This New England

-- Caption by WILLIAM MORGAN, who found the picture.

These three noble males were photographed some time in the early 20th
Century. The photo was found in a miscellany box in an antique store
in Wiscasset, Maine.

Who were these people? The landscape and architecture are clearly
Maine, and the names on the back of the photo suggest proximity to a mill city like Lewiston, chiefly populated by French-Canadians.

"Lauren'' (was the T inadvertently dropped from the end of his name?) holds a toy rifle
and wears a military tunic. The gun is perhaps a Christmas present,
and maybe his Uncle Lemont went outside for a smoke, where Aunt Marie
took their picture with her Brownie.

All of this is conjecture, including whether or not there were ever
other images made of these people. But the canine Prince and his pals Lauren and
Lemont did not deserve total obscurity. So they were rescued, and now
live again, however briefly, here in Cyberspace.

XXX

The seasons revolve and the years change
With no assistance or supervision.
The moon, without taking thought,
Moves in its cycle, full, crescent, and full.

-- From "Another Spring,'' by Kenneth Rexroth

XXX

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

-- From "The Garden of Proserpine,'' by Algernon Charles Swinburne

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All hail The New York Times's Lisa Prevost for her recent article about New Haven's renaissance spawned by the presence of very rich Yale and Yale-New Haven Hospital and by the ctiy's leveraging of train service -- a service very attractive to private developers, which have been pumping hundreds of millions into the old city on Long Island Sound.

(Also helpful has been that New Haven recognizes the high economic potential of its port, and has been upgrading it.)

The Metro North and Shoreline East lines meet in New Haven and it's a major Amtrak stop. All of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor Shorellne route trains stop there.

Many of us remember with irritation the once-long layovers there as they changed the engines between electric and diesel because electrification didn't extend all the way to Boston until just a few years ago --- another reminder that America has had the worst transportation infrastructure in the Western world for many years. (Before the '50s, it had terrific rail service--- especially in New England and indeed up and down the East Coast and into the Middle West.)

It's America's old "private wealth, public squalor'' mix that John Kenneth Galbraith used to write about.

But now old cities that became cities in the 19th Century in part because of railroads may revive because of them -- if policymakers can move away from their addiction to asphalt and their cozy deals with politically connected highway contractors in densely populated strips that are perfect for rail-passenger service.

Still, it often seems that no one wants passenger trains --- except the general public.

Anyway, New Haven still has a lot of recuperating do from the disaster of well-intentioned but wrong-headed urban renewal in the '60s that drove out the city's lower-middle-class and ended up creating drug- and crime-infested slums around Stalinist-style public housing.

Mayor Richard Lee and ''redevelopment '' chief Edward Logue did a lot of damage in their time, though they were eminently honest and "visionary'' men.

So what once was one of America's most stable. middle-class cities (like Hartford, sigh....) became a synonym for a place you didn't want to stroll in, except for the immediate Yale campus, and even that could be excessively exciting after dark.

Yale's reaction to this was initially to withdrawn from its engagement with the city in which it was situated, but in the last 15 years, the university has seen the truism that its fate and New Haven's are obviously interwoven.

The increasing difficulty of hiring some junior faculty, who were afraid of New Haven's crime, probably had something to do with this.

Though it might have been easier to merge with, say Williams College and move everything to the Berkshires.

XXX

Early-spring view of the Blackstone River and Rumford, R.I., from bucolic Swan Point Cemetery, Providence. The region's curious mix of the pastoral and the industrial can be seen here.

 Tags  Lisa Prevost Maine New Haven Rexroth Swan Point Swinburne Wiscasset Yale Yale-New Haven

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