Beautification League

Jeff Speck Toward a More Walkable New Canaan

By |

National planning expert Jeff Speck has spent his career studying what makes cities thrive and has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability. From economists, epidemiologists, and environmentalists to preservationists, planners, and parents, all agree that walkable communities are better in just about every way. Speck explains why walking is useful, particularly regarding land-use, zoning, transit, and parking, and then focuses on how, by sharing examples of places where walking is safe, comfortable, and interesting.

Around Town

Greg Sages, Longtime Executive Director of The Glass House, To Step Down

By |

Greg Sages, with characteristic modesty, views the eight years that he’s led The Glass House as executive director in terms of the organization’s larger goals and history. 

When the historic Glass House building and campus on Ponus Ridge opened to the public in 2007 following the deaths of Philip Johnson and David Whitney, the then-director’s priority was “getting the place open,” Sage said. The second director was from the art community and had strong ties to Manhattan galleries and architects, and focused on those connections in raising the visibility of The Glass House. 

For Sage, “the most important thing was integrating the site into the fabric of New Canaan,” he said. “My predecessors had not focused on that effort,” Sage said. He added that he and Christa Carr, The Glass House’s director of communications, “have been pretty active in local organizations and also we set out to do a number of partnerships with other not-for-profits in town including the library, the New Canaan Museum & Historical Society, Grace Farms, S.T.A.R in this past year, and others.”

“And I think we have maintained a very positive reputation in the museum community with visitors coming from around the country and from around the world,” he said. Sage recently notified his employers at the National Trust for Historic Preservation that he’s stepping down as director.

Around Town

‘This Is Part of Our Obligation’: Much-Needed Ceiling Replacement Underway at the Glass House

By |

For years, even during Philip Johnson’s life, the southwest corner of the plaster ceiling inside the Glass House has been sagging. It’s been getting progressively worse in recent years—to the point where three of the doors into the iconic structure (there’s one on each face of the house) could not be opened. About three years ago, those in charge of the National Trust for Historic Preservation site oversaw a temporary stabilization in the troubled corner, working with Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Evergreene Architectural Arts. “It sagged about three inches in that corner,” Brendan Tobin, senior buildings & grounds manager at The Glass House said Tuesday afternoon, standing near Johnson’s building on the Ponus Ridge site. “They stabilized it by putting some lag bolts and washers in place so it would not further sag, and they gave us basically three proposals to restore or preserve the ceiling.”

Glass House officials reviewed those proposals (more on them below) and settled on one so that work could start days after the 2017 season ended on Nov.

Around Town

‘We Need To Be Doing Better’: New Director Eyes Fundraising, Capital Needs at The Glass House

By |

For all six years that Greg Sages has worked at this National Trust for Historic Preservation site on Ponus Ridge, the Brick House, a building that complements the campus’s most famous structure, the Glass House—designed at the same time and finished a few months earlier, in 1949—has been closed to the public, its collection in storage. The roof of the Brick House is not intact, there’s water coming in underground and above-grade, and an in-floor radiant heat system must be jack-hammered out with its interior slab and replaced—an approximately $2 million project that Sages said he would like very much to tackle “next” (that is, after the ongoing Sculpture Gallery restoration is finished). “It [The Brick House] needs restoration, and we haven’t identified the funding for that,” Sages, a Stamford native and 1972 Rippowam High School graduate who resides in Greenwich, said on a recent afternoon from this sprawling, sloping 49-acre campus. “It is all a matter of coming up with the funding to undertake this. At the National Trust, we have something called the ‘Critical Priority List.’ What needs to be done on each of the [14] structures here.

Around Town

Did You Hear … ?

By |

Police have told an out-of-town man to keep his 5-year-old female golden-doodle out of the dog park at Waveny until he gets the animal spayed. The dog (her name is Amber) is in heat and on a recent weekday evening her owner upset other Spencer’s Run users when he got angry about male dogs in the park trying to mount her. We’re hearing that the man grabbed the male dogs and yanked them off of his fetching female, as though it was their fault. Officials say that if the out-of-towner returns with the dog un-spayed, he’ll be ticketed and his PIN number to enter Spencer’s Run revoked. ***

Though the property owner at the Bank of America building on Elm Street could not be reached for comment after town officials blasted the condition of the planters out front, he appears to have taken at least one major step toward addressing the problem. Within days of a meeting of the Plan of Conservation & Development Implementation Committee that saw some members refer to the area as a “non-garden,” a crew appeared in the morning to install new flowers, topsoil, gravel and plants there.