A fine how-do-you-do in Connecticut

I've lived in Connecticut and Rhode Island all my life and if those two states were a comedy team, Connecticut would be Carl Reiner (earnest, intelligent, quick-witted and serious) and Rhode Island would be Mel Brooks (unpredictable, hilarious, and completely off the wall). So it comes as a bit of a surprise that no-nonsense, straight-laced Connecticut is a little wacky when it comes to imposing fines along the roadside. There seems to be an aversion to round numbers, as the two signs above attest: $219 for littering and $131 for parking in a handicapped space without a permit.

Reminds me of that bit from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail":

 Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.

So, in Connecticut there's a fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous when it comes to fines, not to put too fine a point on it, and we're fine ones to talk.

Don't go there, girlfriend: Greetings from Don't Go Here, Connecticut

This is the road to Don't Go Here 

 Don't Go Here? Really? Seems nice enough.

Perhaps the residents who live on beautiful nearby Lake Hayward had something to do with scaring gawkers like us away from their pretty private oasis.

Google doesn't want you to Go Here either, although they think it's East Haddam and not Colchester.

Sometimes, on the way home from visiting family in Connecticut, we'll get out the GPS and see if there are any eccentrically named streets or villages along the way. On an alphabetical street search through the town of Colchester, a real quirky entry came up. Don't Go Here. Don't Go Here? Is this a joke? This we gotta see. The GPS took us down pretty country roads and past signs for the Devil's Hopyard State Park and then, at a pleasant but extremely nondescript address, our Tom Tom announced "you have reached your destination". We have? All that's here is a country road and somebody's driveway with an ordinary house at the end of it. Why can't we go here? Does a celebrity live here? Is there an ancient Indian curse on this land? Did the GPS go a little funny in the head? When we got home, I went to the interweb and sure enough, Google has it on their map, too, but there's nary an explanation anywhere. If any Nutmeg Staters out there know what this is all about, we'd love to know. Of all the places we've been told not to go to, this is one of the nicest.

A Conn. job: Some fabulously faux Connecticut retro postcards

 Palm trees? In Connecticut?

 No, it's not the Matterhorn. It's Connecticut!

 Here's the real Moodus...

...where they don't take kindly to littering or rounding up to even numbers.

 Goodspeed's Station Country Store...

 ...near the Goodspeed Opera House (photo from ctvisit.com)...

 ...and the great East Haddam swinging bridge.

The small central Connecticut town of East Haddam has a lot going for it: the gorgeous Connecticut River with its sublime 1913 steel swing bridge, the spectacular Goodspeed Opera House, dating back to 1876 and still producing Broadway-caliber musicals, and Goodspeed's Station Country store, one of those nostalgic gift shops full of fun nicknacks. On a recent visit to the store we were taken with a collection of what appeared to be vintage postcards from the region, depicting cheery skiers, fishermen and Nutmeg State guests frolicking on vacation. As a fan of this jolly type of ephemera, and a Connecticut native, I wondered why I had never seen anything like these before and while we were oohing and ahhing over them, the nice proprietor lady told us she had put them together with a publishing house that specializes in whimsical custom-made vintage-looking items. And whimsical they are...Connecticut's a beautiful place but the skiing postcard makes it look like the Swiss Alps in the 1940s. And anyone who has been to sleepy little Moodus will tell you it's pleasant but not exactly the glamorous and rugged vacation mecca seen here. So, to Goodspeed's Country Store, we offer our un-Conn.-ditional Conn.-gratulations for these visual Conn.-fections. They really -ticut the mustard.

Parks and Wrecks Department: The former Ghost Parking Lot of Hamden, Connecticut

Merging traffic: Hamden's Ghost Parking Lot in its late '70s heyday.

Road to ruin: the latter day GPL. These photos come from the cool blog The Lostinjersey Blog. Check it out!

Regrets, I've had a few. Eccentric roadside attraction-wise, one of the biggest would be to have lived in the host town of one of the coolest, wackiest roadside attractions ever and to have NEVER taken a picture of it.

