We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Found the stuff below at Amazon. Might be worth keeping some around, just in case. Don't use it if Santa is in your flue. It supposedly suffocates chimney fires so it would do the same to him.
For us wood-burners, woodpiles feel like money in the bank. Here's a couple of Sipp's woodpiles:
My woodpile, yesterday. I do not have a little drummer boy anymore to stack it for me. I reckon close to 2 cords, maybe 1 1/2. I will get to it after I get to a few other things. The stacked pile of unsplit on the left is bigger than it looks. It's a 1/3 cord of green wood, from Sandy: Maple, Piss-Elm, and Black Locust.
The Founding Fathers did not risk their lives and their fortunes to get richer, although that is what Marxist professors teach our kids. Men like Washington hoped our new land would prosper over time, but their purpose in creating a new nation was liberty.
Where did Bridgeport's working class and middle class move to during and after WW2? And where did Bridgeport's more prosperous people move to when they, or their kids, moved out of the center?
Of course, they moved to wherever their company moved to - or the suburbs, to the new developments or old houses on farmland in surrounding towns like Hamden, Monroe, Fairfield, Easton, Newtown, Stratford. Also, quite a few moved to the northern, suburban part of Bridgeport. In time, these surrounding towns and areas developed their own economies independent of the city, with office parks, retail, light industry, corporate headquarters, multiplex theaters, churches, and even their own universities (eg Quinnipiac University and Fairfield University).
With this de-urbanization and the simultaneous deindustrialization of the northeast, the city core lost its tax base, its jobs, and its vitality. Crime and drugs became endemic with no-go zones for police. Cars, and government-built highways, made the flight that much easier. In response, the city did what all Blue Cities try to do: they raised taxes, applied for federal Great Society urban funds and programs, and sunk into corruption. Death spiral.
Very few old Connecticut cities escaped that. Stamford, CT for one, barely did escape, but Stamford (pop. 122,000) is really a NYC suburb now. It is alive because of huge tax breaks it offers to giant corporations, mainly banks poached from NY. No breaks for small businesses.
A few pics of houses in a pleasant part of leafy, suburban Fairfield, CT; once a semi-rural suburb of Bridgeport but now it's more economically-attached to NYC despite the 1 1/2 hour commuter train ride.
With wifi and plugs, a train ride doesn't need to be a waste of time.
Bridgeport last weekend, Manhattan this weekend. Yeah, we get around to all the hot spots.
We stopped in to see a (rarely-produced, and I think for good reason) off-B'way Chekhov play Ivanov. Impressive cast, as they always have there because even famous but serious film actors always long to do classic stage. Ethan Hawke writes novels, too, in his spare time and plays lead guitar in a rock band.
Mrs. BD observed that, had Prozac been available in Russia in 1885, the play would not have been written. (Chekhov, the son of a serf, worked as a physician his whole adult life, wrote his plays and stories as a sideline, and died young.)
My point is that I was seated next to two extremely cute and jovial 20-something gals, so naturally I had to chat with them a little. They were from Bulgaria, were working in New York. Student visas, now Green Cards. Where did they go to school? University of Bridgeport! Math majors, cute as buttons with shapely legs in black stockings which I refused to notice. They had a Russian gal friend with them who worked at the same famous investment fund. The Russki gal went to Univ. of Moscow, same as Chekhov, and had a PhD in Physics from MIT. All spoke the (accented) King's English, loved going to theater but were "sick of Broadway musicals" so were going around to all the off-Broadway they could. One every weekend. Wonderful - from Bulgaria to Bridgeport to Wall St. to off-Broadway theater. Only in America.
They found it amusing that I had been taking pics of Sandy's damage to Seaside Park just last weekend, right next to the sad Bridgeport campus.
Before the play, we had a little spare time to grab a bite so we found a counter space at The Oyster Bar, my favorite seafood place in NY. This venerable place in the bowels of Grand Central Station posts a daily list of the 25-30 varieties of oysters they have that day. (They always have Wellfleets.) Mrs. had their famous oyster stew but I had New England clam chowder of course. Pure fresh clam, no extraneous ingredients. The aspiring actor and actress wait staff work their butts off, as do the mostly-hispanic helpers. Busy place, always under-staffed I think.
