THE GREEN
Produced, Written & Directed by Kenneth A. Simon
www.simonpure.com
NARRATOR: The Connecticut
Town Green …
For nearly 400 years, the
town common has been a treasured part of civic life --providing state residents
with an historic sense of place.
Next, THE GREEN
NARRATOR: The green is a central
part of most Connecticut towns … a hardy survivor of 400 years and a powerful
symbol of classic New England civic, social and religious virtues.
JEFFERSON DAVIS (D) CT State
Representative, 50th District: There are particular parts of
Connecticut that are essential to our sense of being and greens are absolutely
a part of that.
ANN SMITH (Curator, Mattatuck
Museum): I think the town green is the place that sums up the community’s sense
of itself.
JOHN DEMOS (Professor of
History, Yale): This is where we come together to kind of reaffirm our most
basic values and commitments to one another.
DALE PLUMMER (Norwich City
Historian): Greens are somehow symbolic of our democracy, of our kind of‑New
England's way of life, our tradition of town meetings.
NARRATOR: More than an icon,
the green remains for many towns the heart of their community.
Some of Connecticut’s 172
greens are in the middle of cities … some in the countryside …some anchor
residential neighborhoods … others busy town centers. Some towns have several
greens … others have none.
Yet, despite their
remarkable survival, the history of these public spaces is often misunderstood,
reflecting four centuries of changing usage and attitudes. .
BAND LEADER: Well ladies and
gentlemen I’d like to welcome you Washington town green for this BBQ.this
afternoon. What a day huh?
CHRISTOPHER COLLIER (CT
State Historian): I think town greens mean to New Englanders, specifically to Connecticut
people, a sense of community and a tangible focus for that sense of community.
This is ours. This is where we come together for activities. We can see it. We
can feel it. We can walk on it. It’s a¾something that is people cry
out for in today’s world where there’s very little civic involvement.
CHRISTOPHER COLLIER: New England towns have really two
icons. And you can go to greens all across Connecticut and you find the green
that’s one of the icons and the congregational church. Most of the greens in
Connecticut, in fact, were commons that were part of the church green.
When New Englanders came in
the 17th Century they carried with them a sense of community, a
sense of commonality and, of course, community to the Puritans was tremendously
important.
In the early settlements
they’d lay out common wood lot, common pasturage and common areas for civic
meetings, etc., and these common areas included a church site, a site for the
meetinghouse.
But these common areas were thought
of as town land. In some cases the church would own it, in which case it was
privately owned but treated as a public piece of property.
JOHN DEMOS: One thing that’s
very central to the lives of these puritan communities was the notion that the
community should be as fully unified, harmonious, complete and coherent unto
itself as possible. The green almost always was literally at the geographical
center of these places as they were initially laid out.
The most prominent citizens
in the town, the wealthiest, the ones from the most socially prestigious
families, the office holders and their families, would typically live closest
to the green, all of which would accentuate the sense of the green as being the
center point, the focal point.
NARRATOR: From the first
settlements in the 1600s to mid-19th Century, the town common was
central to daily life in most state towns.
CHRISTOPHER COLLIER: Greens were practical. They were a
place that you were gonna use. They were the places that people would
congregate. They would come with their horses. The greens were mud flats
covered with rocks, had pigs and¾and sheep grazing in them. There would be manure all
over the place.
You read accounts done in
the early 19th Century, the early 1800s of people describing these
greens as littered with debris and rocks, just junk that had been left there.
There was no real concern about clearing it up but that was true of homesteads,
too. The whole idea of cleaning up comes along in the later 19th
Century.
NARRATOR: The Guilford public square, laout in 1639,
was the town center of religion, commerce, agriculture and government.
As in other towns, the church and related buildings
were often built right on the common.
NONA BLOOMER: The earliest
use was as a cemetery, and for the militia. It was used to pasture farm
animals. By the end of the 18th Century when Guilford was
prospering, it already had four buildings on it. It had two churches. It had a
huge building that housed schools, and it had a townhouse. It had farm animals
running all over the place and on top of everything it was cluttered with
tombstones. They removed the tombstones eventually. Of course, the bodies are
still buried in the green.
