The Flickr 1960Sconnecticut Image Generatr

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.

From my Dad's Kodachrome slide collection. I'm almost positive that this was taken in one of Mom & Dad's friends backyard in the Woodmont neighborhood of Milford Connecticut. Aug 1963

A shot of 83 Merwin Avenue looking toward an older car and Long Island Sound in the background. Today, this side of the street is filled with modern condominiums and townhomes with a beautiful waterfront view.

Film was expensive, so as a kid I always tried to get the most out of each roll even if that meant attempting just one more shot after the numbers stopped showing in the little red window in back of the camera. Sometimes it worked and other times, not so well.

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.

The camera was loaded up with a 126 film cartridge of Kodak's Verichrome Pan. Back in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, there was a large Russian community in Woodmont. Most lived on Beach Avenue, Mont Street, Hawley Avenue and Village Road. My parents were friends with all of them.

Once a beach resort for tourists from the 1870 through the 1950s, the shoreline was still lined with dozens of 19th century beach cottages. Some were full-time residences and others were summer houses for people from New Haven and even as far away as New York City.

Very few of these cottages still exist as most of them have been replaced with modern houses and McMansions.

If your browser supports Flickr Notes, I've added a number of them explaining what used to be there during my childhood in the 1960s and later teen years in the 1970s.

Yes, I was that nerdy little 8 year old kid who walked around parties with a cheap plastic camera and flash cubes in my red and white checkered shirt pocket to snap photos of people like these two. At the time, they seemed so mod and hip – a role model to live up to when I got bigger! (of course, by the time I reached their age, this look was totally passé since Disco was the big thing).

My Dad took this Kodachrome slide using his 1950s Kodak Retina 35mm camera. It's just amazing how much gentrification took place in this neighborhood starting the late 1980s and going forward.

This view is near the intersection of State and Fair Streets looking to the unfinished Knights of Columbus Headquarters in the center. The urban renewal era coincided with the popularity of "Brutalism" in architecture, resulting in lots of chunky modernistic concrete structures throughout the city. They're still there and look incredibly dated.

Here's how the same place appears today...
www.google.com/maps/@41.3026347,-72.9234747,3a,75y,282.18...

My Dad probably handed his Kodak Retina camera to a friend, who took this photo. It couldn't have been me, since I was only two years old! As usual, Mom's wearing a little headband and sporting her ubiquitous hair bun.

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.

OK, so it's not the best photo... but still captures a moment in time from long ago.

None of this exists anymore. The Surf Club opened in 1967 and closed in 1983 to be replaced with the Surf Village condominiums in 1984.

A scan of one of my dad's Kodachrome slides. He took hundreds of slides documenting everyday life from the 1950s to the early 2000s.

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.