Business

Family-Owned Geiger’s Settles into Frogtown Nursery Space

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A family-owned business that traces its Connecticut roots to the 19th Century and formed in its current iteration in the early-1950s has moved into the sprawling, pond-flanked commercial lot at the bottom of Frogtown Road—known for decades to New Canaanites under names such as Kimberly or Frogtown Farms & Nurseries. Geiger’s Landscape has been serving New Canaan for more than six decades, in a variety of ways: residents have been customers of the business, dozens of New Canaan storefronts for years have had Geiger’s container gardens and plantings out front and, more recently, the company has helped beautify town pocket parks and the Talmadge Hill trail station. Senior Landscape Architect John Geiger (son of company founder Frank) said New Canaan long has been a key town for the business. “We’ve never had an office or garden center there in the past, but we’ve been working there and obviously it’s a wonderful community,” Geiger said on a recent afternoon during an interview at his Westport headquarters. “And when the Frogtown Nursery came up, we said, ‘What an opportunity to have an business in New Canaan.’ ”

With a physical location in New Canaan and focus on landscape architecture, design, construction and property care, including organic options—in part because, though the Frogtown Road space is a retail nursery and garden center, that part of the industry has become increasingly challenging from a business perspective—Geiger said the company is eager to support the local community.

Government

Town Weighs Future of ‘Audubon House’ at New Canaan Nature Center

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New Canaan is taking steps to help figure out what to do with a largely disused building on Nature Center property that had been operated by what officials call a dissolved nonprofit group. The town had granted a license (not a lease, officials say) to the New Canaan Audubon Society to use Audubon House, which for years has sat in a wooded area near the Visitors Center at the New Canaan Nature Center. New Canaan’s legal advisors say New Canaan now controls that license, since the Audubon Society here dissolved itself, and that it’s a good time to decide whether and how to use Audubon House, since private groups likely are interested in using it, the Board of Selectmen said this week. “Before that happens, let’s get an idea of what that building’s expenses could be, what’s the liability involved in someone else using that building,” First Selectman Rob Mallozzi said Tuesday during the board’s meeting, held in the training room at the New Canaan Police Department. The selectmen voted unanimously to move toward terminating the formal license with the New Canaan Audubon Society—a change that requires Town Council support.

Around Town

New Canaan Nature Center, Town, Businesses and Organizations Mark Earth Day 2014 [VIDEOS]

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“Where have those flowers and butterflies all gone

That science may have staked the future on?”

—from Robert Frost’s “Pod of the Milkweed”

 

The migration of monarch butterflies through New Canaan—and everywhere else along the East Coast—is happening less frequently in recent years, to the point where some are calling the insects’ once widely anticipated journey between the Northeast/Canada and Mexico “endangered.”

The major reason, experts say, is a lack of milkweed, which monarch caterpillars feed on. “The butterflies can go to all kinds of flowers for nectar, but the caterpillars can only eat milkweed plants. They’re having a hard time with loss of bio-habitat, so we are encouraging people in town to plant these free milkweed seeds,” Susan Bergen, a volunteer for the New Canaan Garden Club, said Tuesday morning from a table inside New Canaan Library. There, she and Jen Rayher (nee Sillo, a 1994 New Canaan High School graduate), director of membership and volunteers at the New Canaan Nature Center, handed out the seeds (“Got Milkweed?” on the packet) to mark Earth Day here in town. It’s one of several initiatives and events planned by the Nature Center for the next week, which New Canaan’s highest elected official today declared “Environmental Awareness Week 2014Week” (see video below).

News

Forum with Yankee Gas in New Canaan: ‘Get Them the Concrete Numbers’

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New Canaanites are calling for harder numbers and timetables behind projected cost-savings in natural gas conversion—for example, how much it will cost to convert a home of X square feet that lays Y feet from a main line, and exactly when service will come to each property—prior to committing to Yankee Gas to the degree that the utility needs in order to put a shovel in the ground here. Yankee Gas said during a panel discussion at New Canaan Library Monday evening that it wants to have natural gas service available in New Canaan starting this fall. That service would start by following a roughly 5-mile main up from Stamford along Ponus Ridge, running the length of Frogtown Road, jogging down Weed, running from the top of Elm to South Avenue and then out to the high school. At first, the line would serve many New Canaan businesses in the heart of our downtown, as well as a lot of big town buildings near the route (Town Hall, Police Department, South, Saxe and the high school) and possibly the YMCA. Yet even those buildings no longer carry enough of the natural gas load to reasonably offset, in the eyes of state regulators, the cost of doing the infrastructure work here, according to Paul Zohorsky, vice president of gas operations at Northeast Utilities (which owns Berlin, CT-based Yankee Gas).

Government

Town Gets Info on Historic Designation for Public Buildings

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The town’s highest elected official, together with parks and public works leaders, on Thursday met with local preservationists and historic registry experts from the state to explore the benefits—monetary, aesthetic and other—of designating  as historic some New Canaan buildings. Rob Mallozzi on NCPA meeting, workshop
During a recent interview with NewCanaanite.com—part of which can be seen in the video clip at right—First Selectmen Rob Mallozzi also said homeowners here who pursue historic designation may be entitled to tax credits and grants when they make structural changes to those houses. “What we found out that was most encouraging is that there are not a lot of strings attached, so all in all it was a very good day and it was a positive to discuss the whole concept for preservation,” Mallozzi said. “We’ve got something unique which you cannot re-create, and we need to preserve what we have.”

The comments come on the heels of a public workshop hosted by the New Canaan Preservation Alliance—a nonprofit organization formed in 2007 “in response to rising concerns over the rapid disappearance of the town’s historic built and natural environments,” its website says. In an interview Sunday (just after Caffeine & Carburetors) with NewCanaanite.com, NCPA Board of Directors President Rose Scott Long noted that Town Hall is the lone municipal building now registered as historic.