Around Town

Lakeview Cemetery Launches E-Commerce Channel for Services Honoring Lost Loved Ones

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One of New Canaan’s most venerable and important organizations has launched a new online channel in order to make it easier for people to pay respects to lost loved ones. Lakeview Cemetery’s revamped website now allows visitors to purchase floral arrangements, holiday wreaths and power-washing services for tombstones and mausoleums, and its staff will send photos to users after services have been rendered. Kelly Robb, office manager at the cemetery, said board members of the New Canaan Cemetery Association, a nonprofit organization that owns the 41-acre property together with individual plot owners, along with staff, identified a need among survivors and friends of those interred in Lakeview who have moved away or are otherwise unable to visit the property. “We are just trying to make it convenient and easier for people to order for their loved ones and even friends of the family, as a gift for them,” Robb said. “And to bring them peace of mind.”

New Canaan’s Peter Passaro, who took over as superintendent of the cemetery from Bo Hickey five years ago, said that although the new e-commerce channel only launched recently, it’s already seeing strong interest. 

“It’s really an extra service that a lot of cemeteries don’t provide,” Passaro said.

Business

Audrey Stewart: Matriarch of the Market

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[This is the first installment in a four-part series “Matriarchs of Main & Elm,” profiling the women behind New Canaan’s great business families.]

Audrey Bailey Stewart had recently married Walter Stewart, Sr. when the young couple moved in with her husband’s parents—Walter Stewart, who had founded his eponymous food market on Main Street in 1907 and his rather formidable wife, Nellie, New Canaan’s first woman elected to the state legislature—at the Hoyt Street home that’s still in the family. A smart, strong-willed woman in her own right, Audrey didn’t always have an easy time living with the in-laws and “she didn’t always get along with Nellie,” family historian Karen Brockway Izzo said, recalling one funny story from her grandmother. “Once, Nellie told her that she didn’t like the color purple,” Izzo recalled. “Grandmother apparently had a bit of a rebellious streak, and after a disagreement, painted her entire apartment purple. Even the bathroom.”

After meeting her would-be husband through a chance encounter after taking in a movie at the (then relatively new) New Canaan Playhouse on Elm Street while still a teenager, Audrey Stewart would go on to immerse herself in one of the town’s most important and civic-minded business families. From humble beginnings and acquainted with tragedy even as a young girl, Audrey Stewart would go on to forge a definitive and direct positive impact on the family business during a crucial period of growth, while rearing and raising an entire generation of Stewarts well known to locals.

Around Town

Did You Hear … ?

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For the first time ever, May Fair will open its rides to visitors on the Friday night of the weekend that the hugely popular event runs. “Friday Night Lights” will run from 5 to 9 p.m. on May 8—featuring just the rides, a performance stage and select food vendors Baskin-Robbins, Joe’s Pizza and Chicken Joe’s—and the full, cherished annual fair running about 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. the following day, said Richard DePatie, parish administrator at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. “We’ve been talking about it, off and on, for a number of years, and weather is a factor,” DePatie told NewCanaanite.com. He explained that in recent years, foul weather has caused organizers to hit pause on May Fair for periods of time on the selected Saturday, and that affects how much money can be raised (the fair benefits charities through the St.