Fixing A Fractured Fountain

The Cass Gilbert Fountain has often been damaged by errant autos, but the winter of 1975-76 was a particularly rough time for the venerable and vulnerable monument. During the five months from November 1975 until March 1976, it was struck by cars at least three times.

The most serious crash occurred in December when the fountain was hit by a car that then left the scene. The driver was later  arrested and his insurance company made to pay for repairs.

Here, in late March 1976, we see Primo Polverari of Stonecrest Road, left, with his son, Bill, working on fixing the fractured fountain. Hidden behind the fountain is another helper, Jimmy Vozzo. They had relaid the base, which holds water, and patched it with a special mixture of white cement and marble dust.

One of the region’s top stonemasons, Primo Polverari believed the marble from which the fountain was fashioned came from Italy. One large slab was split in two in an accident that occurred many years earlier, but otherwise the stonework was in pretty good shape, he said.

Poverari felt strongly that the fountain should be protected, either by some form of durable fencing, or by moving it to another site, as had been suggested often in the past — especially by the the State Highway Department, which hates that intersection.

Dave Hebert, then the superintendent of Parks and Recreation which takes care of the fountain, agreed that something needed to be done to protect the monument. “I don’t think it can take much more pounding,” he told The Ridgefield Press.

However, Hebert felt that if a fence were erected, it should be of a low and attractive design. “I don’t want anything to take away from the appearance of the fountain,” he said.

Hebert asked the Planning and Zoning Commission’s Architectural Advisory Committee to suggest a fence design, possibly a post-and chain arrangement. Most of the cars that manage to hit the structure aren’t traveling very fast, so a low fence should stop most vehicles, he felt.

Someone had suggested to Hebert that the fountain be raised up on a mound of earth so that cars would strike the mound and not the stone. The superintendent felt that would be too expensive, but in fact two decades later — after a drunken driver shattered the fountain in 2003 with a Hummer — it was indeed raised a bit.

However, what has probably helped more than anything is the additional placement of planters holding shrubs around the base of the fountain. Between the concrete walls of the planters and the dirt packed inside, a pretty effective set of bumpers has been created.  Several of the planters have been smashed in accidents, but each time, they managed to keep the cars — in one case, a truck — from hitting the fountain.

Primo Polverari retired a few years later from fountain work; he died in 1996. Much of the repair work in the 1980s and 90s and early 2000s was done or overseen by Dr. Robert Mead, a dentist who lived just north of the Keeler Tavern. He often used some dental techniques to fix the marble. 

The fountain was erected in 1915-16, a gift of noted architect Cass Gilbert who lived in what is now the Keeler Tavern Museum. 

Appropriately, in 2016, the museum bought Dr. Mead’s brick house to use as its administrative headquarters. That building had been erected in 1936-37 by Julia Gilbert, Cass’s widow,  as a monument and museum to her husband’s works.  It proved too small to handle the mass of papers and pictures that Gilbert left, so the museum was sold as a residence, eventually becoming the home and office of dentist Mead, who thus had more than a passing interest in the well-being of Gilbert’s great gift to the town.

Cass Gilbert: 

A Most Remarkable Architect

In New York, his Woolworth Building — once the tallest building in the world — still graces the Manhattan skyline.  

In Washington, his Supreme Court building stands strong, despite battles over whom it houses. 

In Ridgefield, while it has too often fallen to the failings of drivers, his fountain has greeted visitors for more than a century.

Cass Gilbert, who bought the Keeler Tavern as his country home and gave us our fountain, was one of the most acclaimed architects of the 20th Century. He designed dozens of important buildings including the U.S. Custom House in New York, the state capitols of Minnesota, Arkansas

and West Virginia, the main libraries of St. Louis and Detroit, and parts of the campuses of the Universities of Texas and Minnesota.

A native of Zanesville, Ohio, Gilbert was born in 1859, and named for Lewis Cass, a U.S. senator from Michigan who served in the cabinets of Presidents Jackson and Buchanan, and was a distant relative of his surveyor father. 

Gilbert quit studies at Macalester College and at the age of 17 went to work for an architect in St. Paul, Minn., then spent 1878 studying at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After some time in Europe, he joined the prestigious New York firm of McKim, Mead, and White — White being the famous Stanford White, shot and killed by a jealous husband in 1906. 

By 1882 Gilbert had set up his own architectural business in St. Paul, Minn., with James Knox Taylor, a fellow student from MIT. They turned out many local houses, churches and commercial buildings as well as the Minnesota State Capitol. 

