Around Town

Waveny Playground Equipment To Appear This Month; Facility on Track for Spring Opening

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Town officials say they’re planning to start installing new playground equipment at Waveny at the end of this month, though the widely anticipated facility won’t be ready for public use until the spring. That’s because the Poured-In-Place rubber surface that will anchor the children’s playground “has to go in during certain temperatures,” according to Public Works Director Tiger Mann. “What we don’t want to do is put the [playground] units out there and then people are going to want to go use them, so it’s an attractive nuisance where we’re stuck,” Mann said during a Town Council and Board of Finance Infrastructure & Utilities Subcommittee meeting, held Monday at Town Hall and via videoconference. 

He continued: “We’re balancing a point of when to put them [the play structures] in the ground and then come back with the Poured-In-Place surface. And our thought is at the end of February it’s going to take us two or three weeks to put it all in the ground and then by mid-March we should have favorable temperatures to then put the Poured-In-Place surface in. Everything is here, ready to go.

Around Town

Coffee’s on for Thursday

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Join fellow residents and NewCanaanite.com editor Michael Dinan for the monthly Community Coffee, to be held 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 5 in the Jim & Dede Bartlett Auditorium at New Canaan Library. The Coffee is presented in partnership with the library, and the brew is supplied by Zumbach’s Gourmet Coffee (thank you, Doug). Salon Anastassia provides donuts, muffins and other baked goods. The free, public coffee is a group conversation about what’s happening around town, moderated by Dinan. Topics come from attendees and we spend no more than 10 minutes per subject.

Around Town

Wilky Gilmore: ‘He Was One of Our Own’

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In among the trophies in the lobby of the New Canaan High School Athletic Complex hangs a framed, vintage number-12 Rams jersey. There is no plaque, no marker, no inscription identifying whose jersey it was. As a result, hundreds of students, parents and fans filter past the jersey every day, unaware of the history or the significance behind it, unaware of Maurice ‘Wilky’ Gilmore. Yet for legions of New Canaanites, especially friends and relatives who were lucky enough to know him personally, Gilmore—selfless, charismatic, intelligent and graceful—etched a singular legacy here in town. That he did so in an era marked by civil unrest makes his accomplishments perhaps that much more impressive—though those close to Gilmore say his rare gifts of compassion and decency saw him transcend matters such as race and, in more than one way, “raise the game” of everyone around him.

Around Town

Did You Hear … ?

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New Canaan Police are investigating a burglary on Oenoke Ridge near the intersection of Logan Road, reported at 11:41 p.m. on Jan. 23. The burglars used a ladder to access the home’s second floor, police said. ***

Register here for “Developing Athletes for the Long Game: Balancing Performance, Health and Wellbeing,” to be held at 9:30 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 6.

Around Town

New Canaan Library Working Toward Proposed Uses for 1913 Building

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New Canaan Library has started planning for a new use or uses of the 1913 building, a sealed structure on the western edge of the organization’s campus. Preserved and moved 115 feet from its original location as part of a Planning & Zoning Commission requirement as the “new” library building project that wrapped up three years ago, the legacy building has been used — on its exterior — as the site of a “Changemakers” art installation since 2024. (The building’s 115-foot relocation cost about $2.4 million.)

“We have formed some committees,” library CEO Ellen Sullivan Crovatto told members of the Board of Selectmen during a Jan. 20 budget presentation, held at Town Hall and via videoconference. She continued: “We have begun a lot of work around how we see using the space.