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 city, Hartford, often seemed to us as far off and
fictional as Oz. Nearly all the television stations in Danbury and Bethel were from
New York, not a part of New England, and denizens of South-East 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
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. Senator Dick
Blumenthal or millionaire Governor 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, 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.
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