On River Street, Factory’s Past Meets Future

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.