A little thematic music. I’m paying taxes; what am I buying?
Ever had to put money into a car you planned to get rid of, just to keep it running for those last few weeks or months until you replaced it? Intensely frustrating, that.
Or, have you ever had to sink money into a house you were selling, just to make it more attractive to buyers? Sure, that pays off in the end, but it’s not very much fun when you’re doing it.
Paying taxes to the city right when a major municipal service fails you can kinda grind your gears, too.
That’s where my grandpa was around this time 41 years ago:
July 27-28, 1972.
Not sure what caused the problem. Unfettered access to the Stamford Advocate’s archives would be a wonderful thing, but such a thing does not exist in my world.
So I don’t know why the city — or, at least, my family’s humble corner of it — was having water trouble.
(The Advocate reported earlier this year that much worse things than mud are coming out of Connecticut’s wells nowadays. Maybe my grandpa got off easy.)
The house on Hope Street was probably about 60 years old then, which seems a little too early for the water lines to start giving out. But, that’s just my perception. Maybe it was cheap pipe.
The problem popped up again the following month before vanishing from my grandpa’s calendars:
Aug. 14-15, 1972. Not sure why it was a “vacation week,” as everyone in the house was on permanent vacation at that point.
How common was bottled water 40 years ago?
I’m sure you could find a couple jugs of it at your local supermarket, but probably not nearly as much as you can find now. I imagine there was enough bottled water around to get you through a day or two of muddy tap water, if you had to.
I can imagine my grandfather grumbling, though, as he went out to buy something he was accustomed to getting delivered right into his house.
Hope Street 
How can you be sure the great blues legend McKinley Morganfield wasn’t on TV at 2 PM on 7/27/72?
Actually, the water on Hope Street in the 1940s & 50s (and apparently into the 70s) was nowhere near as clean as the tap water you grew up with in upstate New York in the 70s and 80s. I’m not sure if that was more a function of era or location.
In the late 1940s I remember rocks & debris and maybe even little dead small water creatures coming out of our kitchen faucet, before your grandfather put on a very basic screen filter.
And from time to time thereafter, the water would turn muddy. It usually meant there was some building project going on nearby, or maybe that the water mains (which were much older than the 1910-ish Hope Street house which is the subject of your blog) broke and needed repair. My recollection is that it was generally a neighborhood-wide event, not specific to his house.
I don’t remember the solution, except to run the water for a long time and hope it cleared up. We might have boiled some, or filtered it through multiple layers of fine cheesecloth (used for some other baking or canning project), or drawn some from friends’ houses or his place of employment.
Very little was available for purchase – certainly not in the small bottles that have become the senseless marketing success of the last 10 years! I think you could buy a ~5 gallon glass jug of it.
Periodically the Stamford Water Company (this is before Aquarian took over) would open fire hydrants and let them run for awhile, usually in the evening. Pipe flushing. Not sure the purpose behind this but the water appeared rusty for a bit after. Later on they started posting a notice in The Advocate and stated the discoloration was harmless. It never lasted more than a few hours. Stamford Water Company always had very high standards. They were one of the first to put floride in drinking water so all children could have the benefits for their teeth.
This may also have been around the time sewers were put in for Springdale. Major project that went on for years. I’m sure that would have shaken things around as well.
I don’t ever remember seeing bottled drinking water for sale in Palmers or any other store. It seemed to hit the shelves around the time of Perrier and other mineral waters. Many places did have Crystal Rock dispensers with 5 gallon glass bottles that weighed a ton and were almost impossible to change on the cooler. Crystal Rock was local then and supposedly came from a spring up Long Ridge. Looking at the well issues in North Stamford I don’t know how wholesome that water would have been….
My I’m long winded……
Thanks for your info on the history of Stamford’s water supply. I find stuff like this fascinating — and of course it fills in a bunch of holes in my blog post.
My grandpa’s calendar has a bunch of entries related to the Springdale sewer project; I think one or two of them have been posted here. (There was one in the blog post about the cesspool, I think.)
[…] about one of my grandpa’s local art exhibitions. Or maybe he wrote a scathing column about dirty water in the Springdale neighborhood, using my grandpa as a […]