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On River Street, Factory’s Past Meets Future

by Paul Bass | Jan 14, 2010 12:08 pm

(5) Comments | Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author

Posted to: Business/Labor/ Economic Development, Media/ Books, Fair Haven

Paul Bass Photo Katharine Weber took a look at the shuttered brick plant. She imagined it buzzing with machines and laborers, 80 years ago. Helen Rosenberg looked at the building and imagined a shopkeeper behind the glass of the street-level arched windows, with artists working upstairs—years into the future.

Those two visions—one of Fair Haven’s vibrant industrial past by the banks of the Quinnipiac River, the other of a vibrant future—came face to face when Weber (at left in photo) and Rosenberg (at right) bumped into each other on River Street Wednesday.

Well, they didn’t exactly bump into each other. They agreed to meet in front of one of the city’s last grand unoccupied industrial buildings to compare notes on their two timely visions of what once took place there, and may take place there next.

Plywood blocks arched windows of the building. But Weber and Rosenberg see glass, and they’ve peered inside.

For more than a century the sturdy, three-story structure was known as the Bigelow building. Up to 100 men at a time built steam boilers there as big as houses, then sent them off on rail or ship to customers around the world.

The building figures prominently True Confections, a delectable new novel written by Weber and published by Shaye Areheart Books (an imprint of Crown). In the novel, the factory turns out Little Sammies, not big boilers—candies invented, produced and distributed by Eli Ziplinsky (nee Czaplinsky) and his New Haven descendants since 1924.

Weber was driving on River Street two summers ago in search of inspiration. “This neighborhood always intrigued me,” Weber recalled. “I thought of it as industrial neighborhood.”

She stopped in front of Bigelow. She pulled out her orange Sony Ericsson cell phone. Snap! She had her picture of the Zip’s Candies plant—in digital memory, and in her imagination.

From there grew the story Alice Tarnall Ziplinsky, the young woman who marries into the family and the business, and ends up keeping it alive and reinventing it.

Along the way, Weber takes the reader on a tour of the inner workings of the candy industry, family-run business, post-industrial urban decline, intermarriage, two unfortunate fires. As in a Zadie Smith novel, say, you don’t even realize you’re diving into the complexities of race, religion, politics, betrayal, economics, or family dynamics. You’re having too much fun on the wild narrative ride.

It almost all takes place here in New Haven—Clark’s Dairy, Marvel Road, East Rock, and, of course, River Street. (There’s a side story in Madagascar featuring a Nazi deportation scheme and a family cacao plantation.)

As True Confections took shape, Weber would find herself drawn back to River Street. She’d return to take in the Bigelow plant anew.

“I can easily imagine the hive of activity that was in this building,” she said. “It’s built to make things. You hear the echo of people coming to work with their lunch buckets.”

Bigelow’s factory did make things, from the 1869 until 1976. And yes, it hummed.

The plant was one of four buildings on the block constructed by Homer Bigelow after the Civil War. (Click here to read a history.)

A block away, the 29th Colored Regiment trained in the park, a historic connection that ended up fitting neatly into Weber’s book.

Tony Bialecki’s father Felix worked as a biolersmith at the plant for over 30 years, until it closed. Like Weber, Bialecki today hears the echoes in that vacant building—of scenes he witnessed as a boy.

“You’d walk in. There’d be sparks flying. There’d be huge overhead cranes. The noise was incredible,” Bialecki recalled. “These guys were so proud of what they did.” When a boiler was completed, the workers would partially dismantle it to pack it for delivery. They line up by the rail tracks and pose for pictures, backed by American flags. “It was like a christening,” Bialecki said.

Today Tony Bialecki works for a city government office, economic development, that’s been hard at work bringing some of that noise and some of those jobs back to River Street. It has spent eight years breathing new life into the old factories along the district’s 25 acres. There’s a metal finishing plant now, three printers, a contractor’s headquarters, an awning company.

And there’s Bigelow. The biggest challenge of the River Street rebirth campaign. And one of the last empty survivors from New Haven’s industrial heyday yet to be demolished or renovated.

Enter Helen Rosenberg. She works with Tony Bialecki in the economic development office. The River Street project is her baby. Like Weber, she uses a word-processor to bring her River Street vision to reality—only instead of novels, she writes grant proposals and land disposition agreements. Since the early ‘90s Rosenberg has wrestled with state bureaucrats, negotiated with businesses owners and neighbors, arranged environmental studies and clean-ups. She rescued Bigelow from demolition. Now she’d like to find someone to buy the building, which the city owns.

She doesn’t expect anyone to hire 100 burly men to make house-sized boilers or engage in other large-scale manufacturing. “We’re not doing a whole lot of that anymore,” she said. “The future of manufacturing is smaller, not huge.”

And the future of urban industrial stretches like River Street lies in “mixed-use.”

