Who, while driving south on Interstate 91 entering New Haven, Connecticut, hasn’t seen this enigmatic structure lurking on the west side of the road near the Ferry St. exit? ? It’s so mysterious and ominous-looking that it has always creeped the hell out of me.
I’ve been seeing this structure since I was four years old, from the back seat of my grandparents’ red Plymouth, as we rode through New Haven to visit their friend Mrs. Smedberg in East Haven. I would have been in its capacious back seat.
That car had a big bas relief of a sailing ship on its hood. Why? Was it supposed to be the Mayflower because the car was a Plymouth?
As we neared the hulking brown structure, probably as we drove down New Haven’s Middletown Avenue, I asked my grandparents what it was.
They didn’t know.
It reminded me a little of a brown milk bottle from New Haven’s Brock Hall Dairy.
IDoes it look like a milk bottle to you? In my four year-old frame of reference, it was a viable guess, although even I could see that it wasn’t exactly a big milk bottle.
In the days when milk came in glass bottles, and was delivered to back porches, Brock Hall was the only dairy in the area that sold its milk in brown bottles. The theory on the color of the bottles was that it blocked sunlight from damaging the milk within.
A scion of the Hall family, Donald Hall, a Hamden native and Harvard graduate, became a distinguished poet and Poet Laureate of the United States.
But the bottles were much better-looking than the desolate brown structure.
It also reminded me of a windmill.
The railroad tracks look abandoned and disused. Look at the number of missing ties:
Clearly, the tower had something to do with the railroad.
When we got home, there was a Google search: “New Haven Railroad Structures.” Or something like that.
Soon, we learned.
The structure is a coaling tower, dating from the time when locomotives ran on steam and the steam was created by coal fires. The tower fed the coal into the locomotive beneath it. According to Wikipedia, “As railroads transitioned from the use of steam locomotives to the use of diesel locomotives in the 1950s the need for coaling towers ended. Many reinforced concrete towers remain in place if they do not interfere with operations due to the high cost of demolition incurred with these massive structures.”
This one was built of concrete around 1910. Apparently too expensive to demolish, it stands in an area of New Haven known as Cedar Hill, which, according to Wikipedia, was named for the cedar trees which were plentiful there in 1665. There’s nary a cedar tree there now; in fact it’s a degraded urban landscape in which even the extensive gray network of railroad tracks looks unused.
Cedar Hill is, in turn, part of the Fair Haven neighborhood, which was originally called “Dragon.” It got this name from the seals that once hung out on the muddy banks of the Quinnipiac—apparently thought to be dragons by the first European sailors, who had apparently never seen seals before.
The Quinnipiac reportedly once produced up to 5,000 bushels of oysters a day in its heyday. What does it produce now? Oil slicks? This makes me sad.
At the Cedar Hill railroad yard, the only saving grace to the bleak landscape is the vertical reddish face of New Haven’s East Rock, the red color of which inspired Dutch explorer Adriaen Block, seeing the landscape from his ship in New Haven Harbor, to name the area Rodenburg (Red Hill).
This painting of East Rock by George H. Durrie shows the reddish vertical face of the rock. The red color is much more striking when the sun is low in the sky, at sunrise and sunset, and shows up much better in this image of East Rock’s twin, on the other side of town, West Rock.
Both are formations of trap rock, the name of which comes from the Swedish word “trappa” or stair. The name was inspired by the step-like formation of their vertical faces. The red color comes from oxidation as the minerals are exposed to the elements. East Rock and West Rock are both part of the Metacomet Range, which extends up central Connecticut and comprises, among other landmarks, Hamden’s Sleeping Giant, Meriden’s Hanging Hills, Simsbury’s Talcott Mountain, and Massachusetts’ Mt. Tom.
In New Haven’s desolate Cedar Hill railroad yard, the towering red face of East Rock softens the landscape and hints at its natural history. And in the railroad yard sits the hulking coal tower, a landmark for over 100 years, finally identified.