Category: Connecticut

Lost in Plain Sight

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Recently I attended a biannual meeting of The Association for the Study of Connecticut History where I heard Marta Daniels speak about her co-discovery of the first tract of land owned by Venture Smith. Smith, if you’ve never heard of him, was an 18th-century African slave who, through sheer acumen and industry, died in 1805 a free and wealthy Connecticut landowner. His autobiography is the only existing testimony in which the narrator describes his childhood in Africa, his subsequent capture and servitude in America, and his life as a free man. He’s becoming something of a folk hero here in Connecticut, as he should be.

Daniels, an antiquarian, described how she and hydrographer Nancy Byrne pinpointed Smith’s original land in Stonington. The general area of the tract was known but previous researchers had made several critical errors in interpreting Smith’s deed, leading to the wrong piece of land being attributed to him. What stumped historians was that the deed clearly noted the parcel’s four corners were marked by rocks with certain initials carved into them — but no one could find the rocks. By returning to the original deed and using GIS, Daniels and Byrne were able to correctly identify the shape and location of the parcel. The women then plunged into the muggy, mosquito-choked forest to test their theory, and sure enough, located the markers. The revealed parcel further demonstrates Smith’s business sense. As a rocky hillside, the 26 acres were probably perceived as junk land by whites, but for Smith, who made his money lumbering and trading, they were a trove, thickly wooded and providing access to the Sound. He sold the land four years later at a profit.

Daniels gave a longer version of the same presentation on C-SPAN.

Live Fast, Love Hard, Own an Island

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I have an article busting the myths surrounding Vincent Island, a deserted acre of rock and sand less than half a mile off Connecticut’s shoreline, in today’s Stamford Advocate.

I’m especially proud of this piece because there are so many garbled stories about the island (its Wikipedia entry, for example); even a current co-owner, a nice old lady, insists on believing her well-worn yarns instead of documented evidence to the contrary. I did a fair amount of archival research on the island and uncovered stuff not even the Stamford Historical Society knew about.

The island is best known for its overgrown ruins of a large cottage, which was built by an owner named Paul Smart:

In 1945 the island was bought by Paul Hurlburt Smart, a lawyer and world-class sailor who lived in Darien.

Smart’s 1979 obituary is a laundry list of accolades. Born in Nova Scotia, he was a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Law and Oxford; was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, a Silver Star and a Purple Heart in World War I; belonged to several yachting clubs and was first commodore of the Noroton Yacht Club; was chairman of the Olympic Yachting Committee, captained and managed the 1972 Olympic Yachting team; and himself won gold sailing in the 1948 Olympics.

Also, Smart enjoyed group sex.

From page 22 of a December 2, 1943 New York Times news story (not online):

Paul H. Smart, a lawyer who is well known in the midtown district as a night club frequenter, was sentenced yesterday in Special Sessions to a nine-month penitentiary term on his guilty plea two weeks ago with two other men and two women to indecently exposing themselves in an East Forty-seventh Street apartment that the police raided on the night of Sept. 29.

The other men, one of whom owned the apartment, received six-month workhouse sentences. The women, both 22 years old, each received three-month workhouse terms. The fact that Smart was given a much harsher sentence in comparison suggests prosecutors perceived him as the ringleader.

To be fair, the article never says what exactly the group was doing; they could have been having an orgy, yes, but they could have been nudists playing charades too. The article ends with this:

The sentences were pronounced after Assistant District Attorney Lawrence J. McKenna had described the five as “moral lepers who should be dealt with severely as a deterrent to others of their kind.” He added that the five were members of a “degenerate clique.”

Some degenerate. Five years later Smart the decorated war vet and island landlord won gold at the Olympics — at the age of 56. As with the Michael Phelps brouhaha last year, authorities then and now seem shocked that folks who work hard, play hard. I’m sure moral finger-waggers everywhere champ at the bit to someday raid an Olympic Village and disrupt the fabled hook-up parties rumored to take place within.

Or is that just another urban legend I must investigate?

