THE CLAM BOX 1939-1985

A Beloved Local Business

In 1939, Anna and George Gross rented a two-car garage on Salem Street and East Putnam Avenue in Cos Cob and opened the original Clam Box restaurant. It had a few stools in front and a take-out counter and was to serve customers in the summers only.  According to their son, Arthur Gross, interviewed by Penny Bott-Haughwout of the Oral History Project in 1986, “My parents started the original Clam Box restaurant with four hundred dollars… They painted the building white. They put an awning in front of it. They bought several truckloads of oyster shells which was put on the ground and then crushed by a crushing machine. And that became the area where people ate in their cars or ate at the stand.”

Original Clam Box
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Business was good---so good, in fact, that “my father made more money in three months in Cos Cob than he’d made all year in New York (at his NYC spot called Cooper’s Fish and Chips near Grand Central Station). Shortly thereafter, the New York City restaurant was closed and George Gross “devoted one hundred per cent of his time in Cos Cob.” After the first year, Anna and George bought the building and opened the Clam Box year-round. Eventually, they built on both sides of the existing main stand and it became a restaurant of about 250 seats.

The Clam Box menu, front cover
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

What was the “secret sauce” to this successful small business? According to Arthur, “ . . . nobody had any seafood items cooked the way we did. The frying was completely new to this New England area… Our kitchens were open to the public. People got the aroma of the cooking. And the fact that we fried at such high temperatures . . . at 375 degrees, they were seared very quickly. An order of fried clams would take thirty or forty-five seconds in these special cooking machines that we had.” Fish and chips were also cooked at a high temperature and “ . . . in a matter of three or four minutes, we’d have a magnificent piece of fish cooked, very crispy on the outside and very moist on the inside.” Everything was cooked to order.

The Clam Box menu, back cover
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Of course, the high quality of the food was fundamental. “We sent a man from Greenwich to New York City five mornings a week . . . to the Fulton Fish Market. He used to leave here about quarter of three o’clock in the morning… The fish was delivered to Cos Cob like ten o’clock in the morning, and it was served that evening.”

The Clam Box menu, inside left
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

How about the prices? The original Clam Box menu in 1939 lists “Silex coffee with cream” for five cents. “People remembered the fact that they got a good cup of coffee.” In addition, “Bottle Grade A Milk” was ten cents; clam chowder, fifteen cents; fish and chips, thirty-five cents; oyster stew, forty cents. The “Clam Box Special” with half cold lobster, crabmeat, shrimps, and clams was ninety-five cents.

The Clam Box menu, inside right
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Customers, mostly locals at the time, had a different cycle to their daily lives in those early days. In the summer, before television and air-conditioning, “a man would get in the car and take a ride with his wife and they’d stop off for fried clams or fish and chips at our type of a restaurant. We also found that we were busier late in the evening---this would run until two in the morning.” Post-WWII, with the advent of television, people tended to stay home in the evenings. “Our business changed rapidly… After the war we never stayed open as late as we did prior to the war.”

George and Anna believed in their business. “Every dollar they made they reinvested back into the property, and they managed to survive, and it was quite successful after the second year.” In 1947, the Grosses purchased another building, with four hundred feet frontage on East Putnam Avenue in Cos Cob, in which the Clam Box remained until 1985. Fortunately, the property also allowed for enlargement of the restaurant facilities.

“By enlarging the kitchen, we were able to purchase additional equipment to make the same recipes… We were able to handle the many thousands of people that we did serve in the summertime… We had a wonderful reputation. We had the nicest people in the area coming out to dinner.” Arthur was proud that a family could be well-fed for under ten dollars.

The Clam Box, expanded capacity, outside
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

In 1963, with additional storage space made available for produce and seafood, the restaurant could serve five hundred and fifty patrons “plus the take-out business.” A bakery was also now contained on the premises in which fresh rolls, pies, cakes, puddings, éclair shells, and more were prepared. Over one hundred and thirty staff were employed. Arthur boasted that “ . . . we must have had seventy-five working here more than five years . . . and another ten or fifteen who worked here for twenty years or more.”   

