Global warming didn’t cause the 93 degrees that the thermometers recorded on this date. It was the good old 19th-century sun.
Everybody who could get away in town, back on Aug. 11, 1852, made their way not to Lighthouse Point, but to Savin Rock and other urban beach locations called “watering places.”
You can hear things that people were talking about on Aug. 11 besides the weather — including a new invention to improve railroad car coupling, and the news of a button factory that opened up in that separate, nearby village called Fair Haven — simply by clicking on the above audio file for the first edition of “This Day In New Haven History” as aired on WNHH 103.5 FM.
The daily feature includes this Independent reporter speaking with Jason Bischoff-Wurstle (pictured), the photo archivist at the New Haven Museum. Our subject every day will be articles, both quotidian and of great pitch and moment, picked out from publications from eras past. These include papers like the the New Haven Daily Palladium or the New Haven Morning Journal and Courier.
Like a couple of guys meeting downtown for coffee and breakfast over the daily newspaper, we chew over how the past is very much present, especially in a town like ours, and how the present is also past.
Did you know, for example, that in the mid-19th Century New Haven was the epicenter of railroad activity and the latest technology? What if Metro-North upped its game and we chugged off in that direction once again?
In short, you might say our theme is “back to the future.” Or, to quote The New York Times‘s Bruce Weber in his July 22 obituary of E.D. Doctorow: “A good part of Mr. Doctorow’s achievement was in illustrating how the past informs the present and the present has evolved from the past.”
While you might think of a DOCTOR for ED, when you think DOCTOROW, think E.L.