Local Artist Invites Others to Participate in Community Art Show & Sale

FRIDAY AND SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 16TH AND 17TH - AFTERNOONS

This is the First Semi-Annual White Tent Gallery Show and Sale.
If you have some art (even from your walls) you would like to offer:
call, come over, set up, be nice, collect your own fees, help clean up.

Juried original art from Middletown perhaps as soon Spring 2012.

This year - open - casual - keep me company!

Marilyn Mills 860-347-7320
138 BROAD STREET

(If significant) Rain Dates 9 / 23 and 9 / 24

Village District Summer Potluck

Members of the Village District gathered for a beginning-of-summer pot luck, and while the while the conversations were largely of the, "where are you going on vacation," and "what are the kids doing" variety, Wednesday's Planning and Zoning meeting continued to surface as a focal point of discussion. At that meeting, the P&Z will consider allowing an exception for a house on College Street which seeks to rent offices in a home which currently doesn't have them. Most of the village district group is opposed to the exception since the group was formed around the concept of encouraging owner-occupied homes in a downtown district which was experiencing many residences being transformed into law offices, medical offices and academic offices. Some members are willing to consider an exception if the office is occupied by the homeowner, and the homeowner lives in the house.

The notice for tonight's P&Z public hearing reads:

1. Proposed Special Exception for an historic adaptive reuse of the property located at 196 College
Street to convert the second and third floors to an office use. Applicant/agent Venture One
Properties, LLC/David Kennedy SE2009-6

NOTE: This item has been tabled and will not be on the public hearing agenda Wednesday night because of unresolved current zoning violations at the address.

Police See Pattern in Downtown Neighborhood Break-Ins

Captain William McKenna, or the Middletown Police Department says the department is noticing a spike in burglaries, robberies and break-ins in neighborhoods surrounding downtown and Wesleyan.

"We already have an arrest warrant for one individual based on the recovery of a piece of jewelry from a Wesleyan burglary," he said. "But it's probably the work of two or three individuals.

"Last night it was just crazy," he said, about the five break-in calls the department received in the neighborhood. "Most of the houses this individual or individuals broke into were occupied. Usually burglars want to make sure the houses are empty. They'll stake out a house, or knock on the front door to be sure no one is home. For that reason we suspect they were under the influence of narcotics or alcohol that made them careless. We have a few people-of-interest in mind.

"In some cases our dog was able to track these guys from one house, to the next house they had entered," McKenna said.

McKenna said the investigation of these crimes is currently at the top of the department's daily list.

"I'm encouraging the midnight shift to be very vigilant. To make their presence known, and to just pound the area," he said. "And we encourage residents to report even the slightest thing that makes them suspicious. If they have a name, or a lead, or a tip they can call the detective bureau or the front desk number (344-3200).

A Disquieting Night in the Village

Another Break-in In the Village District

The clock read 1:10 AM, when the first wave of drunken Wes students hit my block of Pearl Street. They were exuberant with the end of classes, the beginning of the "reading" period, the onset of Spring and the availability of cheap beer on Main Street.

I wasn't angry, simply resigned. After a semester of brain-numbing academic work, a little release is essential.

"Reading period," is it? I don't think any of them were discussing Voltaire.

The second wave was a bit noisier, and the only coherent conversation I could make out was a young man who said, "It's because you're a girl," and the young woman he was accompanying said, "Exactly."

By the time a surge hit Broad Street, I was happy that they had decided on a route that didn't take them down Pearl. But I had my light on and I had Dennis Lehane's Darkness Take My Hand open, and was frankly freaked-out by this tale of a serial killer stalking Boston.

I was wired on a dose of decongestant, so I knocked back a hunk of the mystery before my eyes got heavy at around three. On the threshold of sleep, I heard feet scraping down the length of my gravel driveway. The motion sensor spotlight on the backporch clicked on, and I was down the stairway with my heart racing. But whoever set the motion detector off, was gone. I paced from window to window fueled to a buzz by adrenaline.

I sat in the front bay and watched as a huge oppossum ambled across the street. A Jeep Wagoneer circled the block twice. A Wes Public Safety cart passed a young man in hip-hop regalia who was walking down the middle of the street texting and drawing hard on a cigarette. A small grey car pulled into a neighbor's driveway, then backed out, traveled down the street a few hundred yards, and pulled in and out of another neighbor's driveway.

The adrenaline was just easing off when Lucy's cell phone began to ring at 3:45. It was her mother's alarm company. Her burglar alarm on Mansfield Terrace had been tripped, and Lucy's mother wasn't answering her phone.

"You've got to get over there," Lucy insisted. "I put on my sandals, grabbed a sweat shirt, and a length of sawed-off shovel handle and drove the six blocks to the house.

Tiny Mansfield Terrace was lined with six Middletown Police Cars, and an equal number of officers with flashlights blazing. One of the officers had a dog.

When I explained who I was, an officer told me that my mother-in-law was safe in her room, that they were sweeping the house and yard.

"We're trying to pick up a scent with the dog," he told me. "So if you could stay here for a moment, so we won't confuse the dog."

I'm always in favor of not confusing the dog.

Jane emerged from the house, and was invited to sit in one of the squad cars. The officer behind the wheel pulled down the street so she could talk to me. When he got next to me he rolled down the window, hooked a thumb in Jane's direction and asked: "Do you think you'll be able to post bond."

The joke helped crease the tension.

When we went back into the house, the officer took us into the basement and showed us how the burglar used a glass cutter to remove the laundry room window, entered, and when he or she couldn't get into the house (the door at the head of the stairs was bolted), the burglar had exited through a hatchway, which likely set off the alarm.

