August 29, 2023, Thomaston Dam

 

 

Little Pond Swamp, Litchfield, CT, September 15, 2023

 

Farrel Machine Shop, August 14, 2023

Immediately after taking the photograph of the Farrel Foundry site on September 4th I walked around to this machine shop, still standing. It had paralleled and connected with the demolished Foundry. It looked no different from this picture taken a month before the Foundry demolition. I guess everything that could have been rattled loose by the demolition had already fallen.

The two rows of windows serve various offices and storage areas that were entered from the foundry. The upper row of windows span from the sand elevator in the north to a stair tower beside the" Tunnel" in the south. It contained a workshop and a long rabbit hole lined with shelves, parts to keep the busy factory running. The lower windows brought little light to a few dingy offices, still furnished and entered from the dark perimeter of the demolished foundry's floor. I imagine once they were busy.

Judging from calendars still hanging in nearby places, the offices had not been in use since 1983.

Farrel Machine Tool Foundry, c. noon, September 4, 2023

I just finished assembling as best I could the stitched pan of the empty Farrel Machine Tool foundry site in Ansonia. This is primarily an effort at documentation, but I’m amazed at the vastness. Is there something about the exposed end of the bridge from the sand elevator, like the end of a severed limb, that is disturbing. Perhaps it has to do with having been up there looking down. 

 

Those who have been inside know that behind the high wall a monorail crane shuttled between a tall room on the left side of the image and the "severed limb.” The crane was intact when I took this photograph — so was another crane that crossed the rail corridor to the sand elevator and was parked near the end of the limb. Farrel foundry was as much a giant machine as it was industrial architecture.

 

 

Machine Monster #4

Machine Monster #4 lived in a tube mill on Bank Street in Waterbury. The photos show the regal beast breathing fire when the mill was active (below) and then later after the mill closed (above). The tube being extruded was bound for use on the U.S. nuclear submarine. Those tubes are now manufactured in Mexico on some of the same machinery.

Cookie Monster (#3)

 

Meet Oscar

Meet Oscar — He worked all his life in a Waterbury factory until the factory was closed, abandoned, forgotten, and finally demolished this year.

Portrait Photographer

You never know who you will meet along the rail corridor in Torrington.

La Ermita de Barranco — Lima, Peru, 2012

 

Rock-a-bye Robins in the Fuschia are Gone

 

Yesterday we watched the adult robin dropping food into the chicks' waiting gapes, but I could not catch that on camera. At about 11:30 this morning I crept outside in the passageway under the overhang from which fuschia, nest, chicks, cradle and all are hung. My hunch is this photo is mom standing guard and enduring my "shoot." I took eleven images in 45 seconds and left. When I tried to return, she flew away, and whenever we were outside we could hear multiple robins complaining from the trees around our house.

At 1:30 today, as I returned from my hike, I again passed behind the nest on my way to the front door. Only one of the fledglings remained, and it was perched at the edge of the nest. It permitting me to take only two images and is now gone. So too are the many robins that have been "chirping" at the end of the day.

New Arrivals

I first noticed the nest in the hanging fuchsia basket and the two tiny blue eggs inside it a few days ago, shortly after ignorantly watering all. The fuschia has suffered since, and today the nest had two tiny birds inside. The mother or father watches keenly from trees when I am out and about in the yard. I will let nature take its course, but they will have to get use to our passage or we are their prisoners.

The Sterling Opera House — Evermore

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stairway to Heaven — Strling Opera House, Derby, CT

Some say the Sterling Opera House is haunted. Then again, perhaps all theaters worth the name are haunted.

June 16, 2023: On top of Flying Mountain and in site of our lodgings.

 

Greening Bay, June 10, 2023 — Morning Fog

 

June 10, 2023 — Early morning. a river of fog moving up the coast hangs on the mountains as it crosses the mouth of Somes Sound.

Lobster Docks in Mid-June, Bernard, ME

Cleaned, repaired and neatly stacked, soon to be loaded aboard a lobster boat and carefully set, marked with a buoy for a season of regular emptying and re-baiting until the lobsters' retreat to deeper waters in the fall.