I heard a beautiful Scots accent from the three gals seated at the counter on my right so I had to say something friendly (because, as everyone knows, NY is a cold, tough city and it is my mission to dispel that idea). They were a Mom and her two adult daughters touring the US for ten days with three teen daughters (who were not lunching with them as they had taken the shuttle to the West Side, then the Broadway line up to the Museum of Natural History - Scots are adventurous people). They all lived outside Edinburgh. I asked them how they found the Oyster Bar. Friends at home had enjoyed it, they told me. They were having Olympia oysters on the half shell, and mixed seafood salads. I've never met a dour Scot, but they do drink a bit so you can't tell. They were having champagne with lunch.
Heading north last night back up to Yankeeland on the train, the conductor was a Chinese gal with a slight accent. She was too busy for me to ask her where she was from. A gal Chinese conductor? The world has changed.
I love it all. As long as it is legal, and they study our Constitution seriously. The whole world wants to come here, especially at Christmastime. Not for freebies or the fun, but for the opportunities too. Our energetic legal immigrants are not interested in entitlements, but many of our home-grown voters seem to be.
21:25 "There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.
21:26 People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.
21:27 Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in a cloud' with power and great glory.
21:28 Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near."
21:29 Then he told them a parable: "Look at the fig tree and all the trees;
21:30 as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near.
21:31 So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.
21:32 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.
21:33 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
21:34 "Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly,
21:35 like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth.
21:36 Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man."
Pic above is a remnant of Bridgeport's grand experiments in public housing. I-95 in the background.
Bridgeport was the first city in New England to construct municipal housing for the poor. Father Panik Village was built in 1939 under the administration of long-time (1933-1957) Socialist Mayor Jasper McLevy. (Go figger that surname.)
"Slums" were bulldozed and replaced with modern buildings. In retrospect, how naive but well-intentioned it was to believe that Bridgeport's poor would be lifted up by government housing?
Gov. Wilbur L. Cross, speaking at the ground breaking, talked of an ''expensive and beautiful village'' that would ''take boys and girls off the streets into playgrounds.'' Governor Cross said that ''good housing opened to sunlight and fresh air and ample play areas are the best preventives we have against disease and crime.''
It's easy for us to understand, now, that orderly, pleasing people and environments are not made from the outside appearances, but from the inside. As Insty frequently points out, orderly and pleasant environments are produced by orderly and pleasant people: good environments are not causes, but results. Signs, not causes. NYC's Hell's Kitchen is now expensive and fashionable Chelsea because the slums were never cleared. One of my in-laws grew up with an urban outhouse and it did him no harm at all - or to any of his many siblings. He remembers helping his baby sister get to it during snowstorms.
At first, many happily settled into this heavily-subsidized housing with the modern luxuries of hot water and indoor toilets. Industrial jobs disappeared, but people stayed. Over time, like so many later government housing projects, Father Panik became a no-go zone for police, dominated by drug gangs - so much so that the project became famously emblematic of Bridgeport's decline.
"It used to be beautiful here. You could go downtown and leave your house unlocked and you wouldn't have to worry about anything," said True Hamilton, 72, who has lived in the project for 15 years.
"Now, we're scared to even come out of the door at night. And when we hear gunshots, we hit the floor," she said.
"I've been here so long. I treat the people here like family and they treat me like family. I won't know how to live out there," said Kathleen Vila, who moved into the project with her family in 1943, when she was 9 months old.
When the project opened in 1941, it was a clean, modern complex touted as a solution to slum housing. Built to replace shanties for factory workers, it housed nearly 5,000 people in 46 three-story buildings spread over 40 acres.
Vila's poignant sentence "I won't know how to live out there" captures one of the problems: insulation from the realities of the world can create something akin to the crippling effects of "institutionalization." Designed as a park-like area for the working poor - at first, it was highly diverse in population - but the 1935 introduction of AFDC, it is argued, gradually converted the project into a ghetto of the dependency subculture dominated by a new era of single mothers and their ungoverned kids.
The Village has now been demolished (I wonder where the residents went). This YouTube contains some photos and memories of the place:
I prefer a burger on white bread too. Buns are just too much bread. I like them half-burnt and crispy on the outside and raw in the middle, cooked over wood or charcoal. I agree that a burger requires an onion, either raw or otherwise. In general, though, I'm afraid I view good burgers as just an excuse to eat ketchup.