My hometown of Hamden, Connecticut is a pleasant and innocuous suburb of New Haven. In the '70s, a Mr. David Bermant, the owner of the Hamden Plaza shopping center on busy Dixwell Avenue, wanted to do something unusual to draw attention to his tenants' stores. A self-described art lover, he commissioned New York sculptor and architect James Wines and his firm SITE to create a conceptual public art masterpiece that would entail partially burying 20 old cars in the Plaza parking lot, filling them with concrete and covering them with asphalt. The finished work, referred to as the Ghost Parking Lot, resembled dead cars rising from the grave and the public reaction was decidedly mixed. Hamdenites aren't unenlightened hicks, but this exhibit would be considered pretty far out even in SoHo. I was in high school when the GPL was installed and it so happened that the school was right next to the exhibit. The Plaza management allowed students to park their cars in that part of the parking lot and I remember, on the occasions I had a car, always trying to park in the spaces between the buried cars because it was such a kooky thing. I remember the joke was if you parked your car illegally on school property, it would be towed, buried and asphalted in the Plaza lot. Why I never took a picture of this delight, I'll never know. I suppose it's like a native New Yorker never going to the Statue of Liberty...you don't appreciate what's in your own back yard. Over the next twenty years, the GPL was left to deteriorate, with remnants of the car carcasses poking out through the asphalt. This, to me, only added to the aesthetic awesomeness...the dead cars were like rotting corpses in front of J.C. Penny's, Hallock's and Lafayette Stereo. By 2003, the Plaza was under new management and the dead cars had to go, not just to remove a perceived eyesore, but also because they actually needed the parking spaces for shoppers, of all things, leaving me with only my memories and whatever the Internet has to offer in the way of visuals.

Ghost Parking Lot (1977-2003): we hardly knew ye.

Check out this cool vintage 1978 video. Skip ahead to :36 to see the GPL part. It says it's New Haven, but trust me, it's really Hamden.

Butt weight, there's more!

A personal trainer in Hamden, Connecticut put up this whimsical sign. Perhaps in ancient times it would have read "Friends, Romans, Countrymen – lend me your rears".

Happy birthday, Ernest Borgnine

The great Ernest Borgnine as Lt. Commander Quenton McHale

Ernest Borgnine Park in Hamden, Connecticut

Ernie memorabilia and the fabled Ernie booth at Tortilla Flats in New York City

Today is Ernest Borgnine's birthday. He played a lonely bachelor in "Marty", a cruel sergeant in "From Here to Eternity", a fun-loving skipper in "McHale's Navy" and superhero Mermaid Man in "SpongeBob Squarepants". He's 94 (!) and still looks great. He's also a native of my hometown, Hamden, Connecticut, and they have a small park there is his honor. There's also a Mexican restaurant in New York City that has a fabled Ernest Borgnine booth. I did a previous post about both of these places and you can read all about them here.

Happy birthday Ernie! You do Hamden proud.

Hey, hey Ralphie Boy! The Westbrook, Connecticut Library's Art Carney Media Center

Art played Felix in the original "The Odd Couple" on Broadway, opposite Walter Matthau.

An Asian "Harry & Tonto" poster

Art's Purple Heart

This fine drawing of Art was done by his granddaughter Kirsten Reifheiss

All this and much more can be found at the Westbrook, Conn. Public Library

"How would you like to go through life with your name synonymous with sewage?" Art Carney once asked a newspaper columnist, but his portrayal of loyal, lovably dimwitted sewer worker Ed Norton on TV's "The Honeymooners" forever put him among TV's greatest characters and actors. The perfect foil to Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden, Carney's Norton was Laurel to Gleason's Hardy. I've watched episodes of "The Honeymooners" literally hundreds of times and I still marvel at Carney's delivery and rubber band-like body movements. When Norton has to play "Swanee River" to warm up every time he sits at the piano, you get the feeling that was something Carney did in his real life. And Norton having to throw his arms out and pick every bit of imaginary lint off the typewriter, document, or pool table he's in front of to the chagrin of an ever-agitated Kramden is sheer genius.

Art's career was more than just Ed Norton, though. In addition to playing other characters on Gleason's variety show, he was the first actor to play Felix Ungar in the original Broadway version of "The Odd Couple" opposite Walter Matthau. When he was in his early 50s, he played a man in his 70s and won an Oscar as Harry in 1974's "Harry and Tonto."

