From 3,500 feet, in a 3-seat prop plane, I got a remarkable view of our town.
I marveled at the amount of water. The compactness of downtown and Saugatuck. And the many, many trees that provided a canopy, nearly everywhere.
In 1934, a statewide project photographed every square inch of the state.
The images are housed at the University of Connecticut. They’re fascinating.
Fred Cantor found this shot of Westport:
Click on or hover over to enlarge.
Amonghe surprises, he writes, are “how many houses there were by that point in the Compo Beach neighborhood (bottom center of the photo), and the fairly large number of houses in the Compo Hill/Old Mill Beach neighborhood (just above it).
“I imagine most of these were probably not winterized, but still…”
However, Fred adds, “I expected to see more homes directly on South Compo Road, leading from the train tracks to the beach.”
Also of note: The crooked intersection of South Compo, Bridge Street and Greens Farms Road (just above the railroad tracks). It looked a bit different, before I-95 was built 2 decades later.
What do you notice? Click “Comments” below to share your observations.
(Friday Flashback is a weekly feature on “06880.” Please click here to support it — and this entire hyper-local blog. Thank you!)
Over the years, Wakeman Town Farm’s Harvest Fest has “grown” to become one of the best fundraisers, in a town that has plenty of them.
This year’s event (Saturday, September 9, 6 p.m.) will again feature season fare by local farmers and chefs, wine and signature cocktails, live music, auctions and more.
The food station setup encourages mixing and mingling. Seating in the outdoor tent is limited; tickets go fast. Click here for tickets, and more information.
Season 3 of Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building” includes an all-star cast: Meryl Streep, Martin Short, Steve Martin and Paul Rudd.
And — to keep things interesting — this season the “murder investigation” heads to Broadway.
To do that element right, the New York Times says, producers “enlisted the aid of a musical theater supergroup led by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, known for their work on ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ and ‘La La Land.’”
Before earning “supergroup” status, Justin was a kid — okay, a rising star even then — in Westport.
He graduated from Staples High School in 2003.
He likened the “Only Murders” experience to “theater camp.”
He told the Times: “It was just through and through a Broadway experience — there are just cameras filming it. There was that same sort of ensemble sense, whether it was Meryl or Paul Rudd or Marty or Steve, that everybody was making this show together.”
The show debuted Wednesday. Click here for the full New York Times story. (Hat tip: John Nathan)
Justin Paul and Benj Pasek, at the 2018 Golden Globe Awards. (Photo/Paul Drinkwater NBC)
Westport Police made 1 custodial arrest between August 2 and 9.
A man was arrested for illegal possession of personal information, illegal trafficking in personal information, and identity theft, following a complaint by a resident that a check had been altered and cashed.
Police also issued the following citations:
Failure to obey traffic control signals: 5 citations
Operating an unregistered motor vehicle: 2
Disorderly conduct: 1
Simple trespass: 1
Operating a motor vehicle without a license: 1
Operating a motor vehicle under suspension: 1
Operating a motor vehicle without minimum insurance: 1
Improper use of markers: 1
One person was arrested for trespassing this week.
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Westport’s Department of Human Services’ annual Back-to-School and Afterschool Childcare Campaign for families in need is underway.
Director Elaine Daignault calls the effort “a reminder that many local families struggle to afford basic school supplies, new clothing, and in some cases reliable afterschool care for their children throughout the school year.
“In addition to giving kids the tools for success in school, we recognize the importance of safe and nurturing environments for children outside school hours. Children involved in after-school programs with their peers feel more connected to the community and perform better in school. Reliable childcare allows parents to focus on their jobs with peace of mind, knowing their children are well cared for and engaged in enriching activities.”
Tax-deductible contributions can be made in 3 ways:
Online: Click here, then click “Family to Family Programs – Seasonal Program.”
Check: Payable to “Town of Westport Human Services” (Family Programs – “BTS” or “Afterschool Program” in the memo line); mail to 110 Myrtle Avenue, Westport, CT 06880.
Walmart gift cards: Drop off or mail to Westport Human Services, Room 200 at Town Hall (see above address).
School supplies help children academically — and socially.
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Koda lives near the beach. He usually hangs out at Old Mill Grocery & Deli.
Yesterday he ventured out to the Westport Farmers’ Market.
Unfortunately, he saw this sign:
(Photo/Jim Hood)
OMG! I guess it’s back to the beach …
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Speaking of the Sound:
The Congregation for Humanistic Judaism’s next “Havdalah on the Beach” is tomorrow (Saturday, August 12, 6;30 p.m., Compo).
