A Lost Landmark

The black-and-white picture here is a rather remarkable snapshot in several ways: The crowd, the trees and the beauty of a long-lost landmark.

First off, for newer-comers, the scene is Main Street looking west from about where folks sit in front of Tazza and drink coffee. That big, handsome building is the Jesse Lee Methodist Church on the corner of Main and Catoonah Streets. The accompanying color photograph shows what the same corner looks like today.

The occasion is the September 1958 parade that marked the end of Ridgefield’s six-month celebration of its 250th anniversary. That tent at the right with a cross on it was part of a float, possibly done by St. Mary’s School pupils. (Many other pictures of 250th anniversary parades have been posted here.)

Trees dominate the picture, especially that Norway spruce at the right. It was one of two spruces that stood tall in front of the rectory, hidden at right by the boughs. The other, just a bit north, snapped in half when Ridgefield’s village was hit by a twister on July 13, 1950.

The tree at the left would have been near the front of Bedient’s or now, Books on the Common.

Then there’s the church. This picture does a remarkably good job of capturing the beauty of the facade of the building. If you enlarge the picture and look closely, you can see many find details like dentilated moldings, gable carvings, and nice use of clapboards and facings. And, of course, there are the two handsome towers.

Why, many have asked, would a building as beautiful as this, in the very center of the town, be torn down, as happened in 1964?

Several factors contributed to the church’s demise. To the growing congregation of Methodists, the church’s serious lack of parking space became a real problem. The building could not be expanded to handle the increasing needs of the membership. Then, too, the building was old — the earliest parts dated from 1841 — and was probably expensive to maintain.

So the congregation moved a couple blocks south to its present site, building a much bigger church, with support facilities and plenty of parking spaces. 

Couldn’t the building still have been preserved? Probably, but in the early 1960s, Ridgefielders were only beginning to develop a strong preservationist movement that resulted in establishment of historic districts and a commission to oversee them, as well as organizations like the Keeler Tavern Preservation Society, the Ridgefield Preservation Trust, and the Architectural Advisory Committee. 

The church might have been nice for a new, smaller religious congregation, but none was available or wanted the building. It could have been “repurposed” but apparently its age and the fact that it looked so much like a church dissuaded potential buyers. (However, the rectory next door — which looks like a Victorian house — was repurposed, and today serves as offices and shops.) 

If the same opportunity were to occur today, the church would probably have been preserved,

perhaps for use as shops or offices, or maybe even as a historical museum.

The church was replaced by a two-story, flat-roofed building of stores and offices that was aimed at looking colonial, with brick to match the town hall and the Ernest Scott buildings on two other nearby corners, and the firehouse and telephone building up Catoonah Street.

Incidentally, in 1964, the historic Philip Burr Bradley/Biglow/Ballard house farther north on Main Street was also torn down. That was not the choice of the townspeople, however; part of Elizabeth Ballard’s bequest of the land to the town included that the house be razed so the land could become Ballard Park. She also did not want the house to be a burden on a community that had only recently set up the Community Center in the Lounsbury mansion — Ridgefield already owned one big old mansion on Main Street and didn’t need another, she felt.

Youth On Parade

Several pictures of the Children’s Parade during Ridgefield’s 250th anniversary celebration  have been posted on Facebook’s “Old Ridgefield” group, but none quite as impressive as this one. 

The scene is Governor Street looking west from East Ridge on Friday, May 23, 1958. Led by the high school cheerleaders, the parade of the town’s public and Catholic school children had marched down Main Street and was now nearing its end as it approached  the athletic field behind the old Ridgefield High School.

The town had about 1,500 school children back then and it’s fair to say most of them marched in this parade. (Today about 4,765 are enrolled, which would make for a much longer parade!)

At the ballfield, thousands gathered for performances staged by students of various grades and schools.

