One of the many Kodachrome slides my Dad shot during his life. Here, we're swimming at Merwin's beach, across Merwin Avenue from where we lived on Rock Street. You can see just a bit of the Villa Rosa mansion seawall in the distance.
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As it turns out, the abandoned building which I clearly remembered from the 1970s, but have no photos of, was once Rocco's Apizza and Italian restaurant serving the Woodmont beachside community for decades.
If your browser supports Flickr Notes, I've added a number of them to this photo of downtown Woodmont from the late 1960s.
Since the early 1900s, this area was a beach resort on Long Island Sound. Filled with rental cottages, it was a summer place for generations of people.
The buildings across the street were torn down in 1965. For just one summer, 1966, we had direct line of site to Long Island Sound from our house on Rock Street (just a glimpse of our house on the right with pink shingles).
In 1967, The Surf Club West built a modern pool club exactly where those cottages stood for almost 70 years.
Below is a view from 1966 where we could actually see the beach after the cottages were demolished and before the Surf Club built its facilities on this site.
There used to be a lot of villages which simulated the hardships of daily Pilgrim life in Connecticut. My parents loved to watch lye and fat being boiled into soap, sheep being sheered, bread being baked, the milking of cows, the chopping down of overgrowth, the planting of corn (snore!), the feeding of pigs.
Naturally, my sister and I were always dragged along. I'm not sure about her, but I found these places ultimately boring. All I wanted to do was to be back home biking and hanging out with my friends. After all, I was a kid of the 1960s, not the 1760s!
Over the decades, most of these Pilgrim Villages have been turned into Walmart parking lots as well as large suburban developments. Oh, well.
We were just children then, but felt so grown up. It was a gray day across the street from Long Island Sound. The kind of day where rain drops could start at any moment. Some of the cars parked on Merwin Avenue were quite old, even for the era when this fleeting moment in time was captured. Film is a form of magic which allows you to actually relive moments from much earlier in your life.
In fact, only we old-timers still call it "The Turnpike". All signs with that name have long been removed and today it's just a bland I-95.
For reasons unknown to me, collectors of these kinds of highway signs call them "Trailblazers", which probably refers to an even earlier era before the Federal Highway System was begun in the mid 1950s.
It was one of those old-style Polaroids which only used black and white film packs and you had to manually count the processing time up to 60 seconds on your watch. Peeling off the backing and seeing the image appear was almost like magic to my 7 year old eyes! (and yes, I liked the acrid smell of the fixer sticks). A little moment captured from 1960s life.