Tuesday, August 13, 2019

A Walk in Ansonia, Part Two

Ansonia, Connecticut

A train heading north on the single track, alongside the flood wall. Pumping station on the right.


Along the wall of the Farrell Company foundry building, now sitting empty.


 Another Farrell building across the street from the foundry, waiting for repurposing.


Still another, around the corner.

2 comments:

David said...

I find the scene in the top photo to be disturbing. That wall! Your town’s relationship to the river is a wall. You walk along the main drag, look to your right, across the train track, and see... a wall. It’s hard for me to put into words. I would not want to live there.

Carl Weese said...

David, I find the wall disturbing too, which is why I'm doing a whole series on it. I don't think I would enjoy living near it, though it must be said that the river lies in a deep valley and most of the residential parts of Ansonia tower above the wall. Even the main drag is about twenty feet above the level of the train station one block east. The other side of it though is that a lot of people lost their lives, and a whole lot more lost their houses and possessions, because the wall wasn't there in the great floods of the 1950s.

All over the Naugatuck river valley you find signs and markers on buildings on the main thoroughfares indicating where the water reached in the great floods. I can easily press my hand against an eight foot ceiling, but even on tip-toe I can't reach up to most of those markers.