Art Carney adopted the small Connecticut shoreline town of Westbrook, about 100 miles east of New York City, as his home in 1952 and raised his family there. He and his wife Jean were active in the town and she and their son Paul still reside in Westbrook (Art died in 2003). As a tribute to their famous resident, the Westbrook Public Library has named an area of their building the Art Carney Media Center. There, you can find Carney photos and movie posters and a case filled with mementos from Art's illustrious career (in addition to his Oscar, he won six Emmy awards and was nominated for a Tony). The display was put together by Westbrook residents Shirley Lusk and Beverly Schirmeier, who went to great lengths to acquire old Broadway playbills and other items including Art's Purple Heart received for duty during World War II.

No fan of "The Honeymooners" or Art Carney should miss this loving tribute. It's a regular riot, pal.

(And we'd like to extend a warm Eccentric Roadside tip-o-the-hat to librarian Lew Daniels for talking with us and letting us shoot pictures. How sweet it is!)

Booming business: North Stonington, Connecticut's "Three-Finger" Eddie's

Except for the "Live free or die" state of New Hampshire, fireworks stores have been a rare commodity in the northeast, so when a defunct gas station was converted into a black powder emporium in southeastern Connecticut on the Rhode Island state line, we had to stop and check it out. Unfortunately, it was a few weeks after the fourth of July and the place had already gone, er, bust, but they still had their sign up and a truck parked out front with their spectacularly tasteless name emblazoned on them. Was this place really called "Three-Finger" Eddie's? Really? Yes, yes it was. This reminded me of the fact that a name alluding to accidents or mental illness seems to be a requirement of most retail explosives outlets. An internet search won't turn up any Harvard Educated Mike's or Better Safe Than Sorry Betty's, but you will find Krazy Kaplan's, Crazy Carl, Crazy Herb's, Dizzy Dean, Wild Bill's, Wild Wilma's, Fireworks Frenzy, Pyromaniac Fireworks, and Angelo's Fireworks and Sno-Cones. For sheer tacky fire-power, though, "Three-Finger" Eddie's still has them beat by a sky-high mile. When a customer pays good cash money for retail pyrotechnics, he wants to know he'll potentially lose a digit or two.

Guaranteed to raise a smile: Colchester, Connecticut's ironically named dentist

This sign caught my eye while tooling down Route 16 in Connecticut. I believe Dr. Hurt is in the same office complex as the Dewey, Cheetham and Howe law firm. And that's the tooth.

Taking a toll: Stratford, Connecticut's decomissioned toll booth plaza in a park

A Merritt Parkway toll plaza in the 1950s

With its beautiful tree-canopied lanes and Art Deco, Gothic, French Renaissance and Art Moderne bridges (thanks, preservation.org), southwestern Connecticut's Merritt Parkway really is a "park" way. Otherwise known as Route 15, it starts at the New York state line in Greenwich and continues 37.5 miles to Stratford (where it then continues another 29 miles on into Meriden as the Wilbur Cross Parkway). A pre-Interstate highway Depression-era project, the first section of the parkway was opened in 1938 and featured a scenic wooded layout, rustic signage, and beautifully designed period overpasses. With only two lanes going in either direction and no commercial vehicles or advertising allowed, this truly was and still is "the scenic route" with picnicking along the roadside not uncommon, even up until the '60s. Built for a different and slower era of road travel, it can be a little harrowing getting on and off the road today, with cars whizzing by at 70 miles per hour, but it's still a thrill to ride down this beautiful museum of a highway.

Stratford's Boothe Memorial Park and Museum sits on 32 bucolic acres near exit 53 off the Merritt and it contains an awesome eccentric roadside attraction: a decommissioned Merritt Parkway toll booth plaza (Connecticut did away with highway tolls in the late '80s). The fact that the park is actually named Boothe is an unintended eccentric bonus you couldn't make up. Among the blacksmith shop, clocktower museum, rose gardens and rolling green fields sits the former Milford toll plaza, like a fish out of water. I'm a little confused, though..since Milford is east of Stratford, isn't this a Wilbur Cross toll plaza? Anywho, I love seeing mundane everyday objects in an out-of-context location, and this one really fits the bill. Upon seeing it, I was reminded of my old high school and college friend Kurt, who had a summer job in this very booth many years ago. He was studying the french horn and would practice in his booth during his lonely 12-7am graveyard shift. Now, that's an eccentric roadside attraction.