In 1880, while still in New York, he met his future wife, Julia Finch, a finishing school student. She was 18; he, 21. But it was not until 1886 when Julia was vacationing at Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota that they again met and struck up what became a serious relationship. He was living in St. Paul with his mother and she in Milwaukee with her parents, and most of their courting took place via the U.S. mail. They were married in 1887.

In 1899, Gilbert won a competition to design the U.S. Custom House in lower Manhattan — with a little help from his by-now former partner, James Taylor, who had become a federal Treasury Department design official; Taylor cast the deciding vote in Gilbert’s favor. Virtually an unknown on the national scene, Gilbert won out over many well-known firms and soon gained a wider reputation and many jobs in New York City, to which he moved in 1900. 

Among his New York City projects over the years were a tall neo-Gothic building at 90 West Street (heavily damaged on 9/11); the U.S. Courthouse at Foley Square; the New York Life Building; and many train stations on the Harlem branch of what is now Metro North.

In 1913, his most famous project, the Woolworth Building, opened in Manhattan. At 790 feet, it was the tallest building in the world at the time. One contemporary observer — a minister — called it Gilbert’s “Cathedral of Commerce.” 

With many more words and much more poetry, Paul Goldberger, the architectural critic of The New York Times, described it in 1981 as “one of the great icons of 20th Century architecture. It has a mix of delicacy and strength that is almost Mozartian, a sense of light, graceful detail applied to a firm and self-assured structure that no later building has ever quite equalled….It was pure, graceful composition — the serene ordering of well-proportioned parts.”

Although the Woolworth Building was one of Gilbert’s most famous accomplishments, he was not the first choice to design it. Frank W. Woolworth, owner of the huge chain of “dime stores,” first approached McKim, Mead, and White, where Gilbert had earlier worked. Among the staff architects there was Harris Hunnewell Murdock of Spring Valley Road in Ridgefield. Murdock later revealed that Woolworth had called on the telephone to ask the firm about designing his new headquarters.  After Woolworth hung up, one of the firm’s partners told his secretary to give a polite brush-off to the “five-and-dime man.”

While some of his buildings were among the tallest of their time, Gilbert grew pessimistic about the future of skyscrapers, revealing in 1931 that he was uncertain that form of architecture was “here to stay,” The Ridgefield Press reported at the time. In fact, he didn’t seem happy about the tall, light-hogging buildings he’d done.

 “When I see the long shadows cast even at noon on a winter’s day,” he said, “I sometimes

wonder if the light and air their occupants enjoy compensate for the sunlight their neighbors lose.”

Among Gilbert’s less lofty Connecticut projects were the New Haven train station, New Haven (Ives Memorial) Library and the Waterbury City Hall. 

And, of course, a little fountain in Ridgefield.

Cass and Julia Gilbert came to Ridgefield in 1907, buying what had been the Ressiguie's Hotel, earlier known as the Keeler Tavern. (The Press in 1907 indicated Julia was a descendant of Timothy Keeler, the 18th Century innkeeper, but we have been unable to find evidence of that.)

The Gilberts called their home the Cannonball House because of the cannonball — actually, a defused grenade — lodged in one of the beams on the north side of the building; it was fired from a British cannon during the Battle of Ridgefield in 1777 and can be seen by visitors today.

Gilbert immediately set about enlarging the building by adding a wing to the rear that included a dining room and then-modern kitchen, with additional rooms upstairs. Around 1915, he built the formal, brick-walled gardens and Garden House, now used for many weddings and special events. But he avoided changing the lines and historic features of the old tavern building itself.

His best known work in Ridgefield, however, is the fountain that he donated to the community in 1916 at the intersection of Main Street and West Lane. When it was installed, the

intersection looked much different from today’s heavily trafficked junction — it was a simple triangle that included a tree, and the fountain itself was much lower, with its base almost flush with the ground. The fountain was made of Italian marble — the same material used on his U.S. Supreme Court building.

The fountain was not only a welcoming symbol for people arriving from the west or south, it had a practical purpose. The lower, ground-level bowl served as a watering trough for horses that had just made long climbs to reach Ridgefield; the fountain is some 800 feet above sea level.

After being hit by many automobiles over the ensuing century, including a Hummer driven by a drunk in 2003 that shattered much of the structure, the fountain has been raised a couple feet and surrounded by planters designed to absorb the shock of a crash. A truck that hit the fountain in 2018 did hardly any damage, thanks to these precautions. 

