Bassick family fighting to protect name, school
As renovation moves forward, relatives demanding apology from Bridgeport Board of Education for attack on patriarch
BRIDGEPORT — While the $115 million Bassick High School replacement project inches forward, members of the family the school is named after have stepped forward to make sure their good name — if not the 90year-old structure itself — is preserved.
“I would be concerned if the whole thing was taken down, but of more importance to me — and I think to the family — would be the beautiful parts and certainly the name,” said Justin Parks, the great grandson of industrialist Edmund Chase Bassick.
Parks was born in Bridgeport, grew up in Fairfield and now lives in Norwalk. He said he realizes he has come into the discussion to tear down the current school and build a new one late, but hopes it is not too late to have an impact.
“It may already be a fait acompli,” he said.
It’s not too late, he added, to clear his family’s name.
Last November, as the city school board deliberated about whether to renovate or replace the 90-year-old school, Chris Taylor, a board
member, accused Edmund Chase Bassick, a 19th century sailor and miner, of signing onto a ship that was a slave-trader.
“Bassick never did anything for the people that are in this building now,” Taylor declared in support of a new building. He said he wasn’t suggesting the name be changed, but only in deference to Bassick alumni.
Parks and other Bassick relatives say linking their ancestor to the slave trade is just wrong.
E. Webb Bassick IV, a greatgreat grandson and one of Parks’ cousins, called the comments slanderous in a letter to the school board.
“There is no suggestion in any published or private information that either of my relatives were engaged in any way in the slave trade, not to mention making a ‘fortune’ from it,” Bassick IV said.
Parks said he will attend the April 8 meeting of the city school board to ask for a formal apology.
“I think the family deserves one,” Parks said.
Edmund Bassick’s son, Edgar Webb Bassick, started his business career as a $9-a-week laborer in a Bridgeport machine tool factory in 1897. He would go on to found the Bassick Company in 1911. The Warren Street factory made casters.
Parks said the family was such a strong advocate for the workers in Bridgeport that Edmund Bassick built what was considered one of the first housing developments, known as “Bassickville,” starting in 1883.
The 38 gable-roofed low-cost homes stretching from Fairfield Avenue to State Street still exist, a few blocks from where the high school now sits. They are on the historic register.
“I am proud of what both my great grandfather and great great grandfather did for Bridgeport,” E. Webb Bassick IV said. “It is sad and disappointing to me and to my family that Chris Taylor chose to attempt to sully their names and to disparage the work they did for Bridgeport.”
The namesake
By all accounts, Edmund Chase Bassick was quite a resilient character, so much so that Parks thinks there ought to be a movie about him. There already is a book, written by his father, Charles Parks, one of Bassick’s grandsons.
The family patriarch was born in Maine in 1834 — a state where slavery was illegal — and died on a trip back to Colorado in 1898.
He is said to have gone to sea as a cabin boy on a fishing vessel at age 15, and later on whaling expeditions. He circumnavigated the globe a number of times.
In Sydney, Australia, it is said he struck gold but lost the fortune when his partners assaulted him and left him for dead in a mine. He was rescued, albeit with a broken back.
Later, he went prospecting out West, where he married, and struck gold again in Custer County, Colo. Parks, a Vietnam veteran and retired marketing executive, now owns that mine.
Bassick eventually moved back East, intending to settle in Maine, but visited a relative in Bridgeport on the way. The family moved there in 1880, buying one of the mansions owned by showman and one-time Bridgeport mayor P.T. Barnum. It was called Lindencroft and located on the then-residential Fairfield Avenue. It was said to be the house where Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren met.
Charles Parks — Justin’s father — was born 10 years after his grandfather died, but remembers the mansion well. His grandmother, a widow, eventually moved to a smaller house the family built near Brooklawn Country Club. In 1924, the mansion was razed and the land, just shy of eight acres, was donated to the city to build a school.
The plans
Designed by architect Ernest G. Southey, the original 1929 Georgian-style stone school building with columns and Beau Arts design elements was the best school money could buy at the time.
In 1968, Bassick’s historic facade was masked by a less attractive addition.
Bassick is the last of the city’s public high schools to be rebuilt.
Despite Gov. Ned Lamont’s so-called debt diet, the school replacement project remains on the state’s 2019 priority list to be presented to the General Assembly. If approved, the state will cover about 70 percent of the cost, with the city picking up the rest.
The only question is if the new school will be built for the 911 students as recommended by an enrollment study or 1,006 students as requested by the school’s superintendent.
The City’s School Building Committee is waiting for the state to decide.
Either way, the new Bassick will be smaller than the existing one, with no more than 220,959 square feet, based on state reimbursement formulas. The original Bassick, along with its 1968 addition, totals 250,456 square feet.
Perkins-Eastman architects are working on a schematic design that will be adjusted if enrollment increases. The city has put out a call for a construction manager for the project.
Since the design is not yet complete, Parks is hoping some parts of the original structure and entrance can be saved.
Obviously, he added on a recent tour of the school with school board member Maria Pereira, it needs a lot of work.
The freight-car-sized boilers in the bowels of the school are original and were once fueled by coal. The basement is a graveyard for broken music stands and the school’s former wood shop.
Stand-up heat registers and built-in book shelves line walls in many of the classrooms.
The structure itself, Parks said, is rock solid.
“It is a beautiful building,” Parks said. “In many ways, it is a landmark building.”
Parks is one of the few family members still in Connecticut. Most are scattered across the country. Those he has talked to want to see the building saved in some form and for the school board to correct the record.