Maggie's Farm

Winter is on its way up here in Yankeeland. Officially, Dec. 21 but, like Sipp, we have already had snow.

Got a smokey fireplace? Explanation here.

Other fire FAQs here.

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.

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.

A few more pics below the fold -

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.

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.

One long-time resident:

"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:

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.

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 20^th 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.

Main Street, c. 1910?

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.

One of Barnum's great hoaxes was The Life of Joice Heth, the Nurse of Gen. George Washington, (the Father of Our Country,) Now Living at the Astonishing Age of 161 Years, and Weighs Only 46 Pounds

More details on the story here. He actually sold tickets to her autopsy.

Here's the Barnum Museum, closed at the moment until repairs can be made from a tornado that hit town two years ago. We had wanted to check it out:

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?

From an entertaining post by The Last Psychiatrist (h/t Gerard):

"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.

From Poli Palace, Majestic Theater & Savoy Hotel, Bridgeport:

"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:

This week's series began yesterday. You never know what you'll find here at Maggie's. America has plenty of Bridgeports these days. We'll have a daily Bridgeport post this week.

Bridgeport, CT (settled 1639 as "Newfield") was a boom town from around 1800 until the end of WW 2. Lots of farming in the back country, fishing, shipping and ship-building on the harbor, and, at its peak, over 500 factories. "Help wanted" signs everywhere.

Few people know that Bridgeport was the first city in America with an auto industry.

Farmers, factory workers, a good share of prosperous folk, tons of Polish, Irish, and Italian immigrants and then southern blacks attracted to jobs during the war, grand theaters, fancy stores, and of course, PT Barnum (who Walt Kelly yclept PT Bridgeport). Today, Bridgeport is about 40% recent Hispanic immigrants, 30% Black, and the rest are various kinds of white.

There has been no gentrification of downtown because there are few jobs and not much to do. Well, nothing to do. The weekend streets, empty of traffic and foot traffic except for the occasional hoodie, give a sense of desolation but not menace. There is no critical mass of activity, which has all moved to the suburbs to escape Blue City decay and taxes. (It's Obamaville for sure. In the previous election, just enough uncounted paper votes were mysteriously discovered in bags in a Bridgeport school basement to turn the election over to a Democrat CT governor days after good Repub Tom Foley appeared to have won the election.)

The city's heyday was probably between 1840 and the late 1940s - a century. In today's post-industrial northeast, the town's population is down to around 144,000, and many of the old factories are now vacant lots and the rest are rotting hulks. Even the old Bridgeport Post-Telegram is now the "Connecticut Post." With the decline of the town's manufacturing and farming base - its main bank used to be Mechanics and Farmer's Savings Bank - corrupt politicians, high taxation, criminals, drugs, welfare recipients, and mob influence have been feeding off the carcass of this failed old Blue State city.

This once-proud city, with abundant advantages, did not deserve this fate. Such bountiful towns are like the third world now.

The main businesses in town now seem to be government services, hospitals, and law, since it's the legal and court center of prosperous southern Connecticut and remains Connecticut's largest urban center. Oh, it also has the woebegone and marginal University of Bridgeport which until recently was owned by the Moonies and one which few would attend given any choice at all. Lots of foreign students desperate for an American degree of any sort.

Nobody visits downtown Bridgeport as tourists except me and a couple of my kids on an urban exploration jaunt last weekend. Well, also visitors taking the Port Jefferson ferry or going to Bridgeport Bluefish games. (They have a decent government-looking transportation hub, with the bus station, the Boston - Washington DC train station, I-95, and the ferry all within walking distance.)

During our tourism, we stopped for a pleasant lunch at The Creek in the Black Rock section of town. They had Palm on tap and the place was full of people. I'm told another good popular joint in the neighborhood is Harborview Market. I'll have to try that next time I'm in the area.

A few of my pics:

A cute old half-block (rest of the block demolished at some point, probably in "urban renewal" aka "Negro Removal" in the 1960s) in Bridgeport's South End, with garbage from Sandy's flooding.

Most of the in-town residential areas look like this. Typical northeast workingman's dwellings from the 1880s-1920s. Cheap housing now, but too-high property taxes for the people who might otherwise afford them. When the taxes are higher than a mortgage, it's not attractive. It leads to a downward, death spiral. The poorer it becomes, the more taxes are raised for government "services." Then voters vote with their feet.

Building on the corner of Main St, a block or two from the big new RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland, for those of you in Yorba Linda) bulding - doubtless located with generous multi-year tax breaks. The graffiti is really pretty well-done:

Why? Why not?

