I spent most of Sunday working on the company sales meeting, the board meeting, and a golf outing the client services’ group wanted to hold for some of the firm’s most important clients. David had come back after his two days in Manhattan, and at five o’clock he picked me up for our drive to Jeanette’s.
“Glad you could leave a little early,” he said as I got into the van. “We have to go about fifteen miles out of the way.” We were taking a detour so he could look at a piece of property.
“I’m just happy to get out of the house. I’ve been inside all day.”
He drove for a couple of miles, then turned and headed northwest. I squinted at the sun, pulled down the visor, and searched my handbag for my sunglasses.
“There’s a pair of shades in the glove box if you want them,” David said.
I opened the glove compartment and pulled out a pair of Ray-Bans. “Wayfarers. I’ve always liked these.” I put them on. “They make me think of that old song Don Henley did, ‘The Boys of Summer,’ and that line about the girl having her Wayfarers on.”
“Great song, great line. And those shades look good on you.”
We drove for forty minutes, David on business calls most of the time, me happy to gaze out the window. Soon after passing a sign that said ENTERING PUTNEY, SETTLED 1644, we approached a small downtown area where old wooden houses had been primped and painted and turned into businesses. Tranquility Teahouse, Gilded Lily Antiques, Mayflower Grocery. David ended a call, stopped at a traffic light, then answered his phone when it rang again.
“Hey, Doug, what’s up?” Across the street, two men deep in conversation leaned against a blue pickup truck. “Yeah, I think that’s a good idea,” David said after listening for a moment. “I don’t want to take a chance on it without getting that additional info. Maybe it’s overkill, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.” The light turned green and we drove on, leaving the shops behind us. “Sure,” David said. “I’m on my way there now to take a look.”
He was still talking a couple of minutes later as the road meandered past fields and trees and streams. “We’d have to bulldoze what’s there anyway. Take it down. Too expensive to keep the…what? Yeah, exactly. Start fresh.” He looked at his GPS. “Hey, listen. I think we’re almost there. I’ll call you later.”
We turned onto a road flanked on both sides by woods, the street sign obscured by vines. The asphalt was cracked and broken and full of potholes that looked big enough to eat a wheel or break an axle. “What’s in here?” I asked as he maneuvered the van to avoid the craters and bumps.
“You’ll see in a minute.”
I couldn’t see anything but woods. Then I noticed a few rose-colored spots between the trees. The road swung left and led to a clearing where a long, three-story red-brick building loomed before us. It must have been at least a hundred years old.
The bricks had turned all sorts of colors. Some were burnt orange, some rosy pink. Some looked like they’d been hit with a bucket of whitewash. Vines had scuttled up the walls and died, leaving dried stalks, and the windows were empty of glass and covered with green cyclone fencing to deter vandals. The dark holes that remained peered down at us like disapproving eyes. The roof sagged, and the shingles curled like bits of pencil shavings. I felt as though I’d been transported to an industrial ghost town.
“Wow,” I whispered. “What is this?”
David turned off the engine. “It used to be a woolen mill.” We stepped outside. Gravel and sand crunched under our feet; birds chattered quietly in the woods behind us. The air seemed hotter there, and stale.
“When I was in high school,” I said, “I wrote a paper about the history of Connecticut’s textile mills.”
David smiled. “You must be an expert, then.”
I was hardly an expert. Although I did remember driving with my friend Whitney Reece to one of the abandoned mills to take pictures. The place gave me the creeps. At least at first. But then I began to think about all the people who had gone through the doors and worked there over the years, all the fabric they’d made, how they’d fed their families and scrimped and saved, and maybe a few of them had even sent a child to college on what they’d earned there. I started to imagine what it had once looked like, how beautiful it must have been, and it made me sad to see it all those years later. Closed. Dead. An eyesore.
“I’m definitely not an expert,” I said as I stepped closer to the building. “But I do know a lot of these mills were built in Connecticut in the early 1800s and that people came from all over the world to work in them.”
Bricks had fallen from the building in several places and vines clung to the walls like fingers refusing to let go, but I could tell the structure must have been magnificent in its day. I wondered who had set the dozens of arched windows in place and who had laid the thousands of bricks. Where had those masons come from? Were any of their descendants still alive? If so, did they even know this place existed?
