Around Town

Kiwanis Club’s Annual St. Patrick’s Day Dinner & Social To Be Held Sunday

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The New Canaan Kiwanis Club’s popular St. Patrick’s Day Dinner & Social is around the corner, scheduled for 5 to 7 p.m. on Sunday, March 11 in St. Aloysius School’s dining hall. A community staple for years, the event features Irish dancing and is sponsored by New Canaan’s Hoyt Funeral Home, First County Bank, Bankwell, Kiwanis Division 20, Karl Chevrolet, Sperry DeCew, Nurenu Brand Marketing, Baskin-Robbins, Walter Stewart’s Market, Stewarts Spirits, NewCanaanite.com, Hawthorne Ackerly & Dorrance, Anam Cara School of Irish Dance and Harney Pender Keady School of Irish Dance. Tickets are $10 for children, those under age two are free, $15 for adults ($20 at the door) and are available at the New Canaan Chamber of Commerce, 91 Elm St.; Walter Stewart’s Market, 229 Elm St.; Baskin- Robbins 103 Main St.

News

Letter: At Vigil for Overdose Awareness Day, Learn from Real-Life Stories from Neighbors

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Dear Editor,

It is certainly no secret that opioids and other addictive substances are the epidemics of our country today. Individual lives, entire families, and whole communities are being permanently destroyed by this awful disease. But unless your door has been marked and your family scarred, it is very easy to nod in sympathy and say a small silent prayer of thanksgiving that this didn’t happen to our kid/father/mother/brother/sister/neighbor. But when we utter that prayer, we are forgetting the fact that every person in our community is indeed our kid/father/mother/brother/sister/neighbor. And then we know that indeed we are all affected by the epidemic of addiction.

News

Top-10 Most-Read Stories on NewCanaanite.com through Three Months

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New Canaan history, real estate and land use, business and youth sports—these are the four topics that dominate the top-10 most popular articles published on NewCanaanite.com since we launched. Today marks three months for our local news site covering New Canaan (we launched Friday, Jan. 31). In that time, we’ve seen strong, sustained growth in traffic and social media followings, and garnered some interesting facts from Google Analytics about who reads the site:

61 percent of NewCanaanite.com readers are 18 to 34 years old;
55 percent of our readers are male;
about half of our readers come to NewCanaanite.com through mobile devices—and among those mobile users, about two-thirds are on smartphones, the other third on tablets such as iPads;
we see a 50-50 split between new and returning readers;
NewCanaanite.com has seen sustained traffic of more than 10,000 users per month (10,716 in the month of April, Google Analytics says) and 33,000-plus page views monthly;
Facebook fans have grown on a week-over-week average rate of 10 percent for NewCanaanite.com—the highest 10 times over among local outlets that serve our town. Here’s a list of our top-10 most-read single articles since launching:

New Canaan Man Part of Historic $120 Million Greenwich Estate Sale
‘The Great Wall of New Canaan’: Perambulation Line
Looking Back: Forest Street Deli to Close Next Friday
Dantown: The ‘Atlantis of New Canaan’
In Search of New Canaan History: Stephen Weed’s Fort
Wave Goodbye: New Canaan Stuns Darien To Win FCIAC Hockey Title
The Life of Reilly: New Canaan’s Star Pitcher Chooses Babson
South Avenue Landmark: Brooks Sanatorium, Reincarnated
Heroin and New Canaan, Part 1 of 3: Tracing and Defining a Problem
New Canaan Preservationists Lament Demolition of Historic Jelliff Mill, Home

In the case of the number one story, NewCanaanite.com—with a great assist from Leslie Yager, editor at sister publication Greenwich Free Press—was first to report the name of the group (led by a New Canaanite) behind a historic $120 million residential property acquisition in Greenwich.