Gray pigeons and squirrels trouble a leafless suburban street,chattering past gas stations and forgotten hopes, while gray people slouch in gloveless poverty, grime-spattered jalopies clattering through colorless slop. But some children remember that on the pine hill, hidden from the gray houses live yellow monkeys, screaming cosmic glee amidst make-believe jungles, that down the street live ...
By Andy Piascik When Bridgeport’s Kennedy Stadium opened in 1964, there was as much excitement in the city as there was three decades later with the construction of the Ballpark at Harbor Yard and Webster Bank Arena. There were plenty of parks in the Park City ...
When the Merritt Parkway first opened all the way to the Housatonic River in 1940, it was immediately considered one of the most beautiful roads in the United States. Horse and buggies, bicycles, and pedestrians were banned; this was a tribute to the new road ...
Many items from the P.T. Barnum Research Collection are now available online! Thanks to generous funding from the NEH, researchers may access items from the History Center and Barnum Museum collections: Over a thousand items -- advertisements, books, magazines, manuscripts, newspapers, photographs, prints, programs, records, ...
Laurel and Hardy's comic antics in "Way Out West," was being viewed by hundreds of area residents the summer of 1937. Since the theaters opened to the public in 1922, the grand building in downtown Bridgeport became the place to be seen. By 1939, the Majestic ...
Theaters of the past, especially, in Bridgeport are indeed gone --virtually disappeared. No longer is Main Street bright with the marquees that once held our attention. Downtown Bridgeport has changed dramatically. I can remember so vividly the Loew’s Poli with the headliner letters announcing the latest ...
By Chi-Ann Lin Among the vacant structures in the city of Bridgeport are the historic Palace and Majestic Theaters along with the adjoining Savoy Hotel, all entered into the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.¹ This unique complex, opened to the public in 1921 and ...
By Lennie Grimaldi Donald Trump placed his right hand on the shoulder of a model – tall, blonde, striking, must have been 22 – and with his left hand steered Joe Ganim by the shoulder, easing the two together. “Let me introduce you to a friend ...
By Eric D. Lehman When the growing city of Bridgeport annexed the borough of West Stratford in 1889, it included a triangular island of thirty-seven acres which would become the stuff of legends in Bridgeport history. Playing up the legend that Captain Kidd had buried treasure on ...
By Professor Jeffrey Johnson, University of Bridgeport, 2018 Bridgeport was quick to recognize the commercial potential of recorded music, and it became an early center for the production of phonographic machines and recordings. Perhaps the energy of that enterprise made its residents particularly aware of recordings ...
By Stephen Thornton On stage at Bridgeport’s Park Theater in the fall of 1944 stood “Republico, The Little Mechanical Man.” He was an empty-headed dummy that the stage barker described as “handy, dandy, and works like a whiz.” With his slick hair and neat mustache, the ...
