Around Town

Happy Birthday: Three New Canaan-Based Nonprofit Organizations Turn 80

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Three well-known local nonprofit organizations this year will mark 80 years in operation. The New Canaan Chapter of the League of Women Voters, New Canaan Mounted Troop and the New Canaan Beautification League are united by their focus on community engagement and service. The League of Women Voters is the local chapter of a national organization that helps register citizens to vote, and provides voter education about candidates and issues, according to LOWV Chapter President Miki Porta. 

“We’re really all about civic engagement,” she said. “A lot of us are just history and civics and government geeks who really believe that the more of us who volunteer and get involved, the better life is.” Porta said that running the candidates’ debate prior to Election Day is the LOWV event that makes the biggest difference in the lives of New Canaan residents. 

“Because the League of Women Voters is a non-partisan organization…I think that the candidates themselves and also the people coming to the debate feel that it’s going to be fair, it’s going to be substantive, and it’s going to be balanced,” she said.

0684-Radi0

0684-Radi0: Hidden Gem of New Canaan

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This week on 0684-Radi0, our free weekly podcast (subscribe here in the iTunes Store), we talk to Faith Kerchoff, a town resident since 1963 and member of the New Canaan Beautification League for 30 years, about a local hidden gem to which she and some others in the organization have devoted considerable energy in recent weeks. This installment of 0684-Radi0 is sponsored by New Canaan Music, your local source for music lessons, rental instruments, repairs and everything instrument related. Here are recent episodes of 0684-Radi0:

Around Town

‘A Win-Win for Everyone Involved’: With Generosity and Care, a Plant-Loving Legacy Endures in New Canaan

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Dr. Nicholas and Ashley Rutigliano moved to New Canaan last summer from Manhattan’s Upper West Side. A Brooklyn native whose wife hailed from Stamford, Rutigliano said the couple had been pregnant—their daughter Emilia is now nine months old—and began “thinking of where to set our roots.”

They found an apt home on Millport Avenue. The Cape Cod-style house at number 156 had been owned since 1973 by Bruce Pauley, a fourth-generation New Canaanite and owner of the still-active Pauley Tree & Lawn Care Inc. who had stepped down the prior summer as town tree warden. Pauley and his wife Elaine—together with ‘Deputy Tree Warden’ Bheema, his ever-present and handsome young German shepherd dog—set their eyes on retiring to 33 acres in Vermont, and the Rutiglianos closed on the Millport Avenue house last June. The owner of SANO Physical Therapy & Wellness, providing services to patients in their own homes, Nicholas Rutigliano had come to know the Pauleys through purchasing their home and understood on moving in that they’d “taken care of and nurtured” their property to a high degree.

Around Town

‘A Full Rich Experience’: Conservancy Reviews History of Waveny Park, Future Plans

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Perhaps the most important step taken by the last family to own privately what is today known as Waveny Park was in hiring the renowned Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm to design its grounds and gardens, a local expert said Wednesday. Led by the Brooklyn-born founder of Texaco Oil Company, the Lapham family not only built Waveny House but oversaw creation of the carefully cultivated area immediately around it, including the walled garden, according to Keith Simpson, a New Canaan-based landscape architect. Yet since New Canaan acquired the property in 1967, its main house, outbuildings and grounds all have needed regular repair and upkeep, such as when Simpson and the Garden Club restored the walled garden east of the prominent brick structure in 1982. “But it’s only a small area,” Simpson told more than 100 listeners gathered in the Visitors Center at the New Canaan Nature Center for an hour-long talk on the cherished public park. “More places need attention.

Around Town

‘Lovely Little Touches’: Mysterious Mini-Christmas Tree Reappears at Maple and Main

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There would seem to be little room for what’s happening at Maple and Main Streets—after all, New Canaan’s Christmas tree traditions are well established. There’s the Exchange Club’s annual lighting of the Lou Moreno tree at Kiwanis Park, for example, and the Dec. 24 caroling by the tree at God’s Acre—a cherished tradition that the Civic League started exactly 100 years ago, according to the historical record. Even non-tree decorating practices are fixed—the New Canaan firefighters’ precise, orally communicated tradition of decking the firehouse, or the wreaths affixed to public buildings such as Town Hall and the Post Office. So when a tiny Christmas tree began to appear each December in a disused corner of the Center School Parking Lot about 10 years ago, it was a curiosity to passersby catching sight of it.