Lincoln's Log

At first I thought they were gobs of foam created by cold water flowing into the cove. But they were too formed and too anatomical. So, of course, I had to take a closer look.

Can anyone guess what they were?

Okay. It didn’t long for the first reply (see below) …

Here is the answer:

It was the single biggest store opening in Greenwich Avenue history, and, boy, we sure can use the shot in the arm! All of Lower Greenwich Avenue stands to gain by the enormous crowds expected to converge on the new Apple store in the location of the former twin cinemas. By the time the store opened at 10 a.m. the crowd had snaked around the corner past Diane’s book store. The first 1,000 customers received an Apple t-shirt with “Greenwich Avenue” written on the front. I admired the APPLE TV device and then drove over the Cos Cob TV and bought it for the same price. No lines.

The parking authority in town clearly is ratcheting up enforcement in search of more revenue. People who have lived in Old Greenwich for 15 years or longer are getting tickets for the first time. I saw this parking officer chalking up cars last week. I have never seen that before.

Also, the proposal to put meters in Byram, Cos Cob and Old Greenwich is a non-starter. The small businesses don’t want them. The residents don’t want them. There must be another way to save money.

AHA! There is. I saw this contractor ripping up the turf at Binney Park earlier this week. when I asked him what he was doing, he said he was re-turfing the grass because it was “bumpy.” No doubt some soccer parents have complained that the grass field is uneven. But how much are we spending to re-grass the field? And is this the way we want to spend tax dollars at a time when we have slashed $4 million out of the school budget?

I say let the kids play on bumpy grass. It’ll make them better players in the long run.

Finally, it was good to see the town get around to sweeping up the leaves. Didn’t it seem like forever that the leaves were on the roads clogging up traffic this year?

This picture of leaves dumped onto the parking spaces at Old Greenwich is particularly galling. I pay to park at the train station. Taking up three prime spaces with leaves is selfish and rude. Can’t the town get after those homeowners?

A frequent Lincoln’s Log reader alerted me to a sidewalk construction project in Riverside that she thought was another example of unwise spending at this time. So your intrepid reporter went down to the scene and snapped this shot. I’m actually willing to cut the town a little slack on this one. I remember walking to Eastern Middle School years ago when my son was a student and recalled that negotiating the road leading to the school on Hendrie Avenue was a little tricky, especially at night.

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The Old Greenwich Yacht Club held its annual meeting Sunday and voted in its new board of directors and announced that for the first time in recent memory it does not have a waiting list.

In fact it has nine vacancies. Even the most resilient local institutions have been battered by the Great Recession and OGYC has not been exempted. The club is unusual in that it is a public facility with most of the accoutrement of a full service yacht club except it does not have any dining and events facilities. The club is open to all Greenwich residents with a cap at 300 members.

With an initiation fee of $1,200 and annual dues of only $600, OGYC is one of the best deals in the Northeast for avid sailors. For instance, I pay the Town of Greenwich a lot more – $900 a year – just to store my boat at Greenwich Point and for usage fees such as a marine use permit and mooring permit.

Also, you don’t have to have own a boat to be a member. OGYC owns a fleet of Mercury and Ideal 18 sailboats. The Ideal 18s have become a popular “one class” race boat among all the yacht clubs in Greenwich.

The best part though is the access to Greenwich Cove, which is, in my opinion, the best among the mooring fields in Greenwich. It has easy access to the deeper water in western Long Island Sound and is at the same time sheltered from the prevailing southwest winds by the Greenwich Point peninsula.

The only downside to OGYC is the rancor among the members. A vocal minority has taken to criticizing the volunteer board for everything from maintenance of the boats to board nominations. As a result, board turnover is high and the need for new members is constant.

I joined the club in 2002 after being on the waiting list for one season. If you can manage to avoid the sturm and drang of the club politics, OGYC is an exceptional value. And the opportunity to join doesn’t come along very often. Marc Lotti is the membership director.

