Calla

 

After the rain.

Pumpkins

Every year the owners of this place grow huge pumpkins.  Most are on vines spilling down the hillside.  

This one got a chair to sit on.

Run!

 Even though just a small store on Main Street, Ridgefield Running Company keeps winning awards as one of the best running stores.  It was Store of the Year in 2022.

Marcel Hotel

The building next to Ikea and US Route 95 in New Haven stood empty for 20 years.  It was once the headquarters of Armstrong Rubber Company.   The building is a famous work of brutalist architecture by esteemed architect Marcel Breuer before brutalism fell out of favor.

A few years ago the building was renovated by Connecticut architects and became the Hotel Marcel, operated by the Hilton Hotel group.  With extensive solar arrays on its roof and nearby parking lots, Hotel Marcel is the country’s first fossil fuel-free hotel.  It is Net-Zero and LEED Platinum.  

The building’s iconic six-foot-by-three-foot windows are glazed with high performance glass that meets the Passive House Standard (and has the added benefit of insulating guest rooms from traffic noise.)

Clifford Beers Clinic

 The clinic was created in 1913.  It is named for a Yale graduate from New Haven who was one of five children in a family, all of whom spent time in mental hospitals.  When Clifford Beers left the hospital, he wrote an autobiographical account of his hospitalization and the abuses he suffered.

Clifford Beers Clinic is one of the largest providers of child, adolescent, and young adult mental health care in New Haven County.  

The Whale

 

The Ingalls Hockey Rink at Yale was designed by modernist architect Eero Saarinen,  It opened in 1959.  The rink is knicknamed "The Whale."  It is named after a father and son, one of whom captained Yale's hockey team in the '30s, the other in the '50s.  The Ingalls family provided the bulk of the funds to build it.

Prospect Hill Historic District

 

The Prospect Hill Historic District in New Haven lies north of Yale College's main campus.

I wandered around and photographed some of the appealing houses.

Albertus Magnus College

 Albertus Magnus College is a private Roman Catholic university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was founded in 1925 by the Dominican Sisters of St. Mary of the Springs (now Dominican Sisters of Peace). Its campus is in the Prospect Hill neighborhood of New Haven, near the border with Hamden.

Betts House

When built in 1868, the Betts House was the biggest in New Haven.  It was acquired by Yale in the 1960s but sat empty for four decades.  In 2002 it was extensively renovated and put back in use.  Today it is the home of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. 

Attached to the house is the Greenberg Conference Center, a modern facility named funded by and named for Maurice Greenberg, the retired CEO of American International Group.

Yale Divinity School

 Yale Divinity School surprised me.  It is massive.  About three blocks of red brick buildings around a well-tended central green.  New Haven, Connecticut.

After the Rain

 Outside the Prospector Theater.

Tiny House

 

I often show big elegant houses or historic houses.  A friend recently asked me to show tiny houses.  Ridgefield is a wealthy town and many of the houses are big.  Frankly, the fine architecture or the historic connections are what catch my eye.  But, today is for a small house.  OK, Kate?

Frederic Remington

 The painter and sculptor Frederic Remington became famous for his paintings and sculptures of the Old West, but he lived most of the time in the Northeast.  Remington wanted to leave New Rochelle, New York, for a quieter place and chose Ridgefield.  He only lived here for six months before his death.

Remington's Ridgefield home -- Oak Knoll -- was on Barry Avenue.  (The front yard is pretty badly overgrown, so I couldn't photograph the front.)  Oak Knoll Road and Remington Road are off Barry Avenue, close to Remington's house. 

Eugene O'Neill

 

Playwright Eugene O'Neill lived for five years at Brook Farm on North Salem Road in Ridgefield.  A gloomy person, O'Neill apparently disliked Ridgefield because it was too cold and not on the water.

While at Brook Farm, O'Neill wrote "Desire Under the Elms" and at least five other plays.  Elm trees stood at the entrance when O'Neill was here.  They are now gone.  Think this is one of the elm stumps?  

September 11

 I will never forget how September 11, 2001, began as one of those rare, perfect, late summer days.  Cloudless, rich blue skies.  Comfortable temperature.

Someone peeked into my office and said a plane had crashed into a World Trade Center building.

Must be a small Piper Cub, I thought.  Turned on the television.

No.  Our world changed that day. Never forget.

From the archives of June 27, 2014.

Maurice Sendak

Author and illustrator Maurice Sendak was a 40 year resident of Ridgefield.  His 1963 book "Where the Wild Things Are" is one of the best-selling children's books and is on many children's bookshelves.  