The Clam Box, expanded capacity, inside
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Arthur’s parents retired in 1957. His father George passed away in 1960. Arthur and his wife, Priscilla, managed the business from that time on. Arthur himself had worked in the restaurant from the age of 14 in 1939 to age 60 in 1985. “If people wanted to find me, they could reach me at 9:30 in the morning, and I was here until sometimes 9:30 at night, and I was here many a time seven days a week.” In 1985, the decision was made to close the restaurant and “sell the property, distribute the proceeds (among the corporation of family members), and go our separate ways… It’s the end of an era.”

The Clam Box postcard
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Arthur did have to admit that occasionally he would see some tempting restaurant locations in town. “I’d come home and say to my wife, ‘You know, we could go back and open up another little stand again and just sell clams and shrimp and fish and chips.’ And she’d say, ‘No way, Buster.’”

The interview of Arthur Gross appears in the Oral History Project book entitled “The Clam Box and the Food Mart.” It may be read in its entirety at Greenwich Library and is available for purchase at the OHP office. The OHP is sponsored by Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subject to factual scrutiny.

Mary Jacobson, OHP blog editor.

 COS COB IN THE 20s AND 30s

Cos Cob is a close-knit, self-sufficient community within Greenwich with its own identity. With Long Island Sound to its south and the Mianus River to its east, it resonates with water views and a rich, nautical history that dates to the eighteenth century. It was also home to the Cos Cob Art Colony, the first impressionist art colony in Connecticut, which flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This hamlet includes the sixty-one-acre Montgomery Pinetum, its own neighborhood library, restaurants, and shops. Many of these enterprises are located in “the Hub,” the commercial area at the intersection of Strickland Road and East Putnam Avenue.

 

Gertrude Riska
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Gertrude O’Donnell Riska, born in 1920, has vivid memories of growing up in Cos Cob in the 20s and 30s. She shared her reminiscences with Marcella Raphael of the Oral History Project in 1993. In her interview, she chose to take the reader on a walk describing the sights and sounds that she experienced approximately one hundred years ago.

 

The Cos Cob neighborhood she described had no traffic lights on Post Road with “few cars. . . I would say if there were twenty cars in an hour on the Post Road, that would be a good amount.” Policemen stood in two sentry boxes to help residents cross the street and walked the street each evening “to make sure that the business people had secured their door for the night.” She observed, “There weren’t too many wealthy people in Cos Cob. It was more a working-class town.”

 

As a child, Gertrude remembered shopping for food “just about every day because you didn’t have freezers or refrigerators. You had the old-fashioned ice box where the ice man brought your block of ice if you put a sign in the window and told him to stop with it.” McKinley’s Meat Market was a frequent destination. “He had a huge, giant icebox and every time you wanted a pork chop or something. . . he’d disappear, and the door would slam shut, and then in a minute he would come out with a whole big piece of meat and cut the pork chops or whatever. . . He’d have to return it right away back to this refrigerator. . . they had huge hooks that they hung (meat) on.” 

 

Looking from Strickland Road to the Post Road
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Down the adjacent driveway, was a “tiny-weeny store” operated by Gussie Feldman. Gussie had a large number of children and no employees. “When you entered the store, you’d hear a little bell go ding-ding. . . Pretty soon she’d look through the upstairs window and say, ‘All right, I’ll be right down’. . . Today we’d leave someone in the store with the cash register. But, those days, you didn’t.” Gussie “sold everything from thread to sneakers to odds and ends. . . She did a good business on the Fourth of July. We all went over there and got rockets.”

 

Gertrude remembered the first A&P housed near the old Cos Cob School in a block of stores built by “a very well-known builder, Mr. Schubert.” Unlike today’s supermarkets, it was a very small store with a counter on one side and, on the far side, canned goods on shelves. “You dared not take anything off the shelves.” Instead, you would wait your turn and ask for each item. “The salesman would walk around the counter, go to the far side and get the can of what you wanted, go back. . . He would write the price of each on a brown paper bag. It was very time consuming.”

