Life on Lewis Street in the 1920s

by Mary A. Jacobson

In 1974, Frank Nicholson was interviewed by Olwen M. Jones of the Oral History Project. Nicholson, born in 1915, lived at 52 Lewis Street, between Greenwich Avenue and Mason Street in the 1920s. “Lewis Street in itself at that time, as I look back at it, was more like the beginning of the twentieth century than the beginning of the 1920s.”

Frank Nicholson, photograph by Agnew Fisher

His home “which was not a new house” had a shop in its front. “At that time it was Doc Fowler’s vulcanizing shop, where they vulcanized automobile tires…And the roar that these machines made and the smell of the rubber was pretty repulsive. But that didn’t remain for too long that I remember; around 1922 it was replaced by a battery shop for automobiles.”

On the south side of the street was Cole’s Automobile Agency that sold Wills Sainte Claires, classic cars that were manufactured between 1921 and 1927. Next door was Clark’s garage where you could fuel, repair, wash and store your car. There was one gasoline pump “that you turned by hand and measured out a gallon of gas. Then you turned it back and measured out another gallon of gas…Everybody who had a car took care of it, I guess because there weren’t many at that time.” Between Nicholson’s house and Clark’s garage was “this great big open field and a tremendous big hay and feed barn, which was Timothy Loughlin’s’ Feed and Grain Store.” In the early 1920s, goods like milk, bread, ice and coal were still delivered by horse and wagon.

There were many diversions on Lewis Street to keep a young boy’s interest and imagination active. On the north side of Lewis Street were two blacksmith shops, William Timmons’ and Seth Mead’s. In between, was Kirhoffer’s ironwork shop which serviced carriages. Nearby, was the shoemaker Tony Ginto.

“We learned an awful lot of things as kids because you always could go into the blacksmith’s shop and you could stand around and watch…You’d see them shoeing horses and glad to have you there and watch the sparks flying…Or you could go into the shoemaker’s and sit down and watch him cut the leather to make a sole on a shoe and sew it and glue it…We could go in the battery shop and watch them. You could go in the garage and watch them tear apart a car, and you could watch them vulcanize a tire…You were in things. You were never at a loss for something to do.”

The 1920s ushered in the age of prohibition and Lewis Street was “where the action was.” Number 25 Lewis Street housed Hassett’s Saloon. “I remember the day that they padlocked the saloon and all of these men standing out in front of Hassett’s Saloon bewailing the fact that there would be no more booze.” However, although the front door was closed, the back door was open. Nicholson remembers “rushing the growler” (taking a can to get it filled with beer) for his father. “I’d go to the back window at Hassett’s Saloon and have them fill it and I’d usually get a bottle of soda as a bonus because I was, I guess, small for rushing the growler.” Nicholson recounted stories about bootleg liquor, homemade “hooch,” and speakeasies, but as he would say, “I’m telling you this as recollections of a child…This is not factual; this is things that I remember.”

Looking north on Greenwich Avenue, courtesy of Agnew Fisher

One of Nicholson’s favorite childhood amusements was going to the silent movies at the Greenwich theater. There were two organists who would play during the film, one of whom, Russell Green, was also the organist at St. Mary Church. “If it was Rudolph Valentino in Blood and Sand, there was a score that went with that, and it fit in with the action.”

Skating at Ten Acres, now the Greenwich High School football field, courtesy of Greenwich Historical Society

There were also simple games like putting pennies on the trolley tracks before the trolley crushed them into different shapes. “And stickball, all you needed was an old broomstick and a saw…You sawed off one piece about six inches and that was your ball. At night we’d play cops and robbers and hide and seek. Hide and seek was a good way to get away from the front door… I can remember as a kid, my mother saying, ‘Don’t go away from that door,’ and I didn’t. I’d just stay right there on the curb and that’s where I saw the world go by. Great, great entertainment.”

Timmons’s Blacksmith, courtesy of Greenwich Historical Society

After graduating from Greenwich High School, Nicholson attended Middlebury College, the University of Grenoble and, as a Fulbright Scholar, the Sorbonne at the University of Paris. He began teaching French at Greenwich Country Day School in 1956.

 

The transcript of the interview, “Growing Up on Lewis Street in the 1920s” may be read 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.

Mary A. Jacobson, OHP blog editor.