For a taste, here's Iranistan (pronouced Iranis'tan), PT Barnum's home in 1848 on the corner of Fairfield Avenue and Iranistan Ave. Barnum did a lot of things in his life, made and lost fortunes, was Mayor of Bridgeport for a while, got elected to the CT State Senate to lobby for the railroads (he liked to commute to NYC in the pre-commuter era), promoted and was a major contributor to the creation of Bridgeport's Olmstead-designed Seaside Park, was a great impresario of hoaxes and the strange, and later in life a circus impresario. Everything on a grand scale, always taking risks, a bit of a con man who didn't mind admitting it. An American icon.

His three magnificent Bridgeport homes all burned down but his circus lives on as he first envisioned it: traveling by train and performing in permanent venues instead of under tents. And always, elephants. He transformed the circus industry.

Pine, spruce, hemlock, and fir make excellent firewood. With their pitch content, they may burn hotter and quicker than hardwoods, but they produce plenty of good heat and light. They produce no more chimney creosote than anything else, and probably less. Firs and pines are all they burn out West.

While everybody needs to have a well-used chimney cleaned regularly, creosote accumulates in a chimney mainly from wood with high water content. In other words, "green wood" which has not had 6-12 months to shed its water content by sitting outdoors, or has not been "kiln-dried" like the expensive stuff in stores. Green pine wood is no more problematic than green maple, according to the experts. Ideally, give all wood some time to dry out to minimize creosote build-up.

A second cause of creosote build-up (we are not talking about ash build-up in the chimney, just the greasy creosote) is probably smoldering fires. The hotter the fire, the less likely that creosote will find time to condense and attach somewhere in your chimney. Creosote is, to some extent, water-soluble and thus condenses as it moves up to the cooler parts of the upper chimney.

The problem with creosote is chimney fires. Readers know that I've had a few, and it is not fun. If you are far from a fire station, it can burn your house down by either sparking the roof or penetrating the flue. People like me who burn wood indiscriminately - any wood from any tree, green or aged -  must deal with the creosote issue with creosote fighters. Chimney sweeps cannot remove the grease, but chemicals can. I also enjoy quiety smoldering fires rather than dramatic blazes, so I do everything wrong.

Details on the firewood topic here.

Details on creosote oils here. Some creosote oils are what preserves and gives flavor to smoked meats. I remember painting fence posts with creosote as a lad, with my Dad. I don't think people do that anymore but it is a good and cheap wood preservative.

Here's a good piece on dangerous creosote and wood stoves.

My family of origin voted to ban Christmas presents amongst eachother years ago. It's my two parents, five kids with five spouses, countless grandkids. However, bringing food, booze, and home-made Christmas cookies to the family gathering is welcome and wanted.

In my own family, as the kids have gotten older, we keep it generally in the area of books, scarves, and Christmas socks.

My in-laws, on the other hand, love the whole Christmas ritual of buying, wrapping, and giving presents, and find joy in it.

To each his own. Here's one view:  It's time to ban Christmas presents

and here's a classic - Mama's Family Christmas Morning:

My Thanksgiving prayers (and many of my prayers), begin with "Lord, help us be fully grateful and thankful to You for being a companion and guide in our lives in good times and in hard times."

These half-crazy Puritans had little to be thankful for materially, yet thankful they were on the chilly shore of Cape Cod Bay. Brownscombe's The First Thanksgiving:

And now Cape Cod, this summer. What would those Pilgrim forefathers have thought of this sight?

Dunkin Donuts is a Yankeeland item which has begun to colonize the world. Mediocre coffee, mushy donuts which are not really fat-fried and have no crunch, but half-decent daily bagels. Also, "Breakfast sandwiches" made of God-knows-what warmed-up plastic-wrapped thawed-out food-like substances.

People like Dunkin anyway. It's familiar, predictable, comfortably mediocre. A welcome sign to see on a cold, sleety night of driving in the middle of nowhere. Clean bathrooms. A Dunkin franchise is a cash cow for the franchisee. I know a Greek immigrant who now owns five of them. He's rich. He is fortunate in having a loyal, smart, and pleasant mostly-Hispanic staff. A few Pakistanis too.

I haven't had one of their too-sweet and mushy donuts in years, but once in a while I'll have a toasted bagel. I only like fried donuts.

Bob Rosenberg opened the first one in Quincy, MA in 1949, and the first of thousands of franchises the following year in Worcester.

In 2006 the parent company was acquired by a consortium of private equity firms: Bain Capital, The Carlyle Group, and Thomas H. Lee Partners. Heavy hitters, for a humble donut shop. Dunkin' Donuts is the world's leading baked goods and coffee chain, serving more than 3 million customers per day. Dunkin also bought Baskin Robbins a while ago, which is why you sometimes see the two carbohydrate outlets under the same roof.

Here's a pictorial history of Dunkin Donuts.