The landmark has also survived numerous attempts by the State of Connecticut to move it elsewhere so that a more traffic-friendly intersection could be created. Ridgefielders, of course, have fought each and every move-the-fountain proposal, refusing to sacrifice a landmark that sits in a prominent location at the main southern entrances to the village.

Cass Gilbert died in 1934 while on one of his frequent trips to England. There he was held in

such high esteem that he had been elected to the Royal Academy of Arts, the only American since John Singer Sargent, the painter, to be so honored. (Gilbert had earlier been president of the National Academy of Design for eight years and was appointed to the Council of Fine Arts by Presidents Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson.) 

The London Times wrote after he died, “The list of his most important buildings would only be long enough to prove him the most remarkable architect of his generation in America.”

Since his death, more than a dozen books have been written about Cass Gilbert and his work. 

Only a year after he died, his architect son Cass Gilbert Jr. of Wilton (he designed what’s now the Ridgefield Playhouse) created a brick building at 152 Main Street as a museum to hold his father’s sketches, drawings, paintings, and papers. Located just north of the Gilberts’ Keeler Tavern home and part of the original Keeler Tavern lot, the Cass Gilbert Memorial was dedicated in October 1937 in a ceremony at which Gov. Wilbur Cross spoke.

“I am proud...to have known him, for he was one of the highest ranking architects of the country,” Governor Cross said. “He was a man who could see beauty in the tall building. You cannot prize too highly Cass Gilbert.”

However, the memorial building turned out to be too small to house the large collection of Gilbert material, which was eventually turned over to the Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress, Minnesota Historical Society, and other archives. The memorial building was sold as a residence and eventually became the home and dental offices of Dr. Robert Mead.

Quite appropriately, Bob Mead turned into an expert at repairing Cass Gilbert’s auto-

damaged fountain, and often was called upon to do so — using, also appropriately enough, dental epoxy. Dr. Mead even had copies of the fountain’s spouting turtles made so they could be replaced after periodically being stolen by vandals.

Dr. Mead died in 2015 and a year later, his family sold the homestead to the Keeler Tavern Museum, which now uses the building for its offices. Thus, two properties that were one in the 1700s and 1800s were back together again.

Cass Gilbert and many members of his family are buried in a large plot at Fairlawn Cemetery. Oddly enough, only a few dozen feet away is the grave of Ralph Thomas Walker (1889–1973),  designer of dozens of famous skyscrapers whom The New York Times called the “architect of the century.”

Thus, in a small rural cemetery on North Salem Road, containing about 625 graves,  the remains of two of the 20th Century’s greatest city architects rest in peace, each beneath relatively modest stones.

Elizabeth Hull: 

Feisty and Generous 

Teddy Roosevelt gave a flower to a young Elizabeth Hull. An old Elizabeth Hull gave Ridgefield countless flowers, the ground they grew on, and a lot more. 

A conservative, often feisty personality in the town for more than a half century, Hull  supported environmental, conservation, arts, religious, and humanitarian causes, both here and nationally, and at her death gave more than $4 million to many local, regional and national non-profits.

But Miss Hull could raise hell  — and did, especially when the town announced it was changing her house number.

Elizabeth Abernathy Hull was born in 1900 at the Government House for Volunteer Soldiers in Leavenworth, Kansas, where her father, Albert Gregory Hull, M.D., was chief surgeon and hospital administrator. Her grandfather had been U.S. chairman of military affairs under Presidents James Garfield and Theodore Roosevelt, and Hull once met President  Roosevelt when she was five or six. “He gave me a white carnation,” she recalled with a smile in a 1992 interview.

Her mother, Cora Abernathy Hull, was a singer and ceramics artist.  

Early in the century the family lived on many military bases around the country, but in 1919, moved to New York City where Miss Hull studied music, a lifelong interest. She graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in 1921.

Fifteen years later, she and her mother came to Ridgefield, against the advice of friends who warned her, as she put it, “Ridgefield has the reputation of being terribly snobbish. You’ll never get ‘in’ there.”

“So what?” Hull told them.

So in 1936 she and Cora bought an 18th Century house at the top of Silver Spring Road, across from the Little Red Schoolhouse. Architect Cass Gilbert, designer of the U.S. Supreme Court and the Woolworth Building, had purchased and renovated the house for his daughter, but she died unexpectedly and never got to live there.

Hull almost immediately became involved in her new community. For most of her years here, she was active in environmental and conservation work, and was a member and past president of the Ridgefield Garden Club. She frequently championed efforts to acquire more open space in town. 