I ran my hand over the bricks, which still felt warm from the fading sun. “Don’t ask me how I remember this, but the largest thread mill in North America was in Willimantic, Connecticut. The American Thread Company. And here’s a fun fact: it was the first factory to install electric lights and the first to give workers coffee breaks.”
David peered through a window into the darkness. “And they didn’t even have Starbucks. Imagine that.”
I gazed into the window as well. I couldn’t see anything except rubble and a pile of rusted metal bars. I thought about what David had said on the phone. We’d have to bulldoze what’s there anyway…Start fresh. They were going to tear the building down. Sad, but not a surprise. I wondered what they would do with the property after that. Build a movie-theater complex? An office park? Anything was possible. I walked along the side of the building, looking into other windows; pools of darkness stared back at me.
“I wonder when this place closed,” I said.
“I read it was in the late seventies.”
He’d done some research. “That means it operated for a hundred and fifty years,” I said. “That’s a long time. There’s a lot of history here.”
We paused near what was once the front door but was now just a frame with a strip of cyclone fencing over it. I gazed at the broken concrete slab leading to the entrance and imagined the workers—men, women, even children—heading into the building carrying their lunch pails, hearing the steam whistle announce the beginning of their shift. I could see them at the carding machines that brushed and straightened the wool fibers, the spinning frame that transformed the fibers into thread or yarn. I pictured them standing at the skein winders and the looms. I wondered what had gone through their minds when they looked out of these windows. What were their hopes and dreams?
I picked up a small piece of concrete from the ground and turned it over. “A whole way of life just vanished when these mills closed. These buildings were beautiful back in their day. And now…”
“That’s what happens when buildings are left behind,” David said. “Nature takes its course.”
But why did we have to let that happen? It seemed negligent to stand by and watch such lovely things be destroyed. I knew the building could be beautiful again if someone cared enough and had enough money to do the work. I also knew it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. David and his partners, or whoever bought the place, couldn’t be blamed for wanting to tear it down. But that meant this place, with its history and its soul—the collective memories of all the people who had worked there—would be gone forever. I wished he hadn’t brought me here. I dropped the piece of concrete, and it splintered on the ground, the chips scattering.
“I realize nature takes its course,” I said. “But don’t you think old things are worth saving? I mean, just because something’s old, does that mean you should just let it—”
“You can’t save everything,” he said as he began walking again. “Sometimes it’s not practical.” I hung back, parsing his words, picturing a graph where the costs side outweighed the benefits side. Then I ran to catch up.
He stopped, angling his head. “Do you hear that?”
I listened and heard the faint sound of water rushing, splashing—the river that had once generated the power to run the mill’s machinery. We walked around to the back of the building, where the sound was loud, the river running in quick white currents at the bottom of an embankment of dirt and rocks, water racing over boulders, around saplings, twirling into eddies dappled by the waning sunlight. The air was dank and cool. I tossed a stick and watched the current pull it downstream to a patch of white water, where it spun in a manic dance until it was dragged under the froth.
“What will you do with the property?” I asked David.
“This property?” He turned around to view the factory again. “I don’t know if we’ll even buy it. I’m just taking a preliminary look. A lot would depend on what kind of incentives we could get from the state, among others. Tax breaks, grants.”
“What kind of grants?”
“Remediation, for one. This will be a huge environmental cleanup job.” He glanced at the ground and pushed a little hill of dirt away with his sneaker. “From all those decades of dumping pollutants before it became illegal.”
“And you’d try to get the state to pay for some of that?”
“Sure. We’re talking millions of dollars. Some states have programs to help developers clean up brownfields like this. Connecticut is one of them. There are other sources, too, like federal grants. But it’s not easy. It’s the government, you know. And there’s only so much money to go around.”
Brownfield. I was still stuck on that word. How sad it sounded. And how sad that it was so expensive just to resolve the environmental problems. If David and his partners bought this, I knew they’d be putting up that office park or condo complex. How else would they get back their investment and make a profit? This old building would be gone, and this place would be changed forever.
I thought about Dad and how he used to say we should welcome the future but respect the past. When he and Mom moved from Manhattan to the house in Hampstead, the first thing he did was replace the modern-looking addition a previous owner had grafted onto the farmhouse with one that fit the early-1800s period when the house was built.