"It's the third one this evening," the officer said. "Same busted window. Same sneaker prints."

A house had been entered on Liberty Street, and one in a neighborhood closer to the Wesleyan campus.

There are a rash of break-ins, house entries, and burglaries in the neighborhood over the past week or so. Two car break-ins in the Pearl Street, College Street neighborhood. A mobile home entry. A house burglary on College.

The police officers indicated that this kind of crime spree is usually the work of a thief or two, and not necessarily an indication of a wider crime wave.

I sat and read Darkness Take My Hand at Jane's until I nodded off at 5:35. Jane woke me at 6:00 to let me know the sun had risen to make the neighborhood appear safe again.

Lock your doors. Arm your alarms. Leave your porch light on, and call the police (344-3200) if you notice anything suspicious.

Other conversations

Eyes were glued to TV screens all across town (and across the country), as Barack Obama took the oath of office and delivered his inaugural speech.










I found myself with a group of neighbors from the Village District, at Planning and Zoning Commissioner, Catherine Johnson's house, where she labored over a delicious lunch as we cheered the new president on. Strangely, we gathered at a house where the TV signal was pure analog, and the reception was not always perfect.

I also stopped at the Russell library
where a large group gathered to hear the speech, and where Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz, a Middletown resident, conducted the community conversation.








A vocal group was also found at the Firehouse Grill, but I stopped at the Green Street Arts Center and found that no one had shown up for discussion.

As noted in an earlier post, discussions occured in a number of locations around town.


Other conversations will take place this evening (see schedule), as well as an inaugural jazz celebration at Public restaurant on Main.

As the New Year crawled in

It was the perfect solution on a night when babysitters are impossible to find.

The Pinches invited several neighbors to welcome in the new year with soup, wine, martinis (in virgin cocktail glasses).

The adults talked about Christmas with the families, and the children ran through the hallways searching for ghosts, while the teens and preteens strove mightily to avoid the adults.

At midnight, the group gathered in the great room, and after one false start, counted in the New Year, and finished with a chorus of Auld Lang Syne, and a champagne toast.

Happy New Year.

Rash of Burglaries at Wesleyan and Village District

Several student rooms in off-campus housing, and a few reported incidents in nearby neighborhoods seem to indicate a pattern of small robberies in the neighborhoods surrounding Wesleyan. Wesleyan Public Safety sent out a warning about thiefs who enter after cutting screens, or climbing through open windows.

One neighbor reported, "last week, we had two instances of young men trying to open our
downstairs tenants' windows and their back door. The tenants were
home -- and on questioning, the men said they'd been sent to repair
the window and door, but cited a different Pearl Street address."

Eat your heart out, San Francisco

To fans of New Urbanism -- the movement for traditional neighborhood design, where work, commerce and home can sit side by side -- it's been a banner year. With the rising gas prices, there have been a number of articles in the national news about people who are choosing to move into a town as a way to be more energy-efficient. This evening it hit Yahoo.

The article mentions Walkscore.com, which is an internet-based parlor game where you type in your address, and it gives you a score based on all the services and amenities within walking distance of your home.

San Francisco claims the title of "Most Walkable City", with a walkscore of 86. But readers of The Middletown Eye won't be surprised to learn that downtown Middletown has them beat, with a walkscore of 100% in our Village District.

Come on down!

It takes a village (district) to raise a child

Though we don't know each other, I loved FishMuscle's blog entry on the evening concert at Wesleyan -- I understand he was the one in the yellow shirt, and maybe some of those kids running under the trees were his, mixed with mine.

For me, between raising four kids and my work surrounded by families at Kidcity Children's Museum, I'm always thinking about how we (the collective we) are doing as parents and what kind of people we are raising, and how they are someday going to feel about the job we've done --

Out in the world of commentary, there's a current notion about Parenting that we (parents) are paying too much attention to our kids, creating self-centered little monsters, and a sort of "Kindergarchy", where our culture has come to glorify youth instead of adulthood, and no one wants to be a grown-up anymore. Parents today -- the thinking goes -- are hostages in a cycle of doing way too much for their kids, and the family revolves around the interests of the kids instead of the adults.

We certainly seem to be bucking this trend in downtown Middletown. For the neighborhood parents that I know, life is not a whirl of driving from soccer practice to dance class. Instead, I'd say that engaging in the community is sort of the neighborhood sport for the grown-ups and the kids tag along more often than not. In some ways, our (grown-up) involvement in the community is purely selfish -- it's fun to be part of something larger than yourself. There's no doubt that it sometimes takes time away from your own family's needs. Sometimes, downtown families decide that their kids just won't get to do an activity if it takes too much of the family's time (meaning that it's outside the center core.)

But it's also true that our kids are having a great experience by growing up here -- the kids in our neighborhood have a manageable amount of independence -- they are out and about, and it's not just that they can walk to programs like Oddfellows that other folks have to drive to -- it's that they have a way to satisfy the human urge to be out in public, just strolling or stopping at the library, or meeting on a corner. And they also have a manageable amount of responsibility too -- all of our kids have logged plenty of hours at City Hall meetings, while the debate-of-the-week rages on. Not that it's all work -- we gather for fun at least as often as we gather to rouse the rabble.

I hope that by raising kids in the downtown, my spouse and I are showing them the value of being involved in a community, and of the responsibility we all have to create the change we want to see in our lives. But if somehow they aren't picking all that up, at least I know we are all having a lot of fun living here, and that none of us lack for good friends.