The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
For commuter, Wilbur Cross, Merritt offer ‘singular delights’
My two daily hours on the Wilbur Cross and Merritt truly whizzed by.
The retiring green oasis that distinguishes the Merritt and Wilbur Cross Parkways has made news this year for things other than the occasional gruesome accident or interminable resurfacing.
There was, in early 2024, the strict but rare enforcement of the ban on trucks, commercial vehicles, trailers and the like from their busy concrete ribbons. And more recently the announced renumbering of their exits to conform with U.S. Department of Transportation convention.
As someone who commuted nearly the combined parkways’ entire length — from Meriden to Stamford or Greenwich and back — almost every workday for more than a dozen years, I generally commend the former but lament the latter.
The Merritt and Wilbur Cross are singular delights when it comes to controlled-access highways. Free, theoretically, of huge tractor-trailers and most distracting billboards and advertising, Connecticut’s beautiful parkways are a world apart from the chaotic intensity of I-95. They offer a lush landscape that rushes by, greeting you with the public art of the Merritt’s unique bridge designs and that amusingly short engineering wonder, the Heroes Tunnel on the Wilbur Cross. There are the gentle deer that hopefully haven’t met a grim fate grazing at its sides, and the occasional glimpse of an antique stone wall through the trees, a reminder of Connecticut’s Colonial and agrarian past.
I found the parkways to herald modern history as well. After 9/11, the ramp and skies around the Sikorsky plant in Stratford were filled with Black Hawk helicopters readying for the War on Terror — a powerful sight as you emerged from the trees and crossed the Housatonic on the bridge named for the helicopter pioneer.
And the Northeast Blackout of 2003, it seemed, brought a spate of home generator installation in backcountry, as revealed by the nowtargeted, logoed trucks and vans of their purveyors transiting the roadway.
The Merritt and Wilbur Cross acted, too, as my socio-economic clarion. When technology and keeping up with the Joneses dictated the need for flat screens and home theaters, the trucks and vans became those of installers promising to hook up your sound bars and hide your wires.
I also observed, among the highways’ high-numbered exits in central Connecticut, a preponderance of older, workaday automobiles, while the lanes in Fairfield County boasted a surfeit of new Mercedes, Lexi and Beamers. My commuting years were split between a Chevy and a Pontiac.
And yeah, the parkways inflicted their aggravations — any given Friday afternoon, summertime mowing, continual tree-trimming, occasional construction work, an errant tractor-trailer halted by a low bridge. With only two lanes in each direction, any single-lane obstruction meant you either weren’t getting to that morning meeting on time or your supper was going to be cold. You learned to deal with it when I-95 or the back roads promised only to be more delaying and aggravating.
So I played Jethro Tull and the Grateful Dead, caught the business news and traffic reports, learned a little Mandarin, listened to “The DaVinci Code.” And my two daily hours on the Wilbur Cross and Merritt truly whizzed by.
When I interviewed in 1999 for the business editor job at Greenwich Time and the Stamford Advocate, my soon-to-be boss Joe Pisani, who regularly inhabits these pages, asked me about my prospective commute.
“It’s not an issue,” I told him. It wasn’t. I enjoyed the ride.