“Why do old things always have to be sacrificed to make way for new ones?” I said. “What’s so great about new stuff? This place almost feels alive with the memories of the people who were here. The men, the women, the children. It seems like such a shame to wave goodbye to all that, let the wrecking ball come in and—”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about saving it,” I said, eyeing the factory again. “Yes, it’s old. Of course it’s old. And it needs a lot of work. But it could be beautiful, David.” I picked up another stick and took a step to throw it in the river. “And you’d be…” I was about to say preserving a piece of history when I felt my feet almost go out from under me.
David grabbed my hand. “Sara, careful!”
My heart raced for a moment before I caught my breath. “Oh my God, it’s slippery. Thanks.” His hand was tight around mine. It felt nice. His warmth, his strength.
“I don’t want you ending up in the water.”
I was about to tell him I wasn’t worried, that I knew how to swim, but then I realized the currents were strong and I thought maybe that’s what he was concerned about. We stepped back, and as he released my hand I had a sudden feeling that I didn’t want him to let go.
I tried to sweep away the thought. “Old things are…they’re important,” I said. “They represent what we once were. Sometimes they’re the best examples of what people can create. And they keep getting torn down like they don’t matter. But they do. If we lose our history, we lose ourselves. Don’t you see?” How could I make him understand? “You’ve got to save this place.”
The sun, barely more than a soft curve on the horizon, cast a faint glow over the bricks, a last-ditch effort to illuminate them. David looked confused. Maybe no one had ever questioned him about what he did in his business. Maybe someone should have.
“Sara, just so you understand, if we buy this property—and that’s a huge if—we won’t be tearing down the building.”
Now I was the one who was confused. “You won’t?”
“No. We’d keep it,” he said as we began walking back toward the van. “That’s the whole point. We’d probably look at doing a mixed-use design. Apartments, some retail, maybe artist lofts, some office space. It would depend on the community need.”
Mixed use. Community need. That all sounded good. Very good. “So you were never going to tear it down?”
“No, it would be a rehab. We’ve done a number of projects like that.” He started to tell me about something they’d just finished in Cincinnati, but I felt so embarrassed, it was hard to concentrate. He’d done this before. He’d renovated old buildings. And I’d been talking to him as though he were a novice.
“I feel like a fool,” I said as we got into the van. “Lecturing you about saving this place when that was your plan all along.” I wondered how I could have been so wrong, and then I remembered his phone conversation. “But you said something on the phone before about everything needing to be bulldozed.”
David started the engine. “Bulldozed?” He gazed into the distance. “Oh wait, you mean when I was…” He nodded. “I did say that, but I was talking about another project, a building damaged in a hurricane. It’s mostly rubble.”
Another project. I was relieved to know I’d gotten it wrong.
“I can show you photos of some of the other rehabs we’ve done.”
Now I wanted to drop the subject. “It’s fine. I—”
“Let me see.” He pulled out his cell phone and began tapping the screen. “I have an album that I…oh, here it is.” He held the phone between us. I could smell something citrusy and a little spicy on his skin. Aftershave? Soap? Whatever it was, it smelled nice. “This was an old wire mill in upstate New York. We renovated it and turned it into a mixed-use development. Apartments, restaurants, retail. I took these as the project went along. Scroll through and you’ll see.” He handed the phone to me.
There were photos of the outside of an old red-brick building not unlike the woolen mill—grimy, stained, bricks missing. Inside the factory, the floors were covered with puddles of black water; green paint flaked in sheets off the walls, electrical cords dangled from the ceilings, and broken glass sat like jagged teeth in the window frames.
As I scrolled on, the photos revealed a gradually changing building. The missing bricks were replaced and the façade cleaned. The floors, which I now saw were made of wood, had been refinished and shone with an amber hue. Light poured in through new glass in the oversize windows, and I couldn’t believe the dark, dank-looking place in the first photos had become this clean, sunny space.
“We turned that floor into apartments and artist lofts,” David said, pointing to a photo I’d enlarged of a renovated studio.
“This is incredible. I can’t believe the difference.” It seemed like magic.
“Yeah, it came out pretty nice.”
He backed up the van. “You know,” he said, gazing at the building that must have held a million secrets, “sometimes I think about the people who worked in these places. Decades ago, or a hundred years ago. I wonder about them—who they were, where they came from. How did they get here? Did they cross the ocean? Some of them did. Probably a lot of them. I imagine them at their machines, working. There are places in the floors of some of the factories we’ve rehabbed where the wood is worn from years of people standing by the machines. Think about that.”
I was thinking about that. I could see those people. I wondered if he’d read my mind.