An economic and historic failure

Listen to the words of one of the key people in the fight to save the old Sanborn Library in Bridgeport, the nearly centuryold Greek revival building at the heart of the city’s West End.

At the moment when these words were spoken late Friday morning, the building’s owners, Burt and Molly Stevens of Woodbury, had demolished the wings of the 13,000squarefoot structure. Or perhaps their buyer had hired the crews as he prepares the site for a couple of bland retailers, said to be an auto parts store and a drivethrough coffee shop.

Either way, machines had also chomped huge chunks of the remaining, central walls — despite pleas, petitions and protests for more than a year from activists who said the Sanborn has a place in Bridgeport’s economic hopes — and left the facade and its portico with four Corinthian columns intact for just a few more days before they vanish.

The words form the core of the argument about the Sanborn.

“I think it’s critically important in any community, for economic development to succeed but also historic preservation. And I think those two elements can succeed very well together, and I think if we don’t look at our past and preserve our past, what does that say about how we care about our future?”

Before I say who said them, some background: Whether or not the Sanborn is — was? — a historic landmark, there’s little doubt the building forms a visual nexus, a touchstone of memory and community life, for a 100yearold neighborhood of houses, churches, small commercial buildings, an old gas station, repurposed factory buildings, a cemetery down Mountain Grove Avenue and the oasis of a small, triangular park just beyond the Sanborn’s front door.

And there’s more: the Cherry Street Lofts a few hundred yards away have bring new, apartment life to a vast old mill complex; the Nest Arts Factory across Fairfield Avenue brings funky use to yet another old manufacturing space; and barely more than a block away, the Sanborn’s twin, born as a synagogue, now the Good Shepherd Church, designed by the same architect who built the Sanborn, holds forth with dignity despite some disrepair.

So what happened to the Sanborn? It represents an

Ned Gerard / Hearst Connecticut Media Demolition began Thursday on the former West End Branch Library building, also known as Sanborn Library, in Bridgeport. The building, which was built in 1922 on the triangular property at the intersection of Fairfield Avenue and State Street, has been vacant for many years, and has also served as a bank and community center.

DAN HAAR