A related topic, far more important than the topic of good hamburgers, is the topic of the family meal. I believe in the family as the cornerstone of life, society and culture, and the family meal as a key component. I also believe that the wife should cook it on weekdays unless she's on a business trip, and the guy on weekends, preferably on the grill. Wife is supposed to be the nurturer, after all, and the structurer of family life.
Unfortunately, often I did not practice what I preach in that regard because of work demands - or perhaps because of my difficulty in structuring my time well. Also, because we so often go out for dinner on weekends with friends.
She's a youthful 67 year-old now. The stars of our youths are grannies and grandpas. It's kinda strange. Thank goodness, we remain forever young, don't we all?
Pleasure Beach is a 3-mile barrier beach that runs from the outside of Bridgeport Harbor east to Stratford. Once known as Steeplechase Island when it was made into a beachside amusement park by the developer of Brooklyn's Coney Island. That's all gone now.
Parts of Pleasure Beach are owned by both towns. Arsonists burned the bridge in the 1990s, and it has not been rebuilt. There are abandoned summer shanties on it now - and Piping Plovers.
It probably did not do too well during Sandy. I'd propose leaving it as a nature preserve with a small summer boat landing for picnics.
By the end of this week, interested readers will have a good sense of this sad old town. I can think of few other once-major industrial cities which have risen and fallen similarly: Camden, Newark, and Paterson, NJ, Detroit, Providence, Springfield MA, Hartford, and so forth. But for wealth, variety of industries, and location, Bridgeport's rise and fall seems like a special story.
This is part of our week-long series on Bridgeport, CT.
Pic is the long-departed University Club of Bridgeport (1905) on Golden St., once filled with mostly Yalies at lunchtime.
Why was Bridgeport, CT so prosperous from 1830-1950? It was a major manufacturing city with a large seaport and a railroad. Its prominence as a center for shipping, medicine, law, news and radio, and banking followed from those. From a population of 20,000 in 1820, it peaked in the 1940s - near or below where it is now. Rise and fall.
Industrialization and the presence of the railroad made Bridgeport an ideal manufacturing center producing Bridgeport milling machines, saddles, corsets, carriages, brass fittings, sewing machines, and ammunition. By 1930, Bridgeport was an industrial center with more than 500 factories and a thriving immigrant population. In the late 20th century Bridgeport remained a manufacturing center, producing electrical and transportation equipment, plastics, and machine tools. Like other urban centers in Connecticut, Bridgeport fared less well during the deindustrialization of the United States in the 1970s and 80s.
Remington Arms and Ammunition Co. Union Metallic Cartridge Co. General Electric Warner Brother's Corset Co (now Warnaco) The Bead Chain Manufacturing Co. Singer Sewing Machine Sikorsky Aircraft AVCO-Lycoming Pratt and Whitney The Frisbie Pie Co. Columbia Gramaphone Mfg. Co. Lake Submarine Boat Co. The Locomobile Company of America (electric cars, then gas-powered) Bullard Machine Tool Co. Bridgeport Brass Co. Bridgeport Bronze Co. The Liberty Bicycle Co. Harvey Hubbell Co. (Bridgeport's HH invented the electric socket - and the pull-chain light socket among other things)
and hundreds more. There were abundant jobs for everyone, from unskilled to the most highly-skilled.
It's not at all clear why no effort has been put into combating leftist image manipulation and stereotyping. I suspect it has to do with the faux elitist roots of old guard -- the aping of an imaginary WASP ruling class that one still finds among Northeastern conservatives. Answering, or even giving attention to such insults is considered to be in bad taste and evidence of poor breeding, something beneath the notice of true gentlefolk. We simply don't do that kind of thing, you see.
Well, we'd better resign ourselves to getting our seersucker rumpled and start doing that kind of thing. Inaction may have been excusable fifty years ago, when the major papers, the two newswires, and all three networks were owned and operated by convinced liberals. In the age of the internet and social media, it is excusable no longer. There are vast resources that remain unused in the image wars. We need to learn how to use them.
The value of deterrence cannot be overlooked. Conservatives should select one or more representative leftist icons and Palinize them.