Tod's Point and WW II Veterans

A mansion at Tod’s Point served as a residence for Greenwich WW II veterans and their families from 1946 to 1961

Thousands of people enjoy the beauty and sanctuary of Tod’s Point, yet few are aware of its connection to the veterans of WW II. From 1946 to 1961, the former mansion of Mr. and Mrs. J. Kennedy Tod, the original owners of Tod’s Point (known now as Greenwich Point), served as a residence for WW II veterans and their families. The home was demolished in 1961.

East side of mansion

In 1981, the Oral History Project published Tod’s Point: An Oral History, a complete history of Tod’s Point from its earliest times populated by Indians. Sixty-seven narrators were interviewed for this extensive project and it is from this rich trove that the stories of the WWII veterans are excerpted.

In 1945 the Town of Greenwich purchased the 148-acre property of Tod’s Point from Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, to whom it had been bequeathed upon Tod’s death, for the sum of $550,000. The mansion on the property had not been used as a residence since Mrs. Tod died in 1939. Concurrently, with the end of WW II, veterans were returning home to a severe housing shortage.  Approval was given by the Town of Greenwich to lease the mansion to thirteen veteran families for one dollar a year. 

"...we were all young, just out of the army. It was fun."

Completing renovation

The thirteen families planned to move into the mansion in 1946. First, however, its thirty-nine rooms had to be converted into thirteen apartments. They formed an independent nonprofit corporation called Vetaptco (Veterans’ Apartment Corporation). Each family floated a $1,000 loan from a local bank (The Greenwich Trust Company). According to resident Nicholas Thiel Ficker, “We paid (monthly) rent to our own corporation. I think forty dollars was the cheapest and seventy dollars was the most expensive. Of that, twenty-nine dollars went to the bank. The balance went into our Vetaptco account, and from that we paid for our oil, our heat, our electric, and so forth.”

To ready the apartments, according to Ficker, “This contractor (Peter Danziger) did the basic work and we did all the finishing work. We did all the painting, and some of the plastering, and a lot of the carpentry.” Ficker continued, “To get thirteen young families living down there, it took some courage. . . . It’s cut off from the public, you know, during the dark and winter months. . . . For that particular time, we were all young, just out of the army. It was fun.”

Mansion after snowstorm

Living at Tod’s Point had its challenges. The Town plowed the snow only to the entrance to Tod’s Point. During a blizzard at Christmastime in 1947 Ficker recalled, “Well, we didn’t have any snow shovels . . . so we took these sheets of aluminum and cut them up and made long wooden handles, and nailed these rectangular pieces of aluminum to the wooden handles and made about thirteen shovels. . . . We shoveled all day long, and at six o’clock at night, we finally broke through to Shore Road where they had plowed it.”

Another emergency, that required a communal response, was the inadequate septic system. As Ficker described, “The septic system filled up. . . . There was an old, poor old septic tank, and it just couldn’t take it any longer. On Thanksgiving Day of 1946, we dug a whole dry field. Thirteen men got out there with shovels, picks, and we dug trenches through that. We honeycombed that whole field, laid tiles, filled in gravel, and connected it in with the septic tank which was across the road. . . . We worked up an appetite for turkey.”

Resident Martha Hankins credits her childhood years living at “the Point” with her lifelong appreciation of the environment. “Just the experience of everything and being able to just have so much around you, so much nature, and nature still really affects me. . . .

Aerial photo of Tod's Point

And the bird sanctuary, around Thanksgiving time all the ducks would flock into the lake. There’d be thousands of ducks in the lake.” Ficker reminisces, “. . . we’d go down to the pond. We had a big net on the end of a long pole, and we’d catch blue crabs. Oh boy! Blue crabs were all over the place.”

By 1961, the last family moved out.  According to Ficker,” I think it ended simply because time had run out on it. . . . The Town had said they wouldn’t renew the lease, and there was good reason. . . . It was really starting to get run down. It would have taken a tremendous amount of money to put it into any shape at all. . . . And then there was the decision to demolish the house. Of course, we were all sad to see it go.” Unfortunately, before it was torn down, the building was vandalized. “It was a mess.”

Demolition of the mansion

Martha Hankins returned to her apartment shortly before the demolishment. “The piano we had was pushed down the stairs. . . . I couldn’t come back to see it torn down. It was just too much for me, because we had good memories there.”  Resident Joseph Callachan agreed, “It was just a simply marvelous experience, and one that we’re awfully glad we have in our background.”

The book, “Tod’s Point, An Oral History,” 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.