Rosenberg was asked what she sees in a reborn Bigelow building. “Offices,” she said. “Artists’ studios. Small incubation manufacturers. Specialty retail on the first floor, like Fair Haven Furniture.”

What about a candy factory?

“Sure, if somebody is inspired by your book, I’ll be happy” to help, Rosenberg said, turning to Weber.  “We’ll help with the environmental clean-up.”

“I don’t think they’ll be making Little Sammies,” Weber offered.

Old Eli Czaplinsky, a Hungarian immigrant, was inspired to create those candies after reading Little Black Sambo. He named his creations after characters in the book. Was he, a Hungarian immigrant, supposed to know nine decades ago that his inspirations would run afoul of racial sensitivities in a more modern America?

Katharine Weber’s heroine recognizes the need to change. She has new product lines in the works. A new day is coming for Zip’s Candies—and, perhaps, for the last shuttered stretch of River Street. Hey, any day now wind turbines will be generating some of the juice to run the printing presses.

In the meantime, memories of a simpler past, fictional and real, remain alive beyond the BIgelow building, beyond True Confection‘s 274 pages. Fans can still “order” Little Sammies and Tigermelts and Mumbo Jumbos online through a website complete with a company history. (Expect delays in delivery.)  Youtube has the original black-and-white TV spot from the 1960s with the Zip’s Candies jingle. (Click on the play arrow to watch.)

Who knows? it may just come back into fashion.

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Comments

posted by: anon on January 15, 2010  1:55pm

How come the U.S. allows Goldman Sachs to pay out tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer-financed bonuses in the midst of the worst recession in the past 70 years, while it is the only government in the developed world that for decades has been unable to create the policy conditions necessary for preserving critical historic resources like these for future generations?

posted by: Eric on January 15, 2010  2:47pm

One of the businesses on that block, Phoenix Press (the chain link fence in one of the photos belongs to Phoenix) is rapidly moving forward with it’s electricity-generating Wind Turbine on James Street. The ground-breaking ceremony is Thursday, Jan 21 at 11am. All are welcome to attend, 15 James Street, back parking lot at end of the road (facing the Harbor).

Phoenix Press is working hard to bring attention back to the River Street zone as a vibrant, prosperous location for business now and into the future.

posted by: Jonathan Hopkins on January 15, 2010  5:02pm

Much of the industrial zones in the city have been either demolished or changed in ways that make them unusable as manufacturing places for large numbers of residents. What has happened in the Dixwell neighborhood with the old Winchester factories seems to be a preview of what we might expect in the coming years for River Street, which is the importation of suburban workers and the exportation of pay checks received within the city. What was once an employer of 20,000 city residents, Winchester Factory, is now a sprawling complex of partially abandoned buildings, ambiguous open green space, and places of employment for people who live outside the Dixwell and Newhallville neighborhoods (and New Haven). Most of the Newhallville neighborhood housing was built as word-force housing for people employed at Winchester-without easy access to jobs, Newhallville is in deep trouble, which has been apparent for the last 50 or so years.
It’s the same story for southwestern Fair Haven. River Street is meant as a place for employment for residents of Fair Haven.

The is an image of the corner of Winchester and Munson from early in the 20th century:
http://hphotos-snc3.fbcdn.net/hs142.snc3/16955_1213688337446_1085910074_30530215_7386907_n.jpg
Here is that same corner today:
http://web3oh.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/photo1.jpg
We’ve replaced the loud clangs and bangs of presses, and the stench of burning fuels that produced local goods from local workers and sent the products all over the world with the loud zooms of commuter cars and the stench of exhaust pipes that signal the exodus of pay checks from the city to the suburbs. A parking garage for a factory is not a fair trade-off. Hopefully River Street will have a more successful redevelopment than Winchester.

posted by: Lisa on January 17, 2010  12:57pm

The fact that these buildings still stand today means that we cannot demolish them in the name of progress. We have to re-use and recycle them, like the condos at the Brewery nearby. This is a great opportunity to move forward w/o erasing our past. I am a Fair Haven Hts resident who is thrilled w/ the idea to revitalize this area into a thriving arts community and who knows what else. River St. always reminded me of Red Hook, Brooklyn. The city is being smart about the arts bent for the area. It’s common knowledge that artists are the ones willing to go in as pioneers to a wasted and forgotten place and rehab it. I see this as a good thing in this particular case. No one will really be displaced by the gentrification and raised rents; no one lives over there, to my knowledge. It’s a post-industrial waterfront property. It’s perfect. Here’s a link to a related story form the NYT called “Luring Artists to Lend Life to Empty Storefronts: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/nyregion/13galleries.html . Here is also a link to a somewhat-related CNN ireport about how a Wellness Fair was working to transform a troubled neighborhood in Canada: http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-336145

posted by: Edna Wells on January 21, 2010  2:44pm

A wonderful, inspired, vibrant story in a great new newspaper!

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