 

Sendak's house is in a quiet, wooded part of Ridgefield.  For years there has been talk of creating a Sendak museum, so far without action, though there is a large stone-faced addition out of sight to the left of the house, which holds Sendak archives.

"Defending the Nest"

 There is a new 7 foot tall stainless steel sculpture in front of Ridgefield Library.

A great blue heron by Annie Mariano.

War Memorial

 

In 1925 a monument was erected on Main Street across from where Branchville Road enters, to honor the men from Ridgefield who served in wars from the Civil War to World War I.

Red Barn

 A favorite red barn standing alone in a field on North Salem Road in Ridgefield.

Plant Happiness. Plant Now.

Three roosters.

 

Out of the Jurisdiction: Greenland

 Flying back from Iceland to JFK on a sunny day with blue skies, we passed the southern tip of Greenland.

I ended up with a far nicer photo from the window of an airplane than I usually get.

Out of the Jurisdiction: Gullfoss

Gullfoss is one of Iceland's most impressive waterfalls.  The top level drops about 30 feet.  The lower level drops about 100 feet, some of which can't be seen from this vantage point.

Out of the Jurisdiction: Strokkur

 

Strokkur is a very active geyser in the Haukadalur Geothermal Field.  Nearby is the now dormant Geysir, the geyser that gave its name to the phenomenon.  Strokkur is now the most active geyser in the field.  It goes off every eight to ten minutes and shoots 80 to 120 feet into the air.

Out of the Jurisdiction: Turf Houses

 Turf houses were in use for about 900 years in Glaumbaer, a farming community in the north of Iceland.

This collection of farmhouses at Glaumbaer was added to the National Museum of Iceland's collection of protected buildings in 1947.  The outbuildings house old farm implements.  The main house has furnishings perhaps typical of the first half of the 20th century.  I was too tall to walk through it.

Out of the Jurisdiction: Who Photographs Bottles?

 

Not me, that's for sure.  But if that is what the City Daily Photo theme pickers want, that's what they get.

A bottle of sparkling water.  https://citydailyphoto.org/category/theme-days/

Out of the Jurisdiction: Basalt Columns

We have seen basalt columns all over Iceland.  They form after volcanic eruptions when the magma cools.  Most often the cooling takes place from the top down, creating vertical basalt columns.

But in the Vatnajokull National Park, there are remarkable formations in which the basalt crystals formed circular patterns from magma that cooled from all sides concurrently,

Out of the Jurisdiction: Cod

 We visited a small fish shop in Haugenes, a very small village on a fjord in the north of Iceland.

The owner is the third generation to operate the fish shop.  He gave us an excellent -- and often humorous --  history and explanation of the ways in which cod fishing has changed in Iceland over the years. 

His brother carved a cod in front of us while the owner explained the process and were the best markets for each part of a cod.  Nothing is wasted!  Nigerians love soup from the head.

His brother went out back and returned to show off a 50 pound cod he had caught two days earlier.

The visit ended when the owner carved out a cod eye and went to show it to one of the guests on our trip.

Out of the Jurisdiction: Dettifoss

Here is the huge waterfall I told you yesterday that I would be visiting.  Dettifoss is in north Iceland.  It is 330 feet wide and the cascade drops 150 feet.  Dettifoss is the second biggest waterfall in Europe. 

Very impressive.

Out of the Jurisdiction: Godafoss

Godafoss is one of Iceland's best waterfalls, a short but wide waterfall fed by the glacial Skjalfandaflioti River.  Impressive as Godafoss is, we are told that the one we will see tomorrow is much higher and wider.  I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Out of the Jurisdiction: Two Waterfalls

 First full day in Iceland.  We visited two nice waterfalls in the southeastern part of the country.

Seljalandsfoss looks pretty standard from the distance.  But, get closer and you can see the force with which the water smashes into the pool below.  And this waterfall's special feature is a small cave behind it, which permits visitors to have the unusual experience of seeing the falls from behind.

Skogafoss is a much wider waterfall, further east.  Some climbed a trail to see the falls from above. 

Simple, with Porch

 

Peach Lake Road, North Salem, New York

Keeler Tavern

 I have shown the 18th century Keeler Tavern a couple of times, most recently in 2022.

This is a simple straight-on image from across Ridgefield's Main Street.

Blue and White

 This 1890 house for Ebenezer Hoyt might be my favorite Ridgefield house.  It is a short walk into town and high enough above Main Street that I suspect the traffic noise is well muffled.