NewCanaanite.com (https://newcanaanite.com/author/michael-dinan/page/3)
New Canaan Police at 12:40 p.m. on April 19 received a report of a larceny from a store at 3 Forest St. The street address includes Athletic Shoe Factory. A juvenile was involved, police said. ***
Saturday is Janet Bouton Wood Karl’s 98th birthday. Happy birthday to Janet, a 1945 New Canaan High School graduate and lifelong New Canaanite.
The Board of Selectmen last week approved an approximately $87,000 contract with a New Canaan-based company to further improve a closely watched and historically problematic intersection in the “South of the Y” neighborhood. The town had several stops and starts since it began focusing on relieving high-volume traffic and speeding at the intersection of Conrad Road and Whiffle Tree Lane, including a proposal to install a “mini-roundabout” and a short-lived experiment involving a barricade that drew criticism from residents. Last year, town officials striped the intersection into a three-way stop, according to Public Works Director Tiger Mann. “That was after multiple discussions with the residents and the Police Commission,” Mann told members of the Board of Selectmen during their April 15 meeting, held at Town Hall and via videoconference.
He continued: “We turned it into a three-way stop with temporary striping to show everyone the delineation of where these—I’ll call it a ‘bumpout’—but it’s basically bringing the intersection in, honing it down to make it a true three-way intersection and not allow you to cut the corners on the tangents. So in order to do so, we’ve got to install some drainage on each corner of each bumpout.”
First Selectman Dionna Carlson and Selectmen Steve Karl and Amy Murphy Carroll voted 3-0 in favor of the $86,767.50 contract with Peter Lanni Inc. to complete the work.
Town officials say that New Canaan is seeing an unusually high number of requests from residents who purchase honorific or memorial benches dedicated to loved ones. Typically, the Department of Public Works receives donations from locals who purchase benches and then the town itself assembles and places them in a location that makes sense—for example, in a park. This year, “we’ve actually had more than we normally have,” according to Public Works Director Tiger Mann. The benches in public places—which are consistent throughout New Canaan, following a Parks & Recreation Commission initiative in 2018—cost about $1,700 each and are purchased through a Gaithersburg, Md.-based company called Country Casual Teak, Mann told members of the Board of Selectmen at their April 15 meeting, held at Town Hall and via videoconference. Normally, the town’s highest elected official, First Selectman Dionna Carlson, approves the purchases herself because the total comes to less than $10,000.
During her many years on the New Canaan Nature Center Board of Trustees—eight in all, including five as president—Linda Andros puzzled over what to do with the abandoned “Audubon House” structure near the Visitors Center. An original building on the well-loved Oenoke Ridge property, the Audubon House was demolished one week ago, thanks to the New Canaan Department of Public Works—something that Andros would have appreciated, according to Nature Center Executive Director Bill Flynn. “Our idea to rejuvenate this area, it being the Audubon House, was to make this a celebration to birds and bird-watching and make it a native pollinator sanctuary,” Flynn told 50 people gathered Tuesday afternoon at the Nature Center on a clear, sunny day. “And that was something we had an idea before the building was coming down.”
Next to Flynn stood a young Winter Hawthorn tree donated by Copia Home & Garden and planted in honor and memory of Andros, a lover of nature, plants and animals. She died Dec.
Police last week arrested a 71-year-old New Canaan woman by warrant following a long-running noise dispute with a neighbor at their Locust Avenue apartment building.
Both women came to New Canaan Police headquarters on March 10 (a Monday) after the dispute boiled over, according to an arrest warrant application obtained by NewCanaanite.com. The woman who would be arrested lives on the first floor of their building, the other woman on the second floor.
At about 3:30 p.m. that day, the downstairs woman spotted her neighbor on the street “and confronted her” about noise in the building, according to the arrest warrant application, completed by Officer Michael Schnell and signed by a state prosecutor and Superior Court judge. She told police that she’d made five complaints in the past about her upstairs neighbor, the police affidavit said. Regarding the run-in on the street, the downstairs woman told police that “no verbal or physical threats were made during the encounter,” the affidavit said. The upstairs woman told police that she’d been walking her dog near the intersection of Locust Avenue at Forest Street when the other “confronted her unprompted and told her to ‘stop banging the pipes,’ ” the application said.