The South End’s evolution from factories to high rises
With the seemingly unfettered building of high-rise apartments in the so-called Harbor Point section of my old South End neighborhood continuing unabated, the question for our development happy city is, when is enough enough?
That’s the question raised by a hard-core group of longtime residents, who seem to be fighting a losing battle against Building & Land Technology (BLT), the monolithic developer that over the last 15 years has changed virtually all of the face of the South End by erecting high-rise apartment houses near the Stamford waterfront, is now building two more on Dyke Lane and wants to erect two more highrisers a few blocks away on Woodland Avenue, Pacific Street and Walter Lane, the site of the original Pitney Bowes factory.
All of that, of course would mean the addition of several thousand residents and create even more traffic.
“It’s beginning to look like Co-op City,” longtime South Ender Elizabeth McCauley said this week. “And now, if you live in a typical two-family South End house, some of the high-rises now blot out the sun and make it impossible to see the sky.”
Susan Halpern, an activist who has lived all of her 65 years in the South End, said her group would prefer to have smaller buildings such as town houses erected instead of high-rises. “It would be more in keeping with the remaining historic houses that we still have after so many that have been torn down,” Halpern said.
Land Use Bureau Chief Ralph Blessing said putting up town houses and other small buildings rather than high-rises is not feasible.
“It’s not financially viable to do so,” Blessing told me this week.
The South End’s massive transformation includes the establishment of a virtual community of its own, primarily along the waterfront where stores and restaurants have been established along with a scenic boardwalk along a marina that is open to the public, along with a park.
It is all a far cry than the South End I grew up in. That was a neighborhood where, five days a week, a half dozen factories spewed black and gray smoke skyward while a chemical company on lower Ludlow Street, where we lived, and a paint company on southern Canal Street discharged excess chemicals and paint into the Jefferson Street Canal (where, incredibly, my friends and I occasionally swam). On mornings and at around 5 p.m., loud whistles from the sprawling Yale & Towne lock complex and about five other factories could be heard for miles, signaling the beginning and end of the work day. (The Yale & Towne whistle also served as a signal that schools had been canceled due to snow).
For all the whistle-blowing, smoke and pollution, the South End was as good as it could be for a kid growing up in Stamford’s most colorful part of town, where at least half of the city’s work force was employed at the half dozen or more factories, which also included a Schick Shaver plant on Atlantic Street, an Electric Specialty factory on then South Street just south of the train station, and a Kalart plant on Manhattan street. Maybe it was better in other neighborhoods, where families might have had more money than in our low-income neighborhood, but after riding our bikes to play baseball and basketball games elsewhere in town we couldn’t wait to get back to our polyglot neighborhood of Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Jewish, Italian and Irish immigrant families. Hey, we even had our own beach (where Kosciuszko Park now stands after a concrete wall was installed where the beach was in 1955 following a severe hurricane), ball fields, including use of the enclosed Yale &Towne baseball field and their gym during the workday, a benevolence we deeply appreciated.
Almost all the men in the neighborhood worked in the factories, most of them at Yale & Towne and most of whom walked the short distance to and from work while carrying their metal lunch pails, with some stopping for drinks (usually a shot of rye and a beer or two) after work at Genovese’s Bar on Ludlow Street. Though many of the families were large — having 12 or more children was not unusual — few women worked. My mother, a widow, did, taking two buses to and from the NormaHoffman ball-bearing company on Hamilton Avenue in Glenbrook, leaving our Lithuanian immigrant grandmother to watch over me and my sister.
Sadly, most of my friends, including some outstanding athletes, quit school at 16 to follow their fathers at jobs in the factories. Very few of us made it to Stamford High School. For the most part, those who did were very good athletes. Julie Markiewicz and George Kohores became principals. Eddie Lapinski, a great basketball player, quit school at 16 only to later receive a doctorate degree and became head of the guidance department at Westhill High School. He was practically forced to return to Stamford High School by Nick Koules, a basketball star and coach who became a legend as a basketball and baseball umpire. The South End also produced one mayor, Edward Gonnoud, a plumbing contractor who served two nonconsecutive terms in the 1940s while living on Henry Street in the shadow of the Yale & Towne.
Many South Enders rarely left the neighborhood. Few families had cars, which weren’t really necessary, and buses sufficed just fine for trips “uptown.” Sometimes “uptown” was too far for me to make a certain Sunday Mass at St. John’s on Atlantic Street, so I went to the closer and beautiful Holy Name of Jesus Church on South Street, which drew hundreds of Poles from throughout the city. That posed a minor problem since the Masses were celebrated in Latin and most of the sermons were in Polish, which I had a slight grasp of given that most of my friends were Polish. The nearby Holy Name Athletic Club was also a community center for Polish immigrants and a sponsor of some of the best baseball teams in the city, one of which I played with while I was in college after, as a boy, having set up pins at the club’s duckpin alleys.
Everything began to change in the 1950s when Yale & Towne, which once employed almost 10,000 people, moved south following a long and bitter strike. Stamford’s major employer was eventually followed south by most of the other longstanding factories, marking the end of an era that was eventually supplanted by a number of Fortune 500 companies and a large shopping mall that breathed new life into what had become a dormant city.
The city is now in a second chapter of its renewal. The old South End, whose factories were Stamford’s lifeblood, has been revived by a large and powerful development company which some longtime and former South Enders feel may be going too far in changing what was once Stamford’s most vibrant neighborhood.