Across Greening Bay toward Flying Mt. & Somes Sound

A short walk along the rocky shore from the house we recently stayed in is a point of land dividing Greening Bay from Southwest Harbor. Seated on a rock above the point I can look left across Greening Bay to the deep cleft where Acadian mountains divide, and water flows into the glacial loch that is Somes Sound. We climbed the mountains along the left edge of the opening and hiked along the ridge above Somes Sound. Looking right from my seat at the point the view is across the mouth Southwest Harbor and between islands to the open sea. It is still June and there is little traffic in or out of the harbor. The docks are loaded with lobster traps soon to be set.

 

Fleur-de-lis Swamp

Less than a week ago a few yellow irises began their annual show, poking pointed tips, like candle flames, up through the water. Like most of us, they are invaders in America from Europe, Asia and Africa, but they feel very much at home in the swamps around Little Pond in Litchfield, CT. , and, in any case, once established they are difficult to eradicate. The irises are, in fact, beneficial to the water quality and are used sometimes as water treatment to remove excess nitrogen and phosphorus. 

 

Today the flowers were in full blossom and the shallower areas of the swamp had become fields of yellow irises.

 

 

Cabbage Light #2 — "Solar Sail"

 

 

Cabbage Light

 

Cruising Upstream in Cabbage Soup

 

Not Just Cabbages, Little Pond, Litchfield, CT, May 11, 2023

 

Today's Cabbage #3

Even as new skunk cabbage continue to unfurl, the pond is turning to soup & salad.

 

Today's Cabbage 2

 Actually, now this is yesterday's cabbage. 

Today's Cabbage

 

Farrel Machine Tool — Sand Elevator from Powerhouse

 

Farrel Machine Tool — Face of the Sand Elevator

 

Farrel Machine Tool's Sand Elevator in Ansonia, CT, has always seemed to me like a giant face. For many years I wondered what was inside but never dared to climb the rusting stairs dangling from its chin. It is one of the most distinctive monuments I know to Connecticut's industrial past.

Abstraction Begins with a Rectangle

 

Moments after the northbound train leaves Ansonia Station it passes beneath the red Farrel bridge through a ring of worksheds. Here, before the Civil War — even before the railroad laid the first track up the valley, Farrel Machine Company were casting iron and steel parts. The powerhouse at the back of the yard powered the operation and remained intact until 2021.

 

Cape Cod Memory, 2018

 

RIP2

 

Farrel Foundry RIP

The historic Farrel Foundry, built in 1890 and the largest facility of its kind in New England, was demolished Friday. The first picture below was taken June 17, 2011 on my first visit there when the Foundry was filled with used industrial electronics from dismantled factories. The building had been recently sold, and the prior owner was beginning to empty it. 

 The second photo was taken Sunday, Mar. 5, 2023 after crews had demolished the building. The second photo was taken from a position well to the right of the first photo but looking the same way. The large girder in both photos is the same member.

Unnamed

 

Naugatuck Green, Dec. 20

 

Education in Naugatuck (#4)

When the time came in 1901 for the town to replace Naugatuck's aging high school, the design was again given to the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, and an appropriately lofty site was chosen further up the hill and with a more commanding view over the Green below. It would open in 1905. By then MM&W had designed many of the buildings that give the Green its character. They were the preferred architects of railroad president and industrialist John Howard Whittemore who, advocating “City Beautiful,” had, over many years, paid to make Naugatuck a showplace of the movement.

The high school MM&W designed on the hillside site is nothing, if not disciplined — a granite, marble and brick, Ionic, 3-story Classical temple, restrained from any hint of wayward Beaux Arts eclecticism. It is a buff-colored temple fit for Athena and for the education of Naugatuck’s next generation. Carved above the marble of the entablature is a cartouche quoting Charles William Eliot, “The fruit of liberal education is not learning but the capacity and desire to learn — not knowledge but power.” It’s probably safe to assume Whittemore had considerable say in that choice.

