Teleidoscope

Fri, Dec 15, 2006

Hartford

Posted at 10:03 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I can just barely remember when there were shade tobacco tents along the Connecticut River. The leaves were used for cigar wrappers. I think a lot of that land is super-highways now.

I don't remember whether my Father ever worked tobacco in the summers growing up, but I know that my Mother worked in the tents at least one summer. I don't think the summer work was picking the tobacco. I think it was pruning the plants (cutting off sucker shoots) and weeding. She described working in the tents as horribly hot and sticky and smelly.

About the time the shade tobacco was disappearing and the highways were being built, downtown Hartford got redeveloped with some new buildings and a raised pedestrian mall that connected various buildings above street level, called Constitution Plaza. One building was named Broadcast House, originally home to WTIC TV and radio, and in its lobby was a statue of a man sowing grain from a shallow tray: Broadcasting it. The picture of the statue was the WTIC logo for many years.

The first year after the pedestrian mall was more or less complete they had a Festival of Lights for the holidays, which became an annual event. (According to the website, this year they will use more than a quarter of a million lights.) Our family went into the city to see the decorations the first year because they were new and special. The decorations were mostly sculptures made of wire and little twinkly lights, not the greenery and lightbulbs that were common public decorations. And they were very impressive, especially that first year: I don't think the little twinkly lights were available for home use yet. (Now, of course, you can buy animated reindeer made from twinkly lights at any hardware store and some supermarkets.)

We went to see the lights sometimes in later years, too, depending on the weather and our schedules.

For the first several years that we lived in Manchester my Father worked as a watchmaker in a department store in Hartford named something like "Brown Thompson's". The building had escalators, and was the first place I ever encountered them. He took the Silver Lane bus to work, so in those days our family only needed one car.

I have a vague impression that the Brown Thompson building went away at some point during the redevelopment. The company went away earlier: they were outcompeted by Fox's, the other Hartford department store. I believe Fox's is now owned by the conglomerate that owns Macy's.

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