Bridgeport waterfront just waiting for revival

Beer helps keep cities going. For example, the Pabst Mansion is listed as a major tourist attraction. There is a sprawling Miller Brewery, and the Milwaukee Brewers are the city’s Major League Baseball team. The Brewers play at Miller Park. wait.

The Harley-Davidson Museum is located in Milwaukee. Wisconsin is a purple state. Joe Biden leads Donald Trump with 49.4% of the vote in 2020 to Donald Trump’s 48.8%.

My wife and I were there recently to visit our daughter Tara, who is a professor at Marquette University, an influential Jesuit institution in the city.

The Milwaukee River runs through the city.

Tara and her wife Laura live on the fourth floor of a relatively new residential building on the west bank of the river, not far from Schlitz Park, by the way.

Now, with a different view on assets, a new publisher for the Connecticut Post came to Bridgeport years ago. He doesn’t think he knows it all, and one day he asked me to show him around the area. It’s a diverse field, okay. From Bridgeport East and the poorer parts of the East End to the stables and gables of Southport and Greenfield Hills, and pretty much everything in between.

The new publisher hails from Pittsburgh, a city that knows something about rivers. We found ourselves in downtown Bridgeport, at the truncated end of Congress Street with its long-gone bridge across the Pequinnock River. We looked up and down the river. Across the river, on the Knowlton Street side, the hands of the clock on the billboard had been frozen at eleven twenty years ago. Elsewhere along the river, nothing has changed either.

The rear ends of old brick houses are sinking into the oil-stained shore. The slow river is a haughty battleship gray. Rotten piles stand out. It’s an unsightly graveyard for industries of the past. This is what I see.

Here’s what new publishers see: Wow! See it all on the waterfront.

indeed. Abandoned waterfront, this is what it looks like today. While cockamamie fantasies about developing Bridgeport’s dilapidated downtown theater come and go, the abandoned waterfront continues to be “wasted.”

The photos here were taken from the walkway on the river. View to the north. From their decks, you can see the vacant lot, where old buildings have been demolished and new ones may be imminent. Foresight and development make the Milwaukee River beautiful.

The other day I took a ride down the Pequonnock River. I parked at the end of the street next to Bridgeport Fire Headquarters. The recently planted lot has several benches masquerading as a park. Waterfront property is still a “waste”.

Even more pleasingly, Bernard Crawley, ex-Bridgeport, now Newport, Rhode Island, has completed and published his masterpiece, a project that has been going on for some 20 years Love labor.

Frankly, Bernie is my brother-in-law. He is married to my wife’s sister Maureen. A self-taught historian and author, he was fascinated by the story of James Henry O’Rourke, a baseball player from Bridgeport who, among other famous In addition to the feat, he was also credited with hitting a single in the National League.

Bridgeport’s Newfield Park is a converted O’Rourke farm at the city’s east end.

Bernie, along with Bridgeport librarian and author Michael Bielawa and others, started an organization called The First Hit Inc., which is trying to raise money to save the O’Rourke house that stands alone off I-95 , which is now the Steelpointe development area. They couldn’t save the house.

His 454-page book is titled “The Extraordinary Life of James Henry O’Rourke: A Connecticut Farm Boy’s Journey to the Baseball Hall of Fame.” Of course, this book contains everything you ever wanted to know about O’Rourke, whose inventiveness in spoken language earned him the nickname “Orator Jim.” But it also tells his remarkable story set against the backdrop of major events in late 19th and early 20th century America. It’s available on Amazon.

Michael J. Daly is the retired editor of the Connecticut Post Opinion page. Email: [email protected]