NARRATOR:
In the 18th-Century, newly established towns created new greens, to
serve as highway and market center, as well as a place for the
meetinghouse …
Churches,
courthouses, academies, taverns, shops and craftsmen all located on and around
the green.
ANNOUNCER: “Good morning everyone and welcome to the 9th
annual historic “Norwich Town Days”
NARRATOR:
As the character of the Connecticut colony changed from Puritan to Yankee, town
greens retained their central place in the community well after the separation
of church and state in the early 1800s.
DALE PLUMMER: I think you
have to look at the green as sort of the focus of civic life in the 17th
and 18th Centuries. I think that one of the reasons that the green
has become so important symbolically is that,… this is where the American Revolution was really born in
Norwich. You know, this is where the liberty pole was s et up, where the
Liberty tree news of Lexington and Concord came here. It was a sort of a public
meeting place, a place where people gathered when great and momentous events
happened in the colonial period during the American Revolution.
NARRATOR: With the rise of commercialism in the
1800s many town greens were diminished as businesses were established around
them. Roads were widened --many greens shrank.
As 19th Century
industrialization changed the character of Connecticut – and seemed to threaten
a simpler way of life -- more towns preserved or often created a town green.
Groups of middle-class
citizens-- often town women -- formed village improvement societies and turned
greens from debris-strewn land into something that would provide an attractive
place for rest and recreation.
CHRISTOPHER COLLIER: They
began first by attempting to preserve what they had and, second, trying to make
it look nice. As early as the 1790s they were beginning to plant trees; elms
were a favorite. Beginning in the 1830s there were movements to clean up these
greens, to make monuments of them, to bring some order to them and to beautify
them.
They began mowing them.
Planting grass and mowing them. They tore down buildings that were on the
greens. They even tore down churches and moved them to other places. Greens
became a refuge from the activity and noise of commercial and industrial
society.
NARRATOR: In Litchfield, the
swampy and rocky green was laid out in about 1720 as part of the original town
settlement.
CATHERINE KEENE FIELDS
(Director, Litchfield Historical Society): It was just a road, to the point
where nobody was really taking care of it. And I guess this green particularly
was pretty ugly during certain points in the late 18th and early 19th Century.
The Village Improvement Society really began in about the 1870s and carried on
through easily the 1920s. It's a group of local residents mostly weekend and
summer residents who really felt it was their obligation to beautify the town.
And from the money they
raised they put in sidewalks, they graded the green, they planted trees, they
put in streetlights; they did things like put a clock in the courthouse tower,
they arranged for the first trash pickup in Litchfield. They drained the swamp that was up at the
other end of the green and they really made it into the three parks that we
know today.
NARRATOR: Greens had always been used by the
militia. During the Civil War, units mustered on the green… After the war,
placing war memorials on the green became a natural extension of its military
uses.
Civil War monuments became the earliest monuments on
the green and remain the dominant focus of many to this day.
Some greens are monument parks, established in the
20th Century.
ANN SMITH: Towns and cities tend to put the things that they
hold most important about their communities on the green, and we can tell a lot
about how the community sees itself by the buildings they permit to be on the
green, the activities they permit to be on the green, and the way they create
monuments to things that they think are important whether it’s the Civil War
monuments or monuments to industry.
You’ll notice in Waterbury,
for example, we have a clock on the green because that was one of the important
industries here in the Naugatuck Valley.
Part of what gives places meanings
is what happens there so that we’re adding memories to our greens so that by
adding memories we add more layers of meaning to them. It makes them continuing
living, breathing things rather than flies trapped in amber.
NARRATOR: At the turn of the 20th Century, increased
immigration and industrialization brought great change to Connecticut. Squalid
cities, rising crime and poverty caused widespread fear, even panic.
In response to this social upheaval, patriotic groups like
the Daughters of the American Revolution looked to an idealized Colonial
history as the embodiment of society’s essential values.
