NewCanaanite.com (https://newcanaanite.com/author/laura-ault)
‘Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market. The only hardship about eating at Crust Issues in Norwalk is parking. One recent evening, the woman from Naughty Nancy’s, the adult bookstore two doors down from our intended destination, angrily shooed us away from a parking spot reserved for her customers. Nancy was NOT playing, and I had questions. How could she tell we didn’t plan to shop in her store?
Let me be perfectly transparent: I love a lawn. I love my lawn. During my Manhattan-commuting years, pulling into the driveway and seeing that velvety green expanse was a balm, an antidote to the day’s air-conditioned banality. Lawns signify more than just grass; they’re a Norman Rockwell-coded page in the visual language of the American Dream. Dads mowing in shirtsleeves, a dog named Fido, cartwheels, catch, daisychains, a Rocket Pop.
In New Canaan, where a competitive, Town & Country version of that dream prevails at all times, lawns matter.
I didn’t expect to be back so soon, but if the horrors persist, so, I guess, must we. If you missed the first installment, you’ll find it here.
Last weekend, Arnold Karp and his team posted billboards at the corner of Weed and Elm Streets that claim to give passersby some choice in what gets built there. Protected by the same free speech laws that protect this Op-Ed, the signs also bully the site’s intervenor neighbors and make a crucially deceptive argument in support of the enormous condo building Karp has recently said he wants to construct there. First of all, please understand that the Town of New Canaan did not post these billboards, nor are they asking for you to vote on this project. That’s not how this works.
Let’s talk about what’s actually going on.
Last week it emerged that, after his four-year crusade for affordable housing at Weed and Elm streets, developer Arnold Karp has cooked up an alternative set of plans to build a 62-condo building that will contain precisely zero affordable units. Three neighbors currently serve as holdouts, refusing to greenlight this version of the project. If these neighbors capitulate, the 62-unit, market-rate building will move forward. If they don’t, the 30% affordable, 102-unit rental structure whose grimly generic renderings we first laid eyes on in 2022 will be built.
To add to the intimidation tactic of Karp’s op-ed, bulldozers and land-clearing machinery have been active on the lot all week. I think we’ve all known for some time that this wouldn’t end without an eye-gougingly inappropriate building doing its best to blot out the sun at Weed and Elm streets.
‘Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market. A man, diagnosed with terminal colon cancer, made a hilarious, profound rocketship of a movie about it, and I’m inviting you to come watch it with me at the New Canaan Playhouse on April 18th. André is an Idiot is the best movie about death I’ve ever seen. Not just me; pretty much anyone who sees it. It won the Audience Award at Sundance.