Charles William Eliot was president of Harvard through the transformational years 1869 to 1909 and was a leader bringing profound reforms to American education at all levels. He raised public school graduation standards and broadened high school curricula to include teaching of the sciences and of foreign languages. Eliot served as president of the National Education Association and on a ten member national commission whose 1893 report influenced schools and school boards everywhere, beginning reforms leading to the creation of the first “junior high schools.”

“…not knowledge but power.” I’m still wondering exactly how to understand that.

Salem School, by William Rutherford Mead (#3)

 

McKim, Mead & White were celebrity architects serving America’s elite. William Rutherford Mead was the cousin of President Rutherford B. Hayes, he was involved with the American Academy in Rome, was a man of substance, wealth and contacts. Mead, described as "authoritative" and "quiet," was known as, “the center of the office,” hiring and firing, overseeing the jobs and production that are even more the task of architects than flashy design. Mead is credited with relatively few original designs, but the central building facing onto the Naugatuck Town Green, the Salem School, was primarily Mead's design. 

 

That a school was central to the new City Beautiful to be built, and at the top of the green, looking down the Green's central axis toward the commercial center of town suggests the importance the creators of Naugatuck and the architects placed on education.

Planning the City Beautiful with McKim, Mead & White (2)

The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was transformational for the town of Naugatuck. However, it began long before the fair had begun, in November, 1891, McKim, Mead & White had commissions in the town. Among them to design a new school on the hill above town and to design a formal town green below the school, between the Episcopal and Congregational churches where a stream from the hillside flowed east toward the river across a level plateau that had always been an informal green. The first town meeting had been held on that green almost a half century earlier, and a Civil War monument had been erected there in 1888. 

 

At the center of the formal Green, in an age before automobiles, MM&W, under the direction of William Rutherford Mead, would design a water fountain to bring cold, fresh drinking water to those who passed. Architecturally, the fountain established a formal axis from the head of Maple Street in the east, across the center of the level square that formed the Green, and up the hill, climaxing in the symmetry of the proposed Salem School. This core of Naugatuck’s future City Beautiful cityscape would be in place by 1895. Over the next quarter century McKim, Mead & White would play a major role in designing many of the buildings that surround the Naugatuck Green, the only green in Connecticut designed entirely by an architectural firm, truly a product of the City Beautiful Movement.

Naugatuck City Beautiful 1 — Henry Bacon's Train Station

Naugatuck is the next town south of Waterbury along the Naugatuck River’s path to the Housatonic. It’s small size and history as the corporate center of the American rubber industry made Naugatuck a showplace for architecture and small town planning that resulted from the City Beautiful Movement. By 1910, for travelers who got off the train there, the town's gateway was a new train station designed by, architect, Henry Bacon who was then also at work on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.

Henry Bacon had worked earlier for McKim, Mead & White, was mentored closely by Charles McKim and was his personal representative at the 1889, Paris Exposition and the, architecturally transformative, 1893, Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The Naugatuck Station's style has been described as “Spanish Colonial” and “Italian Villa,” though my own sense is that it is eclectic and original.  

(Note: The entry projection on the front is a recent addition)

Ghostly Letters on the Power House Wall

When Charles Benedict looked out from his “cottage," high on the hill north of Waterbury Green, he might often have looked to this spot below him where the Naugatuck River flows between the brass factories of Holmes, Booth & Haydens on this side of the river and the factories of Benedict & Burnham, across the bridge. Not so much competitors as conspirators, the two brass companies had divvied up the market and brought wealth to Waterbury. After WW1 they would all be part of a combined operation known as American Brass Company, and the entity once known as Benedict & Burnham ceased to exist. However, on the side of the old Benedict & Burnham power house, until the day this past summer, 2022, when the power house was demolished, you could still read the forgotten name, "Benedict & Burnham,” painted large in ghostly letters on the power house wall, though the company that went by that name hadn’t existed for more than 100 years.