Click here for the club’s website

Other incoming board members are:

Commodore Will Morrison
Vice Commodore Barbara Krumeich
Rear Commodore Aileen Hutchins
Treasurer Al Shehadi
Secretary Syd Uhry
Fleet Captain Jonathan Asch
Membership Marc Lotti
Education Lou Casolo
Racing Tom Hagan

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SEWER MANHOLE COVER AT THE BEACH UPDATE

Town officials said they will place a planter on top of the sewer cover at the beach after my recent post:

There must be an explanation. But it’s certainly odd to see a manhole cover right in the middle of the beach at Tod’s Point? Apart from the aesthetic dissonance, there is a safety issue. Hope no one running across the beach mangles a foot or ankle.

Hamilton Avenue School is by far the worst performing school in Greenwich in standardized testing, ranking 387 out of 544 elementary schools in last year’s Connecticut Mastery Test. Greenwich’s best – Riverside School – came in at No. 19.

That’s quite a delta between 19 and 387. It’s Greenwich’s version of East Egg and West Egg.

Moreover, Hami Ave was recently cited by the state as failing to make adequate yearly progress on state achievement exams under the federal No Child Left Behind act.

This week, lost in the elections coverage and assorted other stories like the latest scandal at Greenwich Hospital was this article in the Greenwich Time. It was the most important story this year in my opinion.

Click here for Greenwich Time article

It shows our new superintendent Sidney Freund taking aggressive action to fix the single biggest problem in Greenwich – the troubled schools as measured by every standardized test available which are dragging down the reputation of the entire school district. From what I read in the story, Freund wants to shift $38,000 from a swimming program to fund the development of a new science lab. He also questions the wisdom of busing kids to the Boys and Girls Club in Greenwich during the school day. He’d rather have them in school boning up on their math and reading.

Now, anyone who reads my blog regularly knows my views on the schools. I am a Greenwich resident with no child currently attending the public schools. By all accounts, I should be part of the big vocal conservative voice of empty nesters in Greenwich who do not want their tax dollars increased to support the schools for which they get no direct benefit. Greenwich has an unusually small public school population (about 8900 students) for a city – sorry town – with 62,000 people, owing to the fact that 18 percent of the kids go to private schools. This year the town whacked $4 million from the school budget forcing the new superintendent to do things like shift money from one bucket to another.

Personally, I am appalled and embarrassed that I live in a community where the median price of a home is $2 million but we act like we live in some shanty town in West Virginia, forcing our head of schools to beg for pennies. But that’s another story. This is an overwhelmingly Republican town, and if I don’t like it, I suppose I can always move to Westport.

But this post isn’t my usual rant about the school budget. It’s about some of the parents at Hamilton who don’t want Freund to shift the funds. As I said earlier, I am embarrassed that we have come to the point of forcing Freund to make these choices. But he is acting in greater interest of the children of Hamilton School. He knows we are intertwined as residents of a single community whether we accept that or not. The fact is Hamilton’s low scores bring down the average scores for the entire district and places Greenwich lower and lower in state rankings – now No. 40 out of 195. Westport, by the way, is No. 1.

Headlines blaring out our failure to comply with federal minimum standards don’t do any of us any good either. The headlines say “Greenwich Schools fail.” They aren’t parsed as “Chickahominy schools” or “Riverside schools.” It’s a blot on the entire town every time it happens.

Freund also knows that the elementary students at Hamilton will grow up to be high school students someday when they will take the Connecticut Academic Performance Test which has a science component. He is smart to try to instill a love of science at the elementary level.

These moves by Freund is the first sign that we have the right guy pulling the levers, in my opinion. The parents at Hamilton have a right to be distressed about the loss of the skating and swimming programs. But they live in a town where on Tuesday it was decided overwhelmingly that those things are unnecessary and frivolous. Given the hand he has been dealt, our superintendent is doing the right thing. He deserves our support.

With Greenwich’s commercial vacancy rate at a staggering 18 percent, it’s gratifying – actually it’s exciting – to see a new business open, especially in a landmark venue that has been empty for three years. The name of the business on Sound Beach Avenue is Fred, a women’s clothing store.

The store had a soft opening on Tuesday in the historic Lockwood building (1932) that was previously occupied by Kerr’s Pharmacy, which closed in 2006. The signage out front is still awaiting Planning and Zoning approval. Owner Kelley Frey named the store after her daughter’s nickname.