Commentary—

The Town That Was Here Just A Moment Ago

By Brent Concilio

Our part of Connecticut was special. When I was growing up, northern Fairfield County was a rolling patchwork of elegant horse farms, sleepy little roads, and beautiful homes. Newtown was still home to the Fairfield County hounds, and on an early morning drive down Hundred Acres Road you might see 30 hounds and 40 riders in scarlet jackets galloping through the misty pools of fog that hung like breath between the swells of green grass. Every winter, there was a sleigh rally in Dickinson town park, and most families in town had been in Fairfield County, if not Newtown, for generations.

What might be surprising to many of the people who moved to Newtown in the last 12 years is that these are not the memories of one of the senior citizens being forced out by rising property costs, dreaming about their Newtown childhood in the late 1940s. I’m only 25 years old. In the 1980s, Newtown had a fox hunt, sleigh rallies, and a New England community with a shared history.

My mother grew up in Fairfield at a time when the Fairfield Hunt Club actually housed the county fox hunt. Since my mother ’s early childhood, a deluge of development has pushed the people who made Fairfield County the elegant and beautiful place it was farther and farther out, until now, even Newtown has been called “the new Westport” by The New York Times. Although there are extremely few open fields left, developers have been careful to preserve the appearance of the old Newtown, because that is, ironically, what people want. In most subdivisions you can pretend very easily that you are surrounded by those same sleepy little roads and horse farms that just a few years ago gave Connecticut its special reputation.

While I was in high school, and throughout my undergraduate overseas, every time I came back to Newtown, I would think, “If they just stop now, right now, I can still come back here some day.” Even while I was watching my childhood being subjugated into two-acre success stories by regiments of ride-on mowers, I would still tell myself, “If they just leave this part, if they just don’t subdivide this one day, I can still raise a family where I grew up.” On my last visit back to Newtown I saw the new “Holmes Farm Road” and since then, I have had no thought of one day returning. 

Up until 50 years ago, books about self-improvement focused on the importance all of the mostly invisible personal traits behind the public self: integrity, honesty, discipline, compassion; in short, character. The logic being that if a person was all of these things privately, although these traits are 90 percent internal and unseen, the ten percent that people see would be praiseworthy. Contemporary self-help books, by contrast, are focused on “dressing for success” or “winning friends and influencing people,” they only address the ten percent above the surface. We have, as a culture, become obsessed with how things look, and anything that others don’t see doesn’t seem to count.

In the same way, the old Newtown has been replaced by one that in many places looks a lot like it, but isn’t that place. There isn’t a horse farm over the next bluff, that’s another subdivision. The family in that beautiful old Colonial hasn’t been there for 40 years, it has turned over three times in the last ten. The new houses being built are constructed out of plastic and plywood, with perhaps a little stone facing here and there to give the thing the appearance of quality, to suggest falsely that the entire house is really built of sturdy materials, but below the surface that quality simply isn’t there. Most of these new houses are only designed to be seen from the front. They are to Connecticut homes what Starbucks is to coffee shops. A friend visiting from the UK, who loves colonial architecture, commented that the new houses made him feel like he was on a movie set. This I think is a great description; the new Newtown is a movie set version of the place I once loved.

Many people move to Connecticut for the special beauty and southern New England elegance. For some reason though, when they arrive, they then feel compelled to turn that place into the New York or New Jersey that they left behind. (Although, I have been told New Jersey was once beautiful also.) People with no connection to that elegant country life style and no desire to truly be part of it, move to “the country” because they like the idea of the identity of that place and they like how it looks from the road. What they really want is the lifestyle and the culture of the places they left behind, but with the décor they associate with the country. As a result, they eliminate the 90 percent, anything that isn’t immediately visible from a main road, and try to hold on to only the ten percent that people actually see. However, without the 90 percent, the ten percent quickly feels hollow, propped up, fake, like the front facades of those $800,000 plastic homes. So eventually they need to move onto the next place, chasing the same people that they drove out, only to do the same thing again. (This is starting to happen even in Vermont, where many former residents fled, but have already been pursued by the culture that drove them out.)

There are many other things I would like to say: how even in the 1990s Newtown High School didn’t have the same volume of hard drugs it has now, that the new problems really are genuinely and fundamentally connected to the artificial houses, the vinyl facades; that Newtown now reminds me of the New Jersey community in the movie Garden State rather than the 19th Century painting it resembled when I was a child. However, I am not writing this to alienate people, which I am sure I have done and for that I am sorry. I am writing this because I want people to know that there was a world here before, just a moment ago in fact, a unique and beautiful world, too polite to prevent its own destruction. It was an elegant rural community, from which the new Newtown could learn quite a lot. It certainly wasn’t perfect, but I don’t think it has been replaced by anything that could be called an improvement.

(Brent Concilio, a 1999 graduate of Newtown High School, is the dean of students at a private school in Maryland. He hopes to return to New England to live next year.)