Bring your own dinner, and a chair or blanket. CHJ provides cold drinkds and dessert.
What can you expect? “A short Havdalah service, and a lovely relaxed evening with friends,” CHJ says.
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Mushrooms are a prime Westport Farmers’ Market attraction.
Sunil Hirani took several photos yesterday. This was one of the best — definitely “Westport … Naturally”-worthy.
(Photo/Sunil Hirani)
I’m sure he bought some of the very photogenic ‘shrooms too.
Westporters worry about trees that topple in high winds, bringing down utility lines and disrupting electrical, phone and cable service for many.
But those power lines themselves are dangerous.
Marion Pietrowski writes of a concern that plenty of residents share, but that seems impossible to address.
No authority wants to — or can — claim oversight over the rat’s nest of wires, cables and poles that grow increasingly heavy and more burdened.
She says: “I constantly hear growing concern about the cable companies adding new live wires and wrapping them to the old ones, as well as leaving huge excess lines rolled up for future use, weighing down the poles, as it is apparently cheaper to do that than remove the old ones.”
She sent a few photos to illustrate her point.
But, she adds, “they’re everywhere.”
Post Road West, near Norwalk line.
Compo Road South, at Bridge Street and Greens Farms Road.
Near Luciano Park.
Saugatuck Avenue.
Sherwood Island Connector, at Greens Farms Road.
And, Marion notes, there’s another issue.
It’s easier for utility companies to place a new pole next to a damaged, rotten or otherwise unusable pole, than to remove the old one.
That too seems to be accidents waiting to happen.
One view of Saugatuck Avenue …
… and another. (Photos/Marion Pietrowski)
We just passed the 3-year anniversary of Tropical Storm Isaias.
Like everyone else in town, “06880” loves the beach.
The other day Andrew Brennan — our summer intern — headed to Compo. He spent some time chatting with the lifeguards (during their breaks, of course), to learn more about their jobs.
What do they like? What don’t they like? What do they do, besides sit in a chair, survey the Sound and get tan?
Click below for the latest installment of “06880 On The Go.”
The final summer meet-up for Club 203 — Westport’s social group for adults with disabilities — is Monday (August 14, 6 to 7:30 p.m.) at MoCA. The evening includes a chance to make art.
Season 2 begins September 20. Details will be announced soon. Click here for more information on the club.
As crabbers flock nightly to Sherwood Mill Pond and Old Mill Beach, they’ve lost one species: horseshoe crabs.
Yesterday, Governor Lamont signed a bill banning the harvest of horseshoe crabs in Connecticut waters.
The legislation was sought by advocates who say that the population in Long Island Sound has plummeted in recent years. Thousands of horseshoe crabs are captured each year, often for use by fishermen as bait in traps to catch whelk and eels.
Many are also captured by the biomedical industry, which uses blood from horseshoe crabs for vaccine research.
The population decline has also raised concerns from organizations dedicated to the conservation of birds, who say that migratory shorebirds like the red knot rely on horseshoe crab eggs for food during their annual migration to the Arctic.
New Jersey, Delaware and South Carolina have adopted similar bans.
Compo Beach horseshoe crab (Photo/Lauri Weiser)
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One of the most enjoyable sites for a fundraiser is the main pavilion at Sherwood Island State Park.
That’s the site for Shorefest. Set for September 8 (6 to 9 p.m.), it’s the only time of the year guests can stay at the park past sunset.
The evening includes food, live jazz piano, a silent auction (and of course, a Sherwood Island sunset).
Catering by Westfair Fish & Chips includes lobster, steak, salmon or vegetarian, plus appetizers, salad, dessert and beverages. Burgers and hot dogs are available for youngsters.
All proceeds support the habitat restoration, education and advocacy work of Friends of Sherwood Island State Park. Click here for tickets, and more information.
MoCA’s annual benefit — set for September 30 (7 p.m.) — has a special theme: “The Surrealist Soirée.”
The evening includes imaginative décor, avant-garde performers, a DJ, auction, and catering by Marcia Selden. Guests are encouraged to “dress creatively in line with the evening’s surrealist theme.” Click here for tickets, and more information.
Rosie Lundberg of Westport won gold recently, in the women’s U19 4+ race at the World Junior Rowing Championships in Paris.
Two other SRC athletes competed as well. Fairfielderes Ella Casano placed 4th in the women’s U19 8+, while Fairfield’s George Bentley was 5th in the mens’ U19 4+. Both are coxwsains.