Mary A. Jacobson, OHP blog editor

 

Glenville – A Company Town

by Mary A. Jacobson

Today, one may walk in Glenville to a unique repurposed mill along the Byram River and its picturesque waterfall without realizing the richness of the industrial history of that site. From 1899 to 1978, the American Felt Company (AFC), once considered to be the largest producer of felt in the U.S., operated there.

From 1974 to 1992, interviews were conducted by seven different volunteers of the Oral History Project with 15 individuals associated with the American Felt Company. They encompassed everyone from machine operators to plant manager, each with his or her own perspective of living in Greenwich and working in the plant. The interviews speak to a time when everyone knew their neighbor; when manual labor was endured and respected; and when one’s pride in country, community, family, and occupation was central to one’s life.

American Felt Company sign (courtesy of American Felt Company)

Felt was an ubiquitous product. It was found in everything from pianos to locomotives to refrigerators to the popular “poodle skirts” of the 1950s. Wool was the predominant fiber in the production of felt. The process began with compressed bales of wool delivered to the plant from around the world. “Pickers” would pull them apart to remove the burrs and specks. “Picking” was followed by other labor-intensive processes called “carding,” “hardening,” “hydro-extracting,” and “shearing” before achieving the final uniform surface texture of felt.

The children of Glenville had vivid memories of their fathers working at the mill. Sophia Riakowski recalled her dad working at AFC in 1908, taking care of the boiler rooms. “He used to shovel the soft coal into the furnace to keep the furnace going and going . . . as young kids we used to take a wheelbarrow and wheel it close to the furnace so that my father wouldn’t have to keep going back and forth. It was wicked, and it was awful, awfully hot in there.”

For housing, Andrew Sczesny, who worked in the cutting department of AFC from 1940 to 1978, explained, “The company had these homes, and they rented them out to the people that worked in the mill, for the company only. They only had to pay one dollar a month for one room. Of course, if there were three or four rooms, four dollars a month. They were glad to pay even though they didn’t make too much money at the time. They had a place and they didn’t have to go far from their home to get to the job.”

Worker getting the picked and blended raw stock ready for the carding machine (From “FELT, a Mechanical and Engineering Material,” published by American Felt Company, copyright 1951.)

During the Depression, AFC kept two shifts going. Chief inspector Michael Zygmont remarked, “That kept many of the people in Glenville alive.” However, help was plentiful and “if you didn’t do your job to their satisfaction, they’d hire somebody else because help was plentiful…When I started in 1933, we worked 55 hours a week. Fifty-five hours for $16.60 a week…When the NRA (National Recovery Act) came into the picture, we worked forty hours a week and made fifty cents an hour. So that was twenty dollars a week, and we didn’t know what to do with our time.”

World War II had a big impact on AFC. According to plant chemist and marketing manager Tom Gillick, “Virtually the entire production of the plant was taken over by the military, and then came the Marshall Plan and lend-lease. So, we were re-equipping armed forces around the world.” For example, every soldier’s canvas canteen cover had a felt lining.

After the war ended, there was a great demand for new products. As Tom Gillick explained, “American industry, with its new ideas and products, had been put on the back burner during World War II. Now, they were all trying to build more automobiles and refrigerators and everything else. All these G.I.s were coming home and wanted to start families. So, there was tremendous demand for every type of felt we could make. We were running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”

However, by 1967, AFC became a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Ruberoid Company, which made roofing products, and then of GAF (General Aniline and Film Corporation), which produced industrial chemicals. After ten years, according to Gillick, GAF “made up its mind that it was going to dispose of the business, and the business was sold.”

In the 1980s, developers Ralph Schacter and Sy Schwartz, through careful restoration and renovation, turned the salvageable areas of the AFC plant into “The Mill,” with its restaurants, apartments and offices, keeping the historical integrity of the structure largely intact. Today, “The Mill” is undergoing another substantial renovation as its buildings are being carefully updated into high-end apartments and new businesses.

As developer Ralph Schacter observed, “Nobody makes anything anymore in Greenwich…The mill is very important historically for the people, that something was done here in Greenwich, one of the last factories that produced something.”

Overview of American Felt Company when in full operation (Courtesy of Greenwich Associates)

The American Felt Company interview transcripts may be read at the Greenwich Library Oral History Project office and are available for purchase. The Oral History Project is sponsored by the Friends of the Greenwich Library. Visit the OHP website at glohistory.org.

Mary A. Jacobson, OHP blog editor.