The resulting Colonial Revival radically changed the
appearance of town greens while making them a powerful cultural icon.
JAMES SEXTON (Historian): A lot of the sort of emotional
investment which we have in greens was created as America modernized,
industrialized, became more urbanized and began to be filled with immigrants,
greens in New England became a foil for that. They were our good bucolic past.
ANN SMITH: Americans
remembered that they had been a rural society and tried very hard to create the
image of that rural society again, and so they copied classical revival details
on buildings, only they got the scale wrong. The buildings are bigger and much
more elaborate than they would indeed have been in the colonial period.
CHRISTOPHER COLLIER: They’re
trying to recreate something that probably never existed; they’re trying to
recreate an idealized green whereas in the earlier period they were working
with what they had and just trying to clean it up. Of course, the most famous
one in Connecticut is the Litchfield town green, but that’s a wholly
constructed thing.
CATHERINE KEENE FIELDS: And what they really did was make it
much neater and cleaner and prettier than any 18th century town could ever be.
It's when many of the houses in Litchfield were painted white and grew black
shutters; it's when the center of town which had been really built in the 1880s
and 1890s, brick Victorian buildings, were given shutters, painted white, add
columns and pilasters and all kinds of colonial detail were added, and it
really gave the town the look that we know today.
The first two churches were
on the green. The church that we have now was built in 1826 off the green. In the
1860s the town decided they wanted a …Victorian church. So they took the
steeple off this church, moved it around the corner and it became a dance hall,
a movie theater, a roller‑skating rink and a meetinghouse, and built a
Victorian church. In the 1920s they tore the Victorian church down, moved the
congregational church back around the green, restored its tower and made it
into the colonial icon church that we have today.
NARRATOR:
The Colonial Revival inspired towns to put in new greens often as memorial
parks
CHRISTOPHER COLLIER: Where
there were no greens, people were putting in greens in the 1870s, 1880s. Many
of the greens that we see around now are greens that in fact didn’t exist in
the colonial period, didn’t even exist in the early national period but were
established in the late 19th Century. So many of the greens are
artificial. They were put there as greens for passive recreation.
NARRATOR: The revival
movement began to fade in the early 20th Century as commercial and industrial
development continued to chip away at the greens.
The greatest change in the
20th Century came with the rise of the automobile.
CHRISTOPHER COLLIER: They
began to macadamize roads and that is the period in which we probably saw more diminution
of greens than at any other era. Building roads right through the centers of
greens and right across greens and crisscrossing them and having four corners
on them. And then the merchants began in the 1920s to put colored fluorescent
lighting and you have the green just becoming garish, commercial spot.
Milford, for instance -- its
green has been chewed up so it’s now just a thin strip that runs along the
center of town. And it’s got Subways and Dunkin’ Donuts with their colorful but
not very pleasing signs up that destroys the aesthetics of the green.
NARRATOR:
Connecticut residents began to reconsider the relationship of road to green in
the second half of the 20th Century.
In
the 1950s before there was an Interstate 84, 35,000 cars a day passed right by
the Waterbury green.
ANN SMITH: The proposal then was to
eliminate much of the green so there would be more room for the 35,000 cars to
get through and to take what was left and create parking. There was a
tremendous opposition to the loss of the green at that point and the
consequences, the interchange for Route 84 and Route 8, out here just a couple
blocks away which has made it possible for the green to remain intact.
NARRATOR: More than just hardy survivors, greens
continue to be a central part of community life throughout Connecticut.
Waterbury’s town green has seen many successive
waves of decay and development around its perimeter.
MARIE GALBRAITH (Director,
Mattatuck Museum): I think it’s a part of community memory in Waterbury. This
is an historical spot. It wasn’t something that was created yesterday. It has
been here since the community was first established in 1677. The green has
always been a center where fairs, festivals, celebrations and rallies have been
held.
We’ve had three presidents
visit Waterbury: Franklin Delano
Roosevelt. President Reagan came to Waterbury and also was hosted on the
Waterbury green. John F. Kennedy spoke from the balcony of the Elton Hotel. The
green was filled with people who waited for his arrival.