 During World War II, she was a member of the American Women’s Voluntary Services Mobile Transport Service, which taxied military and civilians around the area when cars and gasoline were in short supply. 

She was instrumental in founding the Ridgefield Auxiliary of Family and Children’s Aid, which helped the needy. She was the first president of the Women’s Town Club, an organization founded in 1956 to promote community improvements. 

Her interest in music led to efforts to bring concerts to town. Years ago she and Metropolitan Opera star Geraldine Farrar, who lived a few doors away on West Lane, arranged a series of musical programs. In some Farrar would sing and Hull would accompany her on the piano. Later she became a longtime benefactor of the Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra.

She was a supporter of the Keeler Tavern, the Visiting Nurse Association and was a substantial contributor to a children’s hospital and a college aimed at the underprivileged.

Hull was also interested in politics and local government, and was a frequent speaker at town meetings. In her later years she became somewhat discouraged with the direction the major parties were taking. “I wish they’d take all the politicians out and put women in their jobs,” she said when she was 92. 

Elizabeth Hull died four years later at the age of 96. Her mother, Cora Hull, had died in 1972 at the age of 101.

After her death it was revealed that Hull gave the bulk of her $4.4-million estate to conservation organizations, museums and charities.

The biggest grant went to the Nature Conservancy, the national conservation group. The gift of some $1.9 million came from the sale of Hull’s house for $821,000 plus the $1.1 million sale of an 18-acre parcel across West Lane at the corner of Golf Lane, which was subdivided as Golf Court. 

Another 24 acres off Silver Spring Road and West Lane, including woods, fields, wetlands

and a pond at the head of Silver Spring Swamp, was given to the Land Conservancy of Ridgefield. That tract was said to be worth nearly $1.5 million at the time.

Among the many recipients of Hull cash grants were the Ridgefield Library, Community Center, Visiting Nurse Association, Ridgefield Garden Club, and Keeler Tavern. Other bequests went to various Bible study groups, several museums, conservation organizations, and charities helping the needy.

She gave her Steinway grand piano to Charles Rex, an internationally known concert violinist and assistant concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, who was a good friend. Two paintings went to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington.

Elizabeth Hull had strong feelings about a number of issues, including the issue of numbers.

In the summer of 1969, after a lot of debate, the Planning and Zoning Commission hired a professional firm to renumber the houses, businesses, and lots along all the roads in town. For years the police and fire departments had complained about the town’s haphazard house numbering — where numbering existed; some roads had no numbers at all.  The disorganized numbering may have been okay when Ridgefield was a few thousand people and everyone knew everyone, but as the town grew, it often made responding quickly to emergencies rather difficult. The commission’s renumbering followed a logical system that even created numbers for lots that might be developed in the future. The system started with the lowest numbers farthest from the center of town.

“They must be mad as a hatter,” Hull declared in August 1969 as she began a petition drive to have the renumbering program rescinded.  “We can easily get 1,000 signatures,” she said.

Hull and others argued that while numbering houses that had no numbers would be a good idea, making thousands of people and businesses change their long-standing numbers was expensive and time-consuming. She estimated that just sending change-of-address notices to correspondents, magazines and bill-senders — plus changing stationery — could cost homeowners $125 to $150, and would cost businesses even more. 

She also felt that numbering in 50-foot intervals — to allow for the possibility of future homesites on vacant land — “is playing into the hands of the developers.”

Finally, she objected to the commission’s system of numbering roads starting at the point most distant from the center. Other towns, she said, number from the center and work out.

In the end, Miss Hull was unsuccessful, and spent her final years at 478 Silver Spring Road instead of 1 Silver Spring Road.

Debs Myers: 

Puckish Persuader

In his obituary, The New York Times called Debs Myers “a puckish former newspaperman who became an adviser to nationally prominent political figures.” It added that he was also “a chain smoker of cheap cigars, whose rumpled suits never seemed to fit his football-shaped body.”

Perhaps it’s no wonder Myers tried his hardest to stay out of the limelight. But he had another explanation.

“In government,” he said, “most of the so-called hidden persuaders would do better to remain hidden.”

As an adviser to New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner,  U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and presidential candidate Adlai E. Stevenson, he believed that, “in a political campaign, the most important thing is the ability to turn lemons into lemonade — to make a potentially damaging issue work for you, not against you.”

Born in 1911 in Kansas, Eugene Victor Debs Myers was named for the Socialist leader who ran for president five times and who was friend of his father. He maintained that he dropped out of school after junior high and at the age of 15, went to work in the sports department of The Wichita Eagle, later becoming its city editor and then Oklahoma bureau chief for United Press International.

