Rules for driving state’s most famous street
Without its signature traffic cops in circles at busy intersections, oneway Greenwich Avenue is undergoing an identity crisis. It’s never really been a street anyway. It’s a parking lot with ambitions.
Tom Keegan and I are perched on a bench at East Elm Street and Greenwich Avenue on a December afternoon that’s warm enough to impersonate September. We’re here to enjoy the lunchtime performance as cars and pedestrians navigate the most famous street in Connecticut during the Christmas shopping season.
The corner holds meaning for us both. I worked for several years at Greenwich Time’s former office down the block on Elm, where I met my wife. Keegan, 68, was the fourth member of his family to direct Avenue traffic as one of Greenwich’s Finest. It was also his playground as a kid in the 1950s and ’60s, as he grew up at the bottom of the hill.
We’re pursuing a sequel to what the late Bernie Yudain called his most popular column among the more than 6,000 he wrote for Greenwich Time.
For all the invaluables on both sides of the shop windows, Bernie recognized Greenwich’s true answer to snatching the ring from Gollum or the Golden Snitch from Harry Potter.
“Mark this well,” Bernie once wrote. “There is one thing alone that love or money or political drag cannot buy: a parking space on Greenwich Avenue.”
From our bench, we might as well be co-hosting a fashion show given the unseasonably gossamer fabrics and bare skin modeled by pedestrians. I reflexively squint a few times, not from sunlight bursting through the cerulean sky, but because it keeps ricocheting off jewelry pinned to chapeaus.
This also feels like a warm-up to the Westminster Dog Show, given the overpriced breeds that occasionally pause to sniff at our presence.
I’m left to handle play-by-play, as Keegan is the color guy. He says things such as, “People no longer drive their cars. They let their cars drive them.”
The pedestrians seem guided by an invisible GPS as well. A woman and her poodle saunter across Elm like she’s Beyonce in a video where the choreographer has ensured the chaos of rolling Teslas never touch her.
Keegan engages passersby I assumed weren’t tuned in. Given all those years on his feet, I wouldn’t blame Keegan if he stayed on the bench. But he rises to do a broad impression of oblivious pedestrians hypnotized by phones.
A couple strolls by, arm-in-arm like they’re about to bust into a Christmas carol, and joins the chorus.
“Everybody just walks into traffic ...” the man says.
Keegan finishes the lyric, complete with jazz hands: “There could be a
fire truck coming.”
At another point he warbles a real song as he recalls the lyrics to an early 1960s New York City public service announcement written by Vic Mizzy, the mastermind behind the themes to “The Addams Family” and “Green Acres.”
“Don’t cross that street in the middle, in the middle, in the middle, in the middle, in the middle of the block.”
The tradition of Greenwich Avenue traffic cops was born in 1927, but reached the stop sign when Fred Camillo was elected first selectman in 2019 and finally took the step his predecessors feared. Traffic officers on The Ave have been redeployed to an electric bike patrol and plainclothes roles.
On cue, two officers roll up East Elm in tandem.
Keegan teases them, like a sergeant scolding grunts: “One hand grenade will get ya both.”
“We’re too quick for that, Tom.” New corner bumpouts (old trolley tracks were revealed during their installation) make the treacherous trek shorter for walkers. Keegan, who is retired and serves on Norwalk’s Common Council, says Police Chief James Heavey is thinking about proposing that signs be posted at corners reminding walkers to look up. What’s really needed is an app that shocks phone addicts when the sidewalk stops.
Keegan explains that there were always unwritten rules to driving on The Avenue, which was traditionally the final test townie parents gave teens before taking them to the DMV to get a license. It’s a good time to finally write the unwritten rules.
Rule I: If seeking a spot from the left lane, the driver must park in spaces on the left side. If driving on the right, park on that side. No darting across a lane to grab a space.
Rule II: No backing up to get a
parking space.
Rule III: No straddling the middle line looking for a space on the left or right. “You gotta pick one,” Keegan says.
Rule IV: “And you never beep your horn,” Keegan concludes. “That’s against the rules, unless someone is going to hit you.”
He doesn’t finish before someone beeps, as though anxious for him to move the thought along.
If we were broadcasting our playby-play on the radio, it would sound like an NPR show with an ambient soundtrack of honks and high heels delivering a steady beat that pays tribute to Charlie Watts.
Every car approaches the stop like the starting line in a “Fast & Furious” street race. And no one walks straight to cross. They drift to the right or left to avoid cars, regardless of their political persuasion. Only the Pomeranians look both ways.
We collect a few opinions, including a reasonable suggestion that officers be returned to the circles during busy times like these. Ultimately, even Keegan concedes our little exercise proved traffic without cops is “really not that chaotic.”
When we rise from the bench, we notice it bears a plaque dedicated to the late Harry Keleshian, a local businessman and real estate owner. “I knew Harry,” Keegan says. Keleshian was, among other things, known for seeking new ways to relieve traffic in the town’s central business district. His bench was our perfect host.
We bid our farewells and head back to our cars in nearby lots. Only a blockhead, after all, tries to park on Greenwich Avenue.