For a working-class and middle class city, by the turn of the century central Bridgeport boasted large neighborhoods consisting of the McMansions of the time. Real in-town mansions on once-Elm-lined boulevards.
Also, large neighborhoods of less grand but entirely spacious and respectable upper-middle class homes with 5-6 bedrooms, usually a sleeping porch upstairs, servants quarters on the third floor, and rooms off or above the barn-garage for a driver, whether of carriage or of automobile. The economy was booming, new Irish and Italian immigrants were eager for factory work or domestic work - and there was no income tax. (Here's a bird's-eye view of one such neighborhood only blocks from downtown.)
Instead of government spreading the wealth around, people spread their wealth around in their own ways. Even the then-ubiquitous trolley lines were privately-owned.
Here are a couple of Bridgeport mansions. These survivors are in the South End. There is essentially no market for either category of the old big homes which, if situated elsewhere in Fairfield County, would fetch millions.
The title of my second unpublishable book will be "George Washington's Nurse". This time, instead of foolishly writing the book first, I plan to market the title, and to come up with an idea and write the book afterwards.
One good reason to have kids is to keep you young with ideas. A pupette recently read PT Barnum's autobiography. She was fascinated by his hutzpah, and wonders how much of his autobiography is a con job.
The statue of ol' PT Barnum in Seaside Park overlooking Long Island Sound. He donated 35 acres of his own property in putting together this 2-mile seaside public park.
The city has two fine, large public parks: Seaside and Beardsley (with its municipal zoo), both donated to the city back in the good old days.
Storm damage from Sandy on the walkway, last weekend:
Barnum's last Bridgeport home, Waldemere (now burned down), overlooked the park. He built it because doctors told him his ailing wife would do better with sea breezes. Who wouldn't?
"I have a degree." No one assumes you're smart because of it, so what was the point? You were tricked, your parents were tricked, your peers were tricked, your employers were not tricked at all. "There's more to a college education than employability." No there isn't. I am not anti-liberal arts, I am all in on a classical education, I just don't think there's any possibility at all, zero, none, that you will get it at college, and anyway every single college course from MIT and Yale are on Youtube. Is that any worse than paying $15k to cut the equivalent class at State? Name me one contemporary fiction writer who required his college training to be a writer, and if you say David Foster Wallace I swear to god I'm going to pumpkin your house.
and
When we see a welfare mom we assume she can't find work, but when we see a hipster we become infuriated because we assume he doesn't want to work but could easily do so-- on account of the fact that he can speak well-- that he went to college. But now suddenly we're all shocked: to the economy, the English grad is just as superfluous as the disenfranchised welfare mom in the hood-- the college education is just as irrelevant as the skin color. Not irrelevant for now, not irrelevant "until the economy improves"-- irrelevant forever. The economy doesn't care about intelligence, at all, it doesn't care what you know, merely what you can produce for it. The only thing the English grad is "qualified" for in this economy is the very things s/he is already doing: coffeehouse agitator, Trader Joe's associate, Apple customer.................................................. and spouse of a capitalist.
Of course I'm not happy about this, I like smart people, but that's the new reality.
This downtown theater and hotel complex was built in the early 1920s right on Main St. They don't make 'em like this anymore. Plenty of famous entertainers appeared in these theaters as they bridged the space between vaudeville and modern movies.
"In the heart of Bridgeport stands an abandoned 13-acre building complex that includes the Poli Palace, the Majestic Theater and the Savoy Hotel, each of which were once glorious edifices and now are empty and crumbling structures, home to rats, vagrants and … ghosts?"
Both theaters had about 2000 seats. For the price of a ticket, you got a taste of elegance and music from a grand old Hall pipe organ. "Meet me at the Poli." Here are some pics of the Poli Palace (later Loew's Palace).
And here's a stroll through the now-creepy Majestic:
4 
Many agree that the simple chuck and sirloin burger at Louis' Lunch in New Haven
Pic is the 
The title of my second unpublishable book will be "George Washington's Nurse". This time, instead of foolishly writing the book first, I plan to market the title, and to come up with an idea and write the book afterwards. 
The statue of ol' PT Barnum in Seaside Park overlooking Long Island Sound. He donated 35 acres of his own property in putting together this 2-mile seaside public park. 