It’s a center for public
expression, civic, patriotic, religious expression.
NARRATOR: The Lebanon Green
was laid out in 1697 as a wide swampy road separating the settler’s home lots.
It is the largest surviving green in New England.
ALICIA WAYLAND (Lebanon Town
Historian): It is a mile in length. It is still in agricultural use, a use that
dates back over 300 years to the early days of the town’s settlement, and it is
the site of significant events during the Revolutionary War. And we still have
many of the sites connected with the American Revolution preserved here around
the green.
Well, there are many public
uses that go on around the green and always have. You know, in the early days
you had your militia drilling here, you had your fairs here, that type of
thing, and we still use the green for those things today. In fact, that’s what
makes it so alive and why people love it so much. It’s very active.
NARRATOR: The New Haven
green has remained the focus of civic and religious life in the city since the
first days of settlement.
NEWTON SCHENCK (Chairman,
Committee of Proprietors, New Haven Green): New Haven Colony was first settled
in 1638 and shortly thereafter the 9 squares that form the core of the city
were laid out. The center square is the New Haven green which is 17 plus acres.
The first settlers were given plots of land around the green and were known as
proprietors, owners. And the proprietors all had an undivided interest in the
green and really as a group governed it.
NARRATOR: Eventually the
proprietors designated a committee of five to manage the green. These
proprietors survive today as a self-perpetuating group, selecting their own
members.
NEWTON SCHENCK: We’re the
only surviving group of its kind, I believe, in the country. The functions of
the proprietors are to maintain the green, to guard it. The city’s park department acts as our agent
and the city funds the maintenance of the green. Our most interesting function,
perhaps, is not maintenance of the green but rather governing the uses of the
green. We never act as censors of that so that a political speech on the green
is always permitted. So that if anybody wants to make a splash they generally
will ask to use the New Haven green as the place where they can make the most
impact.
NARRATOR: The Litchfield green today remains the center of
town and a place for civic events…
CATHERINE KEENE FIELDS: There were a couple different
celebrations that were held during the mid to late 19th Century. One was the
150th anniversary of the town. The Civil War regiment mustered here before they
went off to war. Now we have craft shows, we have borough days, we have a big
road race in Litchfield and that's all centered on the green, so now it's more
community events. Borough Days represents the many different kinds of
celebrations or activities that took place on the green over the course of
Litchfield's history.
NARRATOR: Greens and many of the activities on them point to
a comfortable imagined past.
JOHN DEMOS: I think they’ve
come to symbolize in our minds an earlier time, an earlier way of life which we
imagine as being simpler, more harmonious, more peaceful. Basically the green
stands for the good side, the best in us because we, at some level I think
we’re still uncomfortable with the world we live in where individual interests
really are primary so much of the time, looking out for number one and all of
that. The green is the opposite of looking out for number one, and we like to
remind ourselves of that.
Whether or not it’s based on any
reality. The Puritans did their share of looking out for number one, in fact,
if you examine their lives closely. One of the striking things about early New England
local history I think for many historians is the degree to which these places
were actually very conflict ridden. Constant running struggles and sometimes
violent struggles.
NARRATOR: The historic symbolism –whether real or imagined –
surrounding the green ironically often makes this symbol of community a source
of conflict.
In Tolland, traffic, curbing and signs pit resident against
resident.
REBECCA BOYDEN (Chair, Tolland Planning & Zoning
Commission): Tolland loves its green and most of the citizens in Tolland are
pretty passionate about it. There are people that feel that the green should be
protected by curbing, that that would prevent people from parking on the green,
There are other people who actually feel that that’s part of the traditional
use of the green, that it’s a gathering place and that if you try and keep
people off it, if you make it more difficult to park around the green that then
in fact you’re actually restricting its use a little bit. The use of signs on
the green is another example of¾of some different points of view in terms of the use of
the green. That some people feel, oh, all those signs! They look terrible! But,
in fact, the town green is traditionally the place where you would put a sign
that you wanted everyone to see
NARRATOR: In Guilford, no
civic matter raises more interest than the fate of the town green.