The World competition followed SRC’s strong performance at the US Rowing Summer Nationals in Ohio last month.
Rosie Lundberg (center) and her Saugatuck Rowing Club gold medal-winning teammates. (Photo/Row2k)
If you’ve always wondered about “Uncovering the Non-Spherical Shapes of Bodies Beyond Neptune,” you’re in luck!
Darin Ragozzine — associate professor at Brigham Young University — will discuss that exact topic on next Tuesday (August 15, 8 p.m.), through the Westport Astronomical Society’s free science lecture series.
And finally, musical giant Robbie Robertson died yesterday in Los Angeles, after a long illness.
The lead guitarist and chief songwriter for The Band — the seminal Americana folk/rock/country/gospel group (including 4 Canadians, and only 1 American) — was 81.
The New York Times obituary quotes him: “I wanted to write music that felt like it could’ve been written 50 years ago, tomorrow, yesterday — that had this lost-in-time quality.” Click here for the full story.
(From Westport to Neptune and beyond, “06880” is your hyper-local blog — and a non-profit. Please click here to support our work. Thank you!)
Long-time Westporter Scott Smith is a keen observer of Westport’s beauty.
And its issues.
Today he takes issue with common complaints about traffic. Scott writes:
I read the frequent gripes on “06880” about local traffic congestion.
Yes, it is often a nightmare.
One thing I never hear mentioned: personal responsibility.
Traffic is always someone else’s fault. You’re the one being inconvenienced by all these other cars on the road, right?
But let’s ask ourselves: How many of the car rides we take each day are truly essential? How many trips are to get a latte at Starbucks, or to pick up that one thing at CVS or the cleaners? How many trips are made simply because “I just needed to get out of the house”?
“Saving time” at the Starbucks drive-thru. (Photo/John McKinney)
I’m willing to bet that fully half of our daily car trips are in no way “necessary.” Leaving aside the occasional Waze-induced traffic jam, wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was 50 percent less traffic on our local roads?
And let’s not just beat up on parents for their part in creating twice-daily, self-inflicted jams driving their kids to and from school. According to this federal survey, 1 in every 3 discretionary car trips is for shopping, with seniors accounting for the highest proportion of such travel.
The proportion of trips for social/recreational purposes has grown steadily in recent years as well, with — you guessed it — us baby boomers reporting the highest level of that discretionary travel.
Clearly, for the generation that has always equated cars with freedom and the mythical open road, they are going to have to pry the steering wheel out of our cold, dead hands.
Some mornings I ride my bike to the train station to go to work, especially on gridlock Wednesdays. There are rarely as many as 10 bikes in the racks.
Plenty of room at the Saugatuck station bike rack.
Why is that the case in such a health-conscious, affluent community where on weekends the roads are filled with cyclists riding for exercise? How many of us get in our cars to go someplace to take a walk?
How many of my fellow commuters have ever used the Westport Wheels2U van, much less stepped foot on a Norwalk Transit bus?
And who the heck carpools? Nine out of 10 cars I pass on my way to the train station are single drivers.
Speaking of those vehicles, how much of any local traffic backup is due to the simple fact that practically every other car in Westport is a 20-foot-long, 6,000-pound, 9-passenger Suburban?
Tax vehicles by size and weight and mileage. Use that revenue to help make our roadways safer for cyclists and walkers, especially around schools.
Alarmed by congestion, pollution and spiking rates of child deaths on the roads, a generation ago the Netherlands invested in cycling infrastructure. Today, 36% of Dutch people list the bicycle as their most frequent way of getting around on a typical day. Two-thirds of all Dutch children walk or bike to school, with 75% of secondary school kids cycling to school, preventing an estimated 1 million car journeys each day.
Imagine the benefits of adding a bike trail along the Merritt Parkway’s 300-foot-wide right-of-way. (When I worked in Westport, a colleague who lived in Trumbull would ride his bike to the office, using surface streets, faster than it took him to crawl along the Merritt at rush hour in his car.)
Could the next construction project include a trailway?
With the rise of e-bikes, investing in a multi-use trailway makes increasing sense, rather than encouraging yet more sprawl in outer suburbs. Not only would a bike path cut into the 70,000 cars crowding the parkway each workday, but it would also be a safe and healthy haven for weekend cyclists and charity riders alike.
And before you go all NIMBY in opposing sensible new development around train stations, or if you think our built environment is too complex to upgrade or the Merritt too historic to be enhanced with an adjacent pathway, consider this: Paris is working to become a “15-minute city” where everything you need is located within 15 minutes. Every street will have a bike lane, and 60,000 parking spots are being removed and replaced with parks.