 

The Clam Box
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

A favorite spot, Gertrude stated, was The Clam Box. “Everybody knows The Clam Box. . . It was almost across from about where the car wash is” on Post Road. “It was really a little square kind of a shack” run by the Gross family in the 30s. “Even people from New York would come up to the Clam Box. . . the food was really good, and the price was good.” Originally, they “had maybe two stools. . . but later they added on. They made it much, much bigger.” Eventually, it closed and was torn down.

 

Where the Mill Pond Shopping Center exists now, Gertrude states, “That was just all wetlands. It was just an empty swampland with the tide coming in and out almost up to the Post Road.” At the end of Mead Avenue, there was one roadway “that had been filled in with rocks and extended out into the channel.” Gertrude and her friends would walk out there to an area known as Lockwood’s Dock and swim. “Then you came out in your wet bathing suit and back down across Post Road. . . It was just a normal thing to do, and that was the only place that you could swim.” Between Mead Avenue and Relay Place was a little white building called White Castle Hamburgers. “They were five cents each. . . For a quarter you got five, and they were delicious.”

 

Cos Cob School
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Of course, school was the center of activity in Gertrude Riska’s life. “. . . the Cos Cob Library (was) contained in it, to the left of the front door.” The school was also the setting for country fairs and annual Halloween parties. The fireman’s carnival was held in the school to make money to maintain the firehouse. “It was one of the two events that the whole town waited for. They had the usual booths with spinning wheels and prizes. But the real exciting thing was the dance floor and the Fireman’s Ball.” Gertrude’s father was chief of the Cos Cob Fire Department. “We waited practically breathless all year for that Fireman’s Ball. . . The jitterbugging hadn’t come in, but they were doing the waltzes. It was just nice.”

 

An Early Cos Cob Fire Engine
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Gertrude was particularly proud of her father, Lewis O’Donnell, and his involvement with the nascent Cos Cob Fire Department, founded in 1922, in addition to his work as chief electrical engineer at the Cos Cob Power Plant.  Gertrude’s dad and some of his friends worked tirelessly to convert a donated touring car into a pumper for the fire department as “they didn’t have the funds to go out and buy the proper engines.” When their task was accomplished, “it was a great, wonderful thing for the fire department to have this unique automobile or pumper.” Meetings were originally held in the second floor of the Taylor barn. However, soon after, letters were written to potentially wealthy donors to help construct a proper firehouse. Eventually, a temporary firehouse was built in 1924 [next to where the present firehouse is now].

 

Cos Cob Firehouse
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Gertrude Riska continued to live in Cos Cob until her death, at the age of 96, in 2016. She taught piano to hundreds of students in her home on Orchard Street and played the organ in churches until the age of 92. She and her family’s legacy contributed much to her community in Cos Cob as well as to the town of Greenwich.

 

The interview entitled “A Walk Through Cos Cob in the 1920s and 30s” may be read in its entirety at Greenwich Library and is available for purchase at the Oral History Project office. The OHP is sponsored by Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subject to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

 THE TREES OF GREENWICH AVENUE

Dutch Elm Disease first made its appearance in Glenville in Greenwich in 1933. Discovered in the Netherlands fifteen years earlier, it made its way to America through shipments of logs infested with the European elm bark beetles. As the severity of the effects of the disease on elm trees became more and more apparent throughout Greenwich, and in an attempt to stop the spread of infection, aggressive attempts were made to identify, remove and destroy hundreds of these beloved elms that graced our public streets.

Gertrude duPont Howland

Enter Gertrude duPont Howland who noticed in the 1940s “that on Greenwich Avenue the beautiful elm trees that used to be up and down the Avenue were being taken down one by one. . . They were cutting off the trunk as low as they could get it and then cementing over the area, and that was it. Nothing new was being planted. And as one tree after another came down, there was nothing.”

Gertrude Howland decided to make it a personal crusade to bring attention to the “absolutely bare-looking” condition of the Avenue. Oral History Project volunteer Margaret French interviewed her in 1987 to document Howland’s relentless efforts to replant the Avenue. Contacting Joseph Cone, “head of the parks and trees department at the time,” Howland was told that “the reason he couldn’t plant any more trees, to replace the ones taken down, was that it was far too expensive to dig out those huge roots, and that he didn’t know where else he could possibly plant them.” There were concerns about disrupting utility services “which largely ran down in the street and branched out into each building on each side.” Howland was told that there was no comprehensive map of the location of the different utilities.

