Mansions, great houses, castles oh my!
On the winding, twisting, turning backroads of Connecticut, there’s no telling what you’ll find. Back there where the trees are plentiful and the horse stables are in abundance. You might catch sight of a bluebird with a color so vibrant you can’t help but think for a moment that it was a springtime flower drifting upwards, caught on a current of air. Cardinals in flight dart across streets and into the surrounding hedge lands. At midday, you can walk along the winding roads that don’t have sidewalks; they are so rarely traveled by cars in the middle of the day that it does not matter like it would in the city. If you are just quiet enough you can hear the rustle of hidden animals, maybe deer, maybe small wild cats, as they go about their daily business.
Porsches and Mazaradis line the streets, the cars left over, the extra cars, while the homeowners have gone off to work. Do they drive Teslas or is that just a mark of the nouveau riche?
Abundance and opulence that is the stuff of fairy tales or the punch line of a satirical joke, or six, told by a disenfranchised comedian.
It is unfathomable that tucked in a neat little corner of Connecticut is such unimaginable splendor. It’s made even more shocking when just 5-10 miles outside of this fairytale land where houses line the sea there are places like downtown Stamford where, though tall buildings are beginning to pop up like springtime flowers or a blight of mushrooms, there are the homeless, the begging, the government housing units and the college students taking up a ridiculous amount of student loan debt. Where men line the street by the highway waiting to be picked up for a construction job. Any job.
Just 20 or so miles out and beyond this are the cities of Bridgeport, Hartford, and New Haven. Lands riddled with poverty, crime and the generally hustling. Day in and day out battling high property taxes left over from a time of great economic growth and a heyday that has long since passed. What does the future hold? Maybe a story of gentrification and a resurgence to come, or of a land overrun by casinos, a carbon copy of Atlantic City right in Southwestern Connecticut.
Welcome to Connecticut where the poor and the shrinking middle class coexist right at the hoves of the Wall Street bull, the tech giants, and the other gazillionaires. Cast out beyond the purple curtain of wealth and the old ‘royals’ of New England and far beyond.
From projects to summer homes it is as if these two economic states were worlds apart, not neighbors.
Caia Rose 