New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Mike’s street smarts landed him some great photos
Mike Dabbraccio gazed out at the Grand Avenue Bridge spanning the Quinnipiac River and noted it was high tide. “Look at that current!”
He recalled the current was equally strong on that day long ago when he was a teenager and dived off the bridge.
“I wasn’t a good swimmer,” he said. “I almost drowned. I was running out of gas. My buddies were arguing over who was going to grab me.”
But one of them did jump in and Dabbraccio lived to tell the tale. He recalled that another kid from that Fair Haven neighborhood wasn’t so lucky. “I wasn’t there but he was up on the railroad trestle by Middletown Avenue. A train knocked him into the water. They found his body three or four days later.”
Dabbraccio, now 70, grew up in that neighborhood, on Pierpont Street, about five blocks from the Grand Avenue Bridge. Although he moved away, buying a house in East Haven when he was in his young 20s, he kept coming back to see his friends and to take photos of the unforgettable characters he saw in the streets.
Dabbraccio worked at the New Haven Register in various departments from 1977-1991 but our paths never crossed there. I had not heard his name until he called me up one day and said, “I’ve got 40 years of New Haven area photos. Do you want to look at them?”
When I finally got around to taking him up on his offer, meeting him at Bruegger’s Bagels on Grove Street, I was amazed at what he showed me. Here was “J.D.” — nicknamed for the notorious John Dillinger and he really did look like a gangster. “His real name was Clarence Lane,” Dabbraccio said. “He hung out at the Chapel Square Mall and the bowling alleys at the Roger Sherman Theater.”
Here was “Ricky,” with a belt of fireworks draped around his chest, circa 1974. “Every 4th of July in Fair Haven, about 15 guys got
together and they closed off Exchange Street,” Dabbraccio said. “We called those guys ‘shooters.’ They had their cigars and lit cherry bombs and M-80s, throwing them in the street. Everybody loved it.”
There was more: “Neil the can man” picking up cans in East Haven; a kid standing defiantly on East Pearl Street, looking like one of the characters from the “Our Gang” films of the 1930s; a scene from inside Pequot Drugs, which once stood at the corner of Grand Avenue and East Pearl Street. That’s Sidney Lowenthal smiling at the camera as he sits at the counter.
And here’s a group of old gents playing bocce at Fort Nathan Hale; here’s “Micky” coming out of a bar, smiling, feeling no pain and holding a cigarette with his stubby fingers; here’s Mike Cuzco, selling New Haven Registers downtown. I told Dabbraccio I remember seeing Cuzco standing at the corner of Church and Chapel streets in the 1970s, calling out the day’s headlines. “He worked there 40 or 50 years,” Dabbraccio said.
“I like to go around and look at people,” he added. “And I had a thing for the (Fair Haven) neighborhood. Anybody around here was fair game. I always felt my strong suit was my people photos, portraits. People stuff is where I’m at.”
He told me he started taking photos when he was in the U.S. Air Force, from January 1968 to September 1971. For a long time he was stationed in Germany and he hung out with a guy who was nuts about taking photos. “Nikon! Nikon! That’s all he talked about. That’s when I started taking pictures.” (Dabbraccio’s license plate reads: Nikon.)
When he came back home, Dabbraccio studied photography at the Paier College of Art. After he graduated, not immediately finding a photography job, he got work at the New Haven Register, then on Orange Street.
“I was hired to do maintenance: change light bulbs, empty the trash. Then I unloaded papers from the trucks for a year and-a-half. After that I did a four-year apprentice for the press room. I was a pressman, operating the printing presses.”
When a job opened in the photo department for a lab technician, Dabbraccio saw his chance. “They didn’t want to hire me at first. But I started doing that around 1984. I did portrait work in the lab. I remember doing the dogs for the kennel shows. I learned that if you want to see their tongues, you give them a little piece of ice.”
Because I had seen his fabulous photos from the streets, I told him I couldn’t believe he was never hired to be a Register staff photographer. But he doesn’t seem bothered about it. One day, he heard the Hospital of St. Raphael was looking for a photographer and he went for it. He remained there from 1991 until he retired in 2013.
When Dabbraccio mentioned he had taken photos of open heart surgeries while working at the hospital, I remarked he must have a strong stomach. “Oh yeah! I used to go eat after that.”
He still rides his motorcycle around town and is proud of the “smokin’ paint job” it recently received. But when Dabbraccio met me a second time, at the Grand Avenue Bridge, he arrived in a Subaru stuffed with his framed photos.
New Haven Register staff photographer Peter Hvizdak, who remembers working with Dabbraccio years ago, was delighted to see him again and to view his work. Hvizdak told me later, “He’s got this tough guy exterior. But he’s a sweetheart.”
Sure, Dabbraccio likes to tell his “tough guy” stories. But he said he always steered clear of getting involved with those types. “I grew up in this environment around gangsters, all kinds of people. I still kept my sanity, managing to stay out of that stuff. I have street smarts from those days, so I can deal with just about anybody.”
He said he was 13 or 14 when he got a Libra tattoo on his left hand. “My father screamed at me: ‘If the Lord wanted you to have that, you’d have been born with it!’”
Then he told another story from the neighborhood, although he admitted it’s “folklore” and might never have happened: “Some guys hung a teacher out the window of Fair Haven Junior High School. I don’t know if it’s true but that story has gone on forever. Somebody will say, ‘It was my cousin who did it!’ Somebody else will say, ‘No! It was my uncle!’”
I remarked that it must have been a fun place in which to grow up. He paused for a few seconds, looking thoughtful, looking back out on the river. “It was like that movie ‘The Blackboard Jungle.’ There were a lot of rough people, lots of fights. A lot of wise guys.”
Now that he’s retired and has more time, he’s spending more time on his photography. “I’m trying to get a show somewhere, get someone to hang my stuff.”