Looking down Greenwich Avenue from Lewis Street

Faced with these challenges, Howland decided to enlist the help of Green Fingers Garden Club to “simply trot out to the head offices of each of the utilities (electric, telephone, water and gas), get their maps and reduce them to the same scale, superimpose them on each other and presto! You’d have a real master plan of Greenwich Avenue.” This was a monumental and, ultimately, impossible task. The water company “didn’t have the slightest idea.” The electric and telephone company had sketchy maps “but they were the best they had.” The most discouraging response was from the sewer and drain department who said “some of those things went back to colonial times and were undoubtedly made of wood.” There were “no records. . . And the only way they ever found out was when something broke.”

Cone advised her to engage an engineer to examine the basement of each building on the Avenue in order to make a record of where the utilities enter from the outside. Howland approached Willard DeVaul of S. E. Minor engineering firm in Greenwich, and he not only agreed to do the job, but he did it for free. DeVaul believed the project was worthwhile and “he seemed to enjoy doing it. The three of us (including Bea Rogers, another member of Green Fingers) had a real nice time because some of those basements were perfectly fascinating. What you found there!”

This aspect of the project took a number of months. However, when the drawings were presented, yet another stumbling block to planting trees surfaced. They were told “that with all the increasing traffic up and down Greenwich Avenue, no tree would possibly live, and it was silly to spend money on planting something that was certainly going to die.” Undaunted, Howland solicited help from the Bronx Botanical Garden “to come out and advise us. . . We got a man, and he went up and down Greenwich Avenue with us, and he was terribly supportive and pleased at our idea. . . He advised two kinds: the pin oak and a very new kind of locust called a moraine.” This new thornless variety of locust was so new “he thought we would have trouble finding any big enough for a street.” After phoning countless nurseries, a number of them were found.

However, the issues that Mr. Cone, “a very respected, liked man in town and at Town Hall,” had with the prospective trees, continued. There were additional concerns that the tree roots would make the pavements uneven and that citizens would fall and sue the town; that the roots would break the water mains; that the trees would disturb the flow of air to apartments overhead; and “that the use of public moneys in so dangerous a manner” could not be approved.

Lastly, Howland lamented, before planting any trees, written permission would need to be obtained from the owner of each building. “Half the people that owned them (the businesses) weren’t even living in Greenwich.” To Howland’s surprise and dismay, she discovered that numerous store renters were opposed to trees because of their issues with leaves that drop, that become slippery in rain, and that obscure window displays.

Green Fingers Garden Club planting a
tree on Greenwich Avenue

Help came in the visage of Mr. Mayer H. Cohen, who owned several buildings on the Avenue and was president of the local merchants’ association at the time. “Somebody told us that he was very influential with the people on the street, and that if we could get him to let us plant trees in front of his buildings, it would make a great difference. . . Not only did he permit us to plant trees, he spoke to the others at some merchants’ meeting and, in no time at all, permissions were flowing in.”

Greenwich Garden Club planting a
tree on Greenwich Avenue

According to Mrs. Howland, this whole process took about eight years. Local garden club contributions and private donations helped “to keep it going.” Howland continued, “Well, you see, there were so many obstacles to be overcome, and each time I thought it was the last hurdle. But, of course, it never was.”

Joseph Dietrich, who succeeded Joseph Cone, was “not only supportive, he was enthusiastic about the idea. And he agreed that Greenwich Avenue should have trees all up and down.” At the first official planting of pin oaks, there was a gathering of garden club members, Mr. Dietrich, and the press to mark the grand occasion.

Christmas lights on Greenwich Avenue in the 1950s

Mrs. Howland concluded, “Well, it’s been satisfying. I really get a tremendous kick at Christmastime seeing those trees all covered with Christmas lights. I’m really very happy to see it.”

The interview entitled “Missions Accomplished” may be read in its entirety at Greenwich Library and is available for purchase at the Oral History Project office. The OHP is sponsored by the Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the project's website at glohistory.org. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subject to factual scrutiny.

Mary Jacobson, OHP Blog Editor