Don Pesci: The great dividing Connecticut River

VERNON, Conn.

Every so often a random piece in Quora, a site devoted to answering questions, will hit the eyeball like a hockey puck. Such is Patrick Reading’s short piece, “Why do New Englanders dislike Connecticut and feel it's not part of New England?”

Those of us who live east of the Connecticut River will appreciate his discussion and his tone, a blend of sturdy New England cynicism mixed with melted, buttery humor – very New England.

Reading’s working premise is that those with fortunes enough to live west of the river are imprinted with few characteristics normally associated with New England.

“East of the River,” he writes, “is classic New England. It's blue collar working class people, who root for the Patriots and the Red Sox, the Bruins and the Celtics. It's quiet old mill towns that saw better days a hundred years ago, and are still grinding along. It's rustic, with greasy old garages, motor heads with 3 cars in the front yard, corn and cow farms, and forests with stone walls running through them from farms long gone.

“West of the River is a suburb of New York City. It's money, old and new, manicured rural estates, stone walls meticulously maintained, full of Yankees ball caps and Giants bumper stickers. It's run down brick cities that lasted a little longer than the mills, but are packed with people that never moved on. It's traffic and congestion and poverty a stone's throw from elite private schools and country clubs.”

Having lived many years west of the river in southern Connecticut, I can confirm Reading’s reading of the state's East-West divide. In Redding, Danbury and Stamford, Connecticut’s West of the River capital, Hartford, often seemed to us as far off and fictional as Oz. Nearly all the television stations in Danbury and Bethel get their broadcasts from New York, not a part of New England, and denizens of southeast Connecticut infrequently thought seriously about state politics under the gold dome.

Then, too, the smell of old money was pungent. Greenwich, where my wife Andree taught in Catholic schools for many years, is what those unused to New England ways think that Connecticut represents.

“Western Connecticut is New York’s backyard,” Reading writes, “a Hollywood version of ‘New England’. They sell maple syrup to tourists, usually with Vermont’s label on it. They have someone trim their trees and sell it to the country inn that burns wood in a 300-year-old fireplace for ambiance. Other people ‘summer’ there, Their antiques stores are meticulous and curated for Manhattan interior designers, with someone in a suit making sure you don’t touch the merchandise without hearing an in depth story about its history. They have seafood dining experiences all year round, because where else are New Yorkers going to go for the ‘Christmas in Connecticut’ experience? They sell New York style pizza masquerading as ‘New Haven’ style. They talk like New Yorkers so it’s comfortable for outsiders.”

Overdone? A smidgen overdone, yes – but on the whole, Reading has Connecticut’s wealthy West of the river's number. It is impossible to imagine millionaire U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal or millionaire Gov. Ned Lamont living in Pomfret, although Lamont maintains an immodest summer cottage in North Haven, Maine, where his wealthy forbearers bought up much of the island. Blumenthal’s wife has deep roots in New York City, where her family owns the Empire State Building and other lush properties.  

To demonstrate the bifurcation, Reading throws up a map showing the distribution of Red Sox and New York Yankee fans in the state, which conforms almost exactly to an East of the River, West of the River division, with Red Sox fans populating the eastern portion of the state.

Western and eastern Connecticut just feel different. Perhaps the best way of putting it might be to say that eastern Connecticut is Jeffersonian, full of virtuous farmers, while western Connecticut is Hamiltonian, full of Blumenthals and Lamonts, more politically inclined, with an unquenchable hankering for earning easy money and liberally spending other people’s money.

There is also a north-south divide and, as always, socialist Michael Harrington’s sundering division into poor and the very rich, who really seem to be, as F. Scott Fitzgerald many times told us, “different than you and me.”

How different are the very rich? Well, as politicians, they drag their log cabins with them wherever they go on the campaign trail, even in Connecticut’s larger cities, where the dependent and imprisoned poor wait for deliverance from political saviors who just now are promising them crumbs from rich tables in exchange for votes, the wealthiest of the politicians convinced that the quickest way to get a vote is to buy one with other people’s money.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.