Judge Denies Requests for Dismissal in Guizan Lawsuit

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The judge presiding over the civil case against six Connecticut towns, their police chiefs, and a number of officers involved in a botched 2008 no-knock raid has refused to dismiss the majority of counts filed by the plantiffs, homeowner Ronald Terebesi, Jr. and Susana Guizan, the mother of the man killed by police. The towns and police had requested the complaints be dismissed by reason of qualified immunity and on other grounds, but Judge Janet Bond Arterton ruled that such immunity is only available if the police are actually, you know, competent:

The Supreme Court explained in Harris that the need to train police in constitutional limitations on use of deadly force is “so obvious” that failure to do so constitutes deliberate indifference. Harris, 489 U.S. at 390 n.10. Inasmuch as the SWERT team is armed with lethal weapons and tasked with launching raids on homes, the law requiring proper training on the circumstances and method of their use given the potentially grave results to targeted persons is clearly established, and [Monroe Police Chief] Salvatore’s alleged failure to exercise professional judgment precludes qualified immunity for the failure–to–train claims at this stage. [p. 13]

How did the police fail to exercise professional judgment in the raid? From pages 4-5 of the ruling:

Cirillo, Ruscoe, Jones, Kirby, Candee, and Solomon developed the “Operation Plan” for the SWERT assault on Terebesi’s home to execute the warrant. It involved 21 armored, helmeted police officers in military attire, armed with semiautomatic and automatic weapons, sniper rifles, and explosives. When members of the SWERT team objected to the planned forcible entry into Terebesi’s home, and proposed alternatives such as calling the home and demanding that the occupants come out or sending uniformed officers to knock on the door, Ruscoe, Jones, Kirby, Candee, and Solomon overruled those objections and rejected their alternatives. Although SWERT standard operating procedures require negotiating before executing a tactical option, SWERT engaged in no negotiation, and the Operation Plan as developed did not include any negotiation.

Mark Cirillo is a sergeant in Darien. William Ruscoe, Kenneth Jones, and Ronald Kirby are officers in Trumbull. James Candee is the police captain in Easton, the town where the raid took place, and John Solomon is Easton’s chief of police. For the full list of defendants, see here.

In summary, the tactical team ignored its own protocols. A friend of mine who is a J.D., has trained in tactical police methods, and works as a detective in law enforcement (but not for any of the six towns involved), told me the internal dissension described by the judge is significant. He interpreted this as desk jockeys overruling trained officers to pursue a personal grudge against Terebesi.

The judgment is noteworthy for being the first unbiased official document describing the events of that day. From page 6:

During all of this activity, Guizan and Terebesi, who were unarmed, made no attempts to resist or flee. A DefTech 25 explosive detonated in front of Sweeney, who then fired his handgun six times within three seconds, mortally wounding Guizan. Weir fired his M–4 assault rifle once. Torreso continued to search Terebesi’s home, deploying at least eight more DefTech 25 explosives and starting a fire in the basement.

The police detonated eight flash bangs after Terebesi and Guizan were subdued, then set stuff on fire. You won’t find details like that in the report by State’s Attorney Jon Benedict, the ventriloquist’s dummy mouthing the version spoken by the police chiefs.

This is also the first time a government official has admitted a flash bang exploded in front of Sweeney, potentially provoking him to fire wildly into Guizan.

For the full back story, see my piece in the Fairfield County Weekly. The judge’s ruling can be downloaded here.

“Something Unexpected About Being Here Near the Sea”

~ Jackson ~ 4 Comments

Yesterday work resumed toward removing the cottages on Long Beach West. Demolition had been halted since April 15 due to the shorebird nesting season. But over the summer, the ghost town saw some new residents: vagabond artists who made the desolation of the place their canvas.

Ben Wolf, 27, the organizing member of the artist brigade, said the project is worth the application of the more than 30 gallons of paint used thus far, despite the sealed fate of the dilapidated ghost town.

“Life is ephemeral,” he said. “Art in a gallery only lasts for one month, but the chance of this lasting longer than a month is at least possible.”