An interesting aspect of this picture is the field to the right. Just a few weeks after this picture was taken, ground was broken for the new Ridgefield Boys’ Club on that property. In May 1958, the club was still in the old Loder House, on the same north side of Governor Street but west of this scene, about where the Fairfield County Bank drive-in is (the trees are hiding it from the camera).

The lawn and walk visible beyond the future club site at the right led to the Victorian house that soon became the Donnelly office building for a half century. It was torn down four years ago for the new Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association headquarters. (For more on this, search this blog for “House of Friends.”)

Up the hill behind the trees on the same side would, in another year and a half, appear the Donnelly Shopping Center, with its First National supermarket and Woolworth’s. 

The left or south side of Governor Street looks pretty much the same today, except it’s irrigated baseball and soccer fields instead of just lawn.

One last interesting feature of this picture is the cheerleaders. If you look closely, most of them, along with some band members, appear to be looking at something happening behind the lead cheerleader in the middle. And they are smiling about it. Why?

The picture was taken by Bramac Studio, according to the back. While no photographer’s name is given, Bramac was owned by James Kavallines,  and was the contract photographer for The Norwalk Hour; that is to say, The Hour did not have staff photographers and used Bramac for photo assignments for many years.

Parade and Pageant Faces, 1958

These three photos are from the Children’s Parade and Pageant on Friday, May 23, 1958, a major part of Ridgefield’s 250th anniversary celebration that year. Three adults are identified, but does anyone recognize any of the young faces?

The upper two photos are children from Veterans Park School; at top, the picture includes. at left, Principal Isabel O’Shea (for whom O’Shea Auditorium at East Ridge Middle School is named), and teacher Lucile Nicholas. The middle shot shows kids, waiting to join the line of march, at the top of Prospect Street — that’s the library in the background. 

The bottom picture shows two St. Mary’s pupils dressed as Indians,  standing at a microphone as they announce the beginning of the big historical pageant at the East Ridge school baseball field. (That’s assistant RHS principal Charles D. “Chad” Crouchley, chairman of the day’s program, seated at left).

Back then, there were only two elementary schools in town: Veterans Park and St. Mary’s. All the rest of the public school grades were housed at the East Ridge school, a building later taken over entirely by Ridgefield High School and now the Richard E. Venus Municipal Municipal Building.

Parents — no doubt mostly moms — created colonial garb for their kids, following predetermined patterns.

Some of the St. Mary’s kids were outfitted as American Indians, leading a contingent of pupils dressed in their school’s blue uniforms.

At Veterans Park School, “little girls and their female teachers wore Colonial costumes of white crepe-paper mob caps, long skirts, and blue crepe-paper frilled aprons,” said a contemporary account in The Press. “The boys and their male teachers wore Colonial hats and jerkins over their other clothes, with buckles on their shoes.”

The older East Ridge school kids “were dressed in Colonial costume like that of Veterans Park children, but brown instead of blue. Several of the older boys were dressed in Revolutionary war outfits and other boys were attired in Victorian full dress, with tails and derby hats.”

The accounts says nothing of what the non-Colonial girls wore.

The students all marched along Main Street and up Governor Street to the East Ridge baseball field where they staged a historical pageant, complete with bands for music. More than 1,500 people crowded the field and its surroundings.

“Life of children in early Ridgefield was shown by Veterans Park children, with scenes in a Colonial home, a school, and a church,” the 1958 account said. “East Ridge children showed other scenes of Colonial life, including someone in the stocks, a house-raising, figures of the past such as Sam Keeler, Peter Parley, and the Rev. Thomas Hawley, concluding with Colonial square-sets, for which Elisha Keeler of South Salem was the caller.

“Junior high students depicted scenes of the town’s early government, paying a school teacher, binding over an orphan girl to a farmer, and the dispute over the ‘Oblong.’

“The final scene showed General David Wooster, mortally wounded, being carried on a litter.”

“Backdrops for the pageant all made by the students with the help of various teachers, included a church, school, whipping post, house and Indian wigwam.”