Corner Offices of American Brass Co., Waterbury

South Main Street Looking South to St. Francis Xavier Church

South Main Street Looking North to St. Anne's Church

Formerly the site of Benedict & Burnham brass factories, this building was built after brass manufacturing was merged into a single company, the American Brass Company. Manufacturing was carried on in the sheds below these offices.

Through Factory Windows, 2011 — St. Anne's from the attic of the Holmes, Booth & Haydens Lampworks, Waterbury

From the north end of the attic of the brick Lampworks (c.1880), where Holmes, Booth & Haydens once made brass burner mechanisms for oil lamps, the view across the sawtooth roof of the tube mill (c. 1918) took in one of Waterbury’s most prominent landmarks, St. Anne’s Church (1906), formerly the Shrine of St. Anne's. In 2019 the distinctive stone spires of St. Anne’s were determined to be unstable and demolished. The view in this photo was already gone, as the Lampworks had burned to the ground a year earlier. It had been empty since 2012, the year the tube mill shut down and the elaborate machine shop which had previously maintained the machines of tube-making was emptied and the lathes and presses sold off and taken away.

Through Factory Windows 4 — Pine Hill and Our Lady of Peace Cross

 

Through Factory Windows 3 — Union Station, Waterbury from Ruins of American Brass Co.

 

Through Factory Windows 2 — St. Xavier Church, Waterbury

 

Through Factory Windows 1 — Pine Hill, Waterbury, from the Benedict & Burnham Powerhouse

Blackbirds on Rabbit Hill

 

The Silo on Rabbit Hill. 2006

 

Forever Rabbit Hill

 

Mt. Bushnell (1191') from Angevine Hill (1214') — January, 2012

Rabbit Hill November, 2021

 

Mt. Tom from Bronson Field Trail

View Over Davies Hollow

The view is from the trail up to Bronson Field in the Steep Rock Preserve, across Davies Hollow and the old Bronson Farm to the back of the picture where the tower on Mt. Tom, the highest peak, stands out against the sky. Just below the tower and to the left is a rock clearing through which the Mt. Tom trail passes. Beyond the mountains route 202, connecting New Milford and Litchfield, passes Mt. Tom Lake.

In the middle ground, just beyond the farm, at the base of the dark hill the Bantam River flows from right to left for a half mile through Davies Hollow before merging into the Shepaug. The Davies family were the first to settle the Hollow and helped establish St. John's Episcopal Church there before Davies land was confiscated during the Revolution.

In 1871 Shepaug Railroad would begin running along a roadbed that still follows the river. There was a stop just beyond the farm at a platform they named "Romford" for the gentleman who lived there, Romulus Ford. He was an investor on the board of the Shepaug Railroad and merited a stop made from his name.

Rabbit Hill — 5

 

Rabbit Hill — 4

 

Rabbit Hill — 3

 

Rabbit Hill — 2

 

Rabbit Hill — 1

 

at the studio of Michael A. Angelical

 

Stone Carver, Michal A. Angelical this week in his shop in Bristol, CT.

 

Corn 7

 

Hoedown Corn

 

Swashbuckling Corn

 

Hawkeye

 

Autumn Corn 3

 

Autumn Corn 2

 

Late Corn

Rage

 

Deep in Hidden Valley, Washington, CT

Recently found among photographs taken June, 2018:

 

School's Out

 

Water Colors #11