Around Town

Dantown: The ‘Atlantis of New Canaan’

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Drive slowly along the upper reaches of Ponus Ridge and you can glimpse the last vestiges of a once-thriving New Canaan community, most of which now exists deep beneath the Laurel Reservoir. Beyond the chain link fence surrounding the lake, myriad stone walls crisscross through the trees, some of which suddenly disappear into the water. This is all that remains of Dantown. For Bob Tilden of Montour Falls, N.Y., the search for Dantown began as a search for his ancestors. One of these ancestors, Francis Dan, arrived in what was then Stamford in the late 17th Century, eventually settling a community by the Rippowam River near the New York state border.

Around Town

A Brushy Ridge Mystery: The Rockery

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If you’ve ever taken a ride up Brushy Ridge Road, you might have noticed an ancient stone arch on the side of the street framing a rusted wrought-iron gate. It is seemingly a gateway to nowhere, as looking beyond it one can’t see a house, cemetery, steps or anything of apparent significance. Adding to the mystery is another arch at the top of Brushy Ridge that looks like something out of Stonehenge. Rewind about [150] years. Local history says that William H. Thomson was a doctor in New York City in the mid-late 19th century.

Town Living

9-6-6-Story: The Many Changes of New Canaan’s Exchanges

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New Canaanites today see residents on cellphones everywhere, driving up Ponus Ridge or walking along the sidewalks of Elm and Main. For people such as Cookie King, née Van Beck—who lived in New Canaan from the 1930’s to the 1960’s and whose family lived in New Canaan until 1995—that’s about as impersonal as the way individual cell numbers are assigned: Between IP technology and mobile provider pool applications, there’s no rhyme or reason to a New Canaan “extension.” “We still have a landline and won’t give it up,” King told NewCanaanite.com “Have phone on the wall with a dial on it too.”

Many New Canaanites remember the days even before “966” was the town’s main designated exchange, and a look at our local telephone history tells the story of those three digits, long associated with the Next Station to Heaven. The first telephones in New Canaan were installed in 1881, as four businesses in the then-small town—Henry B. Rogers & Co., Hoyt’s Nurseries, Monroe’s drug store and Johnson’s carriage works—were part of the Norwalk exchange. After the turn of the century, New Canaan’s population began growing rapidly—as did the number of phones in town.

News

‘They’ve Carried on Our Culture’: New Canaan Girls Lacrosse Beats Darien for CIAC Class LL Title

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It was a lot of déjà vu all over again at Sacred Heart University’s Campus Field on Saturday afternoon. For the third consecutive year it was New Canaan-Darien in the CIAC Girls Lacrosse Championship. The same matchup as it has been for the previous four FCIAC Championship Games. And just like the conference final played 16 days ago, it was the Rams who came away with a five-goal win as New Canaan downed the top-seeded Blue Wave 10-5 to take the Class LL crown. “I am just so happy for this team,” New Canaan head coach Kristin Woods said.

Business

‘We’re Excited To Be Here’: Best Pizza Shop Opens on Main Street

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John Parlatore and his young family were among the first wave of New Yorkers to make the move out of the city when COVID hit in March of 2020. 

“My sister lived up here for about four years and we’d come up and visit her all the time,” Parlatore said on a recent evening at Best Pizza Shop at 62 Main St. “We liked the area but never thought we’d move from the city. Our daughter was going to school and we had restaurants there. When the city said on Saturday by Monday we were closing, we just saw it as a preview of things to come of mismanagement and we were right.”
Parlatore—who owned several eateries in Queens—slowly shut down each establishment, including his Italian restaurant that had been operating since 2013 and a pizzeria that had opened in early 2020 with the intention of reopening in Fairfield County. 

Serendipity intervened for Parlatore when Vicolo’s closed after nearly three decades on Main Street, leaving New Canaan without a go-to destination for family birthday parties and postgame youth and high school sports celebrations. 
“We heard about what Vicolo’s was,” Parlatore told NewCanaanite.com. “I hadn’t been there but I heard that through the years that it was a gathering place for people and that families ate here.