NONA BLOOMER: People care
passionately about the green and for them it symbolizes the way they relate to
the town. Because of the disputes that it has aroused concerning whether more
memorials should be put on, considering¾concerning what kind of
trees should be put on, what kind of lamps it should have, what kind of
benches, what kind of garbage pails.
NARRATOR: In Durham, maintaining the town hall’s
historic location by the green was a primary issue in an October 2000
referendum. Using a fix-it-here or build-a-new-one-there argument, supporters
of renovation claimed that the town hall might have to move off the green
unless funding was approved. In a backlash, some voters claimed scare tactics
and turned down the project.
Antiques dealers Bill and Sandy Landon bought the revolutionary-era residence
Redwood in Lebanon in 1986 and have been carefully restoring it since. They became embroiled in local controversy
after they proposed to build a par-3 golf course behind their home, which is
directly across from the town green.
BILLY LANDON: And we thought it would be an unoffensive
thing for the town, that basically this would be good for the young folks and
others, and we wanted to create a park here.
SANDY LANDON: One of my passions for the golf course was to
bring more people here to appreciate the town and what it stands for. And
what’s wrong with the oldest game in the world being played where they can
enjoy the historic significance of the whole area?
BILLY LANDON: And we don’t expect to make any kind of a
change that’s detrimental to the town of Lebanon.
NARRATOR: Lebanon’s town historian led the battle against the Landon’s proposal.
ALICIA WAYLAND: The zoning regulations do allow for certain business
uses around the green and after all, it was the center of business activity in
the old days so to speak. But the point is 300 years later how intense do you
want that activity to be?
NARRATOR: For most of the 20th
Century, the state Department of Transportation often proposed improvements to
traffic flow that significantly impacted town greens.
In the mid 1990s, the DOT
proposed reconfiguring the town of Brooklyn’s central roads at the expense of
an already diminished green.
JEFFERSON DAVIS: And the
townspeople of Brooklyn got up in arms and just said, this is an affront that
we can’t take, it is tearing apart what we think is an emotional center of our
town here at the town green. We got the Department of Transportation to
dramatically change not only their design for here in Brooklyn but to change
their whole philosophy in how they approach road projects.
NARRATOR: The spread of suburbanization in
Connecticut and its impact on the built environment and state culture finally
led the Connecticut legislature to pass the Village District Act in 1998. The
act strengthened the power of local citizens to protect the neighborhood around
the green.
JEFFERSON DAVIS: It made
clear for local zoning boards that they really had the jurisdiction to be able
to zone aesthetics -- that the shapes and positioning of buildings and their
relationship to roads were important to the feel that any area, particularly
the town green, gives to a town. It’s different than historic districts. It’s
not interested in just capturing one point in time.
As we put up subdivisions
that outside of architectural style could be in any state in the nation, as we
find more and more strip malls popping up everywhere across the state that
again increases the homogeneity of our life, that town greens are important for
the people’s sense of community, it gives them their roots, it gives them a
spiritual sense of being in their town, and that’s important.
NARRATOR: A vital part of
Connecticut for nearly 400 years the town green is a tangible link to an
imagined small-town past –an everlasting, visible and central place for a
cherished concept of community.
DALE PLUMMER: The reality of the green and the image that
most people have of it are not really in sync. But in some ways is that‑is
that so important? I think that‑that the greens in some ways are more of
a myth, a kind of counter mythology that we in Connecticut and in New England
hold together and hold very dear.
CHRISTOPHE WIGREN (Assistant
Director, CT Trust for Historic Preservation): The way we shape our greens not
only attempts to¾to
serve the community in some¾some practical way like providing a space for band
concerts but also as a way of expressing who we’d like to be and where we think
we’ve come from, of trying to tie ourselves to our history and to maybe pick and choose the bits and pieces of that
history we want to tie ourselves to, and to say who we think we are.