What A Drag (The Silas Deane Highway)

Hartford Courant, 'Commentary': 3.30.2003

By LINDA CASE

March 30, 2003

I am in a lover's quarrel with Wethersfield - furious at the brutality of the Silas Deane Highway, a strip that runs through it.

Wethersfield is billed as Connecticut's "most ancient towne." Founded in 1634, it contains a remarkable collection of occupied 17th- and 18th-century dwellings in its historic district. There are nice contemporary neighborhoods as well.

Contrast this with the jumble of Silas Deane. The road starts at Jordan Lane and runs 31/2 miles to the Rocky Hill border.

How could it ever come to this? The latest atrocity is the remodeling of the Silas Deane Middle School. A landmark thick-trunked oak and a row of maples were cut down. The nearby rose garden at town hall was damaged. The last grassy area is being largely paved over.

With its low-slung buildings, oversized signs, barren parking lots and haywire utilities, the highway represents the worst in suburban strip development. (What would the early American merchant and patriot Silas Deane think of it?)

Of course, there are a few decent buildings. But, in short, the highway violates every classic principle about what makes for a pleasing street. How did we let the place get so crummy?

It kills me that this ugliness is in Wethersfield, a town that should know better.

A symbol of everything that has gone wrong is the south side of Siperstein's Paint Store, which opened a couple of years ago. The 60-foot-long blank wall features drips of turquoise-colored paint, as if spilled from the roof. It is visible from half a mile away.

The splotch is an eyesore. It simply adds to the many other offensive views on the strip: phony facades; scalloped marquees; poles, wires and signals going every which way; and screaming signs - 10 feet high, 20 feet high. Each name has to cry out louder than the next. It's a free-for-all. They repel rather than attract.

Some business owners beautify in a Lady Bird Johnson sort of way. They tack on a mansard roof. Put a pot of flowers outside. Or paint murals on their buildings. But, with no overall plan, the street is a mess. It seems to get worse by the day.

Contrast this sensibility with that of Glastonbury, just across the Connecticut River. Some 30 years ago, its planning and zoning commission painted a picture of the kind of town it wanted. It devised strict design standards that apply to new construction and remodeling of existing structures.

Glastonbury wanted to cultivate business growth. Yet it did not want the kind of sprawl that often accompanies it. Its guidelines helped to shape what you see today.

The mood there is so different from that which prevails in Wethersfield. What's more, in Glastonbury, business real estate values are hot, not moribund.

The area near the Somerset Square shopping center has become a tree-lined promenade. Office rents in buildings set along it are the highest in the region.

Take a look on nearby Main Street at the size of signs - at Mobil, CVS and Battiston's laundry, for instance. They're a fraction of the size of the screamers on Silas Deane. Yet, without the chaos, they are quite visible. There are grassy borders, many trees and harmonious building fronts. Wethersfield can learn a lesson.

Instead, we have been operating with no vision at all. This mentality amazes me. I thought Wethersfield was a tony town, with a vivid heritage. Why has it been acting like such a self-belittling slum?

We seem to be grateful that the smoke shops and the dollar stores are locating in our midst. If a Walgreens, for example, deigns to come in, we let it put in an unimaginative, standard-brand bunker, with nary a twig of landscaping. We do not give it a template for what should be.

As evidenced by what exists, Wethersfield's planning and zoning commission has not been doing any planning. It has acted as if the concept of design review is foreign. Yet, a Historic District Commission in Old Wethersfield has enforced strict aesthetic controls for the past 25 years, with great results.

In 1987, residents sponsored a national competition to come up with an imaginative blueprint for Silas Deane. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill published a master plan, made up of the best ideas. Ever since, it has languished.

The plan sees the highway as a boulevard lined by trees. Parking is set in back. Oversized signs are banned. Lighting is shielded, not glaring. And utilities are buried underground.

Landscaped islands and other devices slow the traffic. They say to passersby: You are in a real place. You're not just whizzing through.

Sounds like the same principles Glastonbury has employed so well.

Wethersfield must adopt that can-do attitude. It, too, is a beautiful town, ideally situated for business. But the more the highway goes downhill, the worse it is for everyone. Why should our main drag look so bad? It is turning into an Airport Road, Hartford, kind of place - a veritable shrine to visual pollution.

We need more than an "improvement" here or there. What we need is a dramatic prescription for the town at large. And that's not pie-in-the-sky idealism.

Meanwhile, the strip continues to deteriorate.

Recently, yet another self-service gas station canopy rose on Silas Deane, near Wells Road. It is huge. It is red. One more uglifier coming up.

And I continue to see red.

Linda Case is a free-lance writer who lives in Wethersfield.

Copyright 2003, Hartford Courant