During World War II, he served briefly in the regular Army — “I may have been the most inept soldier in the Army,” he said. “It was the about-face that did me in. I had lost a lot of weight and my pants kept falling off.” 

Instead of sending him to fight, the Army transferred him to the staff of “Yank,” the Army’s magazine, where he wrote many feature stories. He later edited a book, “Yank: The G.I. Story of the War.”

After his discharge he became managing editor of Newsweek and was soon working for Adlai Stevenson, writing many of his campaign speeches. After Stevenson’s second unsuccessful run for president, Myers quipped: “I will never again work for a candidate who is short and plays tennis.”

He was more successful with Bobby Kennedy, masterminding many aspects of the campaign that got him elected U.S. senator from New York. 

In the 1960s, he served as Robert Wagner’s executive secretary, heading what The Times called the mayor’s “personal brain trust.” He was credited with helping keep Wagner popular with the people of New York City.

After leaving the political world in the mid-1960s, Myers founded a public relations firm called Infoplan International, based in New York. 

He and his wife, Nellie, lived on Fulling Mill Lane from 1967 to 1969 when they moved to Bethel. He died there two years later of cancer; he was only 59.

In City Hall Park in Manhattan, within view of the window of the office where he worked under Wagner, a monument to Debs Myers stands next to a dogwood tree, also placed there in his honor. The monument bears one of Myers’ most often quoted observations: “Do the right thing, and nine times out of 10, it turns out to be the right thing politically.”

The monument, near the park’s famous fountain, is directly across Broadway from the Woolworth Building, the skyscraper designed by Cass Gilbert of Ridgefield. 

Ralph T. Walker: 

Architect of the Century

Though he probably never lived here, one of America’s leading creators of the skyscraper is spending eternity in Ridgefield — practically next to another skyscraper architect. 

The New York Times called Ralph Thomas Walker “the architect of the century” and Frank Lloyd Wright considered him “the only other honest architect in America.” 

Walker designed many of the major art deco skyscrapers in Manhattan, including the Barclay-Vesey Telephone Building (lately called the Verizon Building, heavily damaged on Sept. 11, 2001), the Irving Trust Building, the Western Union Building, the Salvation Army Headquarters, and the Walker Tower.

His reputation was so great that he was elected president of the American Institute of Architects and, in 1957, the AIA’s 100th anniversary, the organization created a special award for him, the Centennial

Gold Medal of Honor, for his extraordinary service to architecture. In covering the award, The Times dubbed him the "architect of the century."

Born in 1889 in Waterbury, Walker apprenticed at $1 a week under a Providence, R.I., architect while studying at MIT (in his third year of apprenticeship, he got $3 a week). During World War I, he was a lieutenant in the camouflage section of the Army Corps of Engineers; the unit created sometimes elaborate ways of hiding arms and materiel from the Germans, often using painted fabric.  

After the war, he moved to New York where he began designing many tall buildings in cities in the Northeast, was closely involved in the design of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and became a partner in a major architectural firm that still exists today as HLW International.

So what are his mortal remains doing in Ridgefield, a town in which he probably never lived? Ridgefield was the home, late in their lives, of his parents, Thomas and Marion Shipley Walker, who lived at what is now 83 West Lane, just northeast of the junction of Olmstead Lane. Since Thomas was a construction worker of modest means, Ralph may have bought the house for his parents.

Ralph probably visited his folks here and may have stayed at their house for periods of time. But his home from the 1930s until his death was in Chappaqua, N.Y.

The Walkers moved here around 1930. The couple purchased a “family plot” in Fairview Cemetery on North Salem Road, where both are buried. Thomas died in 1934, Marion in 1947.

Three years after being so highly honored by the AIA, Ralph Walker quit the organization after the AIA charged that a member of his firm stole a contract from another architect. While Walker was found to be completely without fault in the case and eventually rejoined the AIA, he destroyed his Medal of Honor in anger over the incident. Meanwhile, his wife, Stella, was committed to a sanitorium; she died in July 1972. Within months, Walker married Christine Foulds, a widow from England. However, not long afterward, on Jan. 17, 1973, Walker placed a silver bullet into a pistol and shot himself.

One wonders whether Walker, in planning for his death, chose to be buried with his parents, not only for family reasons but also because a few dozen feet away, in the same cemetery, is the grave of another master of the 20th Century building design: Cass Gilbert.

Thus, a relatively tiny, rural cemetery, containing about 625 graves, holds the remains of two of the 20th century’s greatest architects.