A 2020 report on traffic congestion finds “if development is clustered closer together, people can take shorter trips between home, groceries, entertainment, and other destinations—sometimes even short enough that they can take those trips by walking or biking. But if that development is dispersed along a corridor instead, it leads to longer trips and more vehicles turning on and off the corridor to reach destinations spread along it, creating more traffic on those local roads as well as freeways that serve the area.”
Does that sound like Fairfield County? “If we were going to design a system to generate the maximum amount of congestion each day, this is exactly how it would be done,” the authors conclude.
So my fellow Westporters: Next time you’re stuck in traffic, take a look in the rear-view mirror. We all share responsibility for why our local roads are a mess, and we all can be part of the solution.
That includes driving less and driving smarter and supporting public and private initiatives aimed at moving away from the car-centric culture that is ruining our lives and our planet.
(Do you agree or disagree with Scott’s thoughts? Click “Comments” below. And while you’re at it, please consider a donation to help “06880” continue to open a wide range of topics tor discussion. Please click here. Thank you!)
Want a solution to traffic? Look in the rear-view mirror! (Photo/Tracy Porosoff)
A Westport man was arrested early this morning, in connection with an assault on US Capitol police officers during the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
Authorities set up a staging area at Coleytown Elementary School and surrounded the Bayberry Ridge home of Benjamin Cohen, around 6 a.m. “It was a classic ‘come out with your hands up!’ scenario,” a source told “06880.”
A press release from the US Department of Justice Attorney’s Office in Washington says:
A Connecticut man has been arrested on felony and misdemeanor charges, including assaulting law enforcement, related to his actions during the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. His actions and the actions of others disrupted a joint session of the U.S. Congress convened to ascertain and count the electoral votes related to the presidential election.
Benjamin Cohen, 21, of Westport, Connecticut, is charged in a criminal complaint filed in the District of Columbia with civil disorder and assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers, both felony offenses. In addition to the felonies, Cohen is charged with several misdemeanor offenses, including entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, engaging in physical violence in a restricted building or grounds, and engaging in an act of physical violence on Capitol grounds or buildings.
Cohen was arrested today in Westport and made his initial appearance in the District of Connecticut.
Benjamin Cohen, at the US Capitol. (Photo courtesy of US Department of Justice)
According to court documents, Cohen was identified by law enforcement authorities among the crowd of rioters gathered along a police line on the West Plaza of the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, 2021. Just before 2:29 p.m., open-source video and body-worn camera footage show Cohen joining rioters in breaching the police line and moving toward a group of officers. Cohen is then seen making physical contact with the group of officers by pushing and shoving them with his hands as the crowd surges forward. Seconds later, Cohen rushes toward the officers again, shoving and striking officers with his hands. At some point shortly thereafter, video footage shows Cohen standing in the crowd of rioters, where he can be heard shouting, “Our House!”
Later, at approximately 2:48 p.m., Cohen is seen entering the Lower West Terrace tunnel, joining other rioters assembling against a police line. Cohen then makes his way deeper into the mob and begins to push against a rioter in front of him as additional rioters join the effort around him. Together, the mob pushed in a concerted “heave-ho” effort against the police line in the tunnel.
After the first “heave-ho,” Cohen participated in subsequent efforts in the tunnel against the police line. At approximately 2:56 p.m., a rush of additional rioters entered the tunnel, and those rioters, including Cohen, engaged in another “heave-ho” effort by moving their bodies in unison back and forth, pushing with coordinated force against the police.
By approximately 3:05 p.m., Cohen made his way back to the tunnel entrance and began rinsing his eyes after having apparently been sprayed by officers. Cohen remained with the mob just outside the tunnel until at least approximately 4:01 p.m., where he continued to assist combined efforts by the mob to push back into the tunnel.
Court documents say that at some point thereafter, Cohen was photographed inside an office inside the Capitol building situated with a window, which had been broken, just to the left of the tunnel entrance. Cohen is then seen in open-source video departing this office through the broken window.
This case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the Department of Justice National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section. Valuable assistance was provided by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut.
This case is being investigated by the FBI’s New Haven and Washington Field Offices, which identified Cohen as BOLO (“Be On the Look Out”) #379 on its seeking information photos.
Valuable assistance was provided by the U.S. Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police Department.
In the 31 months since Jan. 6, 2021, more than 1,106 individuals have been arrested in nearly all 50 states for crimes related to the breach of the U.S. Capitol, including more than 350 individuals charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement.
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