…

Caledonia Curry, 32, Wolf’s girlfriend, said the natural landscape at Long Beach West is a force of inspiration for many artists in the retreat.

“There is something unexpected about being here near the sea,” she said. “It’s a little bit of a paradise, but at the same time you get the juxtaposition with the broken cottages. …”

Skinny-dipping, star-gazing and storytelling occupy the artists’ downtime. But often, they work all day and use flashlights to continue into the night.

Camping on the beach? Co-ed skinny-dipping? Dude! Why didn’t anybody call me?

Anyway, I hustled out there to take some photos of the art before it was gone. I wasn’t surprised to find the po-po stationed at the beginning of the construction road going through the dunes. I asked an officer about the artists. He said they didn’t know how long the artists had been camping on Long Beach West but the place was deserted now. He also said a lot of people had recently been ticketed for trespassing out there. He added that while it was acceptable for me to take pictures of the cottages from below the high-tide mark (which in Connecticut is open-access land), if I or anybody else went above it, we would be “jackpotted.” Does anybody really believe a main function of the police isn’t revenue collection?

I thanked him, then drove to a paddleboard launch far from his prying eyes. I paddled up Lewis Gut and used one of the still-existent docks to access the cottages. There was no one about; the workers were only doing preparation work on the road, with the actual demolition days away. I surreptitiously took my photos (exteriors only, since this cat has an aversion to treeing himself) and then paddled away. Mischief managed.

My favorites by far were the murals. The scale of the collages and their composition out of the environment made them fun too. I wish artists had been out there every summer since 2007. Having to commit a crime just to experience the exhibit is another demonstration of the ridiculousness that is Long Beach West and Pleasure Beach.

I’ve updated my photo essay on LBW, with some more pics of the artwork at the end. The narrative also includes new research and the events of the failed land deal.

Blaming the Good Guys

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Randall Beach, columnist for the New Haven Register, writes about the unbearable loneliness of the Pirelli Building, and before reaching the end of the second paragraph, I can already guess who the villains are: those evil Swedish furniture makers.

Thousands upon thousands of us drive by the vacant Pirelli Building every day; its forlorn billboardy presence prompts wistfulness, curiosity and concern.

When will Marcel Breuer’s historic yet modernist creation be used for something more than to provide free advertising for its current owner, Ikea, to hawk its products?

…

Robert Grzywacz, the [New Haven Preservation Trust]’s second vice president, said Ikea officials “have no incentive to fix it up, which is unfortunate.”

This raises the troubling question of whether Ikea’s strategy might be “demolition by neglect” — allowing a building to be unused for so long that the owner finally says it can’t be saved.

That would be a convincing argument if it had any correlation to reality. When I interviewed the sales manager of IKEA New Haven and the public affairs rep for IKEA US in late 2008 for a piece about the Pirelli Building, both made it clear to me that it’s a white elephant they would love to sell. The historic status prevents demolition and IKEA has no interest in managing a rental property. They only bought it because no other parcel of land that large existed within New Haven for them to build upon.

The reasons why no one has purchased the Pirelli Building from IKEA aren’t conspiratorial. It’s a large structure, meaning a small company isn’t going to buy it, especially when office space is otherwise readily available. It has flaws, including asbestos, and seeing as it’s been empty since 1997, very likely lacks the internal infrastructure necessary for a modern business. A large company is better off building from scratch. Even in the mid-90s (when I lived in New Haven) the building was only partially occupied, suggesting the deterioration of the upper levels was well underway before it was completely abandoned. If the Pirelli Building is so attractive, why wasn’t it more fully occupied — or occupied at all — before IKEA purchased it in 2002? Why doesn’t Beach blame its decline on the previous owners?

Oh, right. Because the multinational corporation is the Snidely Whiplash in Beach’s preconceived story template.

The only possible futures I foresee for the Pirelli Building are either the city buying it to appease preservationists; or IKEA selling it at a loss to a developer just to get it off their hands. Until then, it’s preposterous to point fingers at the same people who are sustaining the building in the absence of any civic or commercial interest.