An open letter to the Town of East Lyme, CT
There was a Facebook discussion I became privy to about the impending closure of Colonial IGA in downtown Niantic (the former location of Mitchell’s Market)… One of my FB friends offered a link to a story on the New London Day’s website about the store’s closing. I tried to comment, but i was not permitted… for whatever reason… it’s not relevant.
I was able to retrieve the comment I so lovingly wrote, and post it here for your benefit, if you are interested in the affairs of Downtown Niantic, CT.
As someone who grew up in Niantic, and has always, for good or bad, had a soft place in his heart for the town, I have to be honest. Niantic has nothing to offer young families, except costly schools and high property taxes.
The downtown is a dud, and has been since the casinos went in. Flanders, the next best thing (due to its proximity to I-95) has no character and nothing to offer.
There is no marketing vision for the town, to draw tourist trade. The beaches are lame, and as far as business goes, the only things that seem to settle in Niantic are beach-town-kitsch shops and pizza joints.
Grow a pair, Niantic! If you want to revitalize the downtown, then you need to make downtown vital! It’s not just about tourism, it’s about making Downtown Niantic a place what’s not only worth visiting, but worth returning to.
Make Niantic friendly to the people who hunger for what Niantic is uniquely positioned to offer. You could make Niantic the Kayak capital of Connecticut, for example, by offering excellent low- or no-cost launch facilities with adequate parking, and zoning breaks for businesses in the surrounding area.
I got my start kayaking in Niantic, and it’s a great place for it… you have the river, the bay and the sound, all accessible from Niantic waterfront… Exploit that reality, and draw the paddlers away from Old Lyme and Mystic, because Niantic has the better facilities and better access.
Kayakers are generally brand-conscious and have disposable income. Couldn’t you capitalize on that? Aren’t there some foreclosed properties the town could take over in, say, Pine Grove and/or Black Point, and sell them to marina developers to put in a “paddle-friendly park”, where there’s parking and needed facilities, but there’s also shopping for needed items, like nutrition bars, PFDs, bottled water, maps, paddles, maybe even boats… I dunno … put in a Subway… I’m just brainstorming here… and I don’t even have a vested interest in the town’s well-being anymore…. But I’ve been hearing about people whining about the impending demise of Niantic since the 70’s.
If Niantic REALLY wants to come back, it needs to make the downtown a place not only worth visiting, but worth returning to, again and again. Just for the record, Colonial IGA (formerly Mitchell’s) was not that.
As a post mortem, of sorts,, I currently live in Warwick, RI, because there is no decent-paying work in Niantic. You know what Warwick has? It has my job, my house and my kayak launch point. When, exactly, do I need to come to Niantic? I’ll tell you. To visit my father’s grave. I have 20 great years of memories in Niantic, but if that’s all Niantic has to offer me, I’m afraid my life has passed it by.
March 8th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Niantic for me is a collage of sweet feelings and images mixed with bitter and painful shadows of bad memories crosshatched by hard times and cruelty. The familiarity of every road I drive while visiting becomes eerily surreal to me while I watch the changed, and new landmarks flashing by opposing my recollections. As time rolled by and I was the one living in Warwick RI, I realized that Niantic had become some high priced suburbia…suburb of where I could never figure out. It had morphed itself into something I felt I could never attain with its high dollar real-estate and next level new money snobbery which surpassed that of what I had grown up with. The house I grew up in has long been torn down replaced by a huge and now ruined colonial that pisses on what was with its neglect and disrepair. Now I live in West Virginia whos modesty and warm kindness envelopes me in it open arms like a mother embracing a lost child and what I have come to realize when I remember driving with my mother down main street toward Morton House on a Sunday morning past the Tastey Freeze, telephone poles, wires and analog TV antennas contrasted against the white Sound Shore sky, seagulls sailing about…is that now that I could go back, theres no reason to go back. No grave, no nostalgia, no pride of past would drag me back to stay..only necessity brought about by lingering family.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
Sure, and I agree… that Niantic has become an over-priced bedroom community for outfits like Pfizer. That’s why I suggest that Niantic needs to find a basis of commerce that can involve people who may have no previous basis for coming to Niantic, but once they come, for whatever reason, it’s compelling to come back again and again. Eventually, it seems to me, if there is a reasonable enough reason to keep coming back, there’s a reasonable enough reason for some to stay. If you can do that, it seems to me you have a path to revitalizing the community. Your particular memories or discomforts with Niantic, don’t necessarily have to hamstring the town. I think what hamstrings the town is the people with ties to World War II - era Americana, who refuse to allow Niantic to advance. Until the grip of those folks is released, I see no future for me in the town.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Its only appeal back in the 60s when tourism was its big draw, was its quaintness and beaches…but now with all the snobbery there aren’t enough quaint people to put up the facade to make that market viable again. You would have to do it by promoting some kind of attraction like kayaking…but…in this economy I don’t see a lot of disposable income becoming available for that kind of industry. Although up there…maybe thats not an issue.
I only wanted to express my issues with the town. The snobbery and cruelty of those folks we grew up with however is part of the issue. Those people have an incredibly narrow view of the world…which I didn’t realize until I left. I was shocked to discover that the people of East Lyme CT were much more ignorant than many people living in the deep hollows of WV. Anyway, you would have to fight the town council…who believe they must zone to reduce the commercialness of the town, which they believe sustains its quaintness…and the environmentalists who don’t believe in industry. You cant mess with the wetlands to build your kayak launch buster…you may endanger the blue heron or the rock crab.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
Right… No, you’ve got it… there is a snobbery of the people who’ve moved in recently… Then again, I think there’s something to be said for preserving the marshes and whatnot… I mean, that’s part of the natural beauty that attracts kayakers (for example) to Niantic. I merely mean to suggest that if *you* or *I* are not going to live in and be a vital part of Niantic, there’s got to be a way for Niantic to survive and succeed…. for that to happen, it seems to me that the town has to be, to some extent, prepared to sacrifice some of its fantasy quaintness, and replace it with a pragmatic, but aesthetically agreeable attraction. The attraction must draw some kind of growth Whatever growth that is must give the town a future, otherwise it will eventually fail.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
I cant see how it can fail with so many rich residents paying taxes. They could use some aesthetically agreeable attractions yes, but long time residents are probably just trying to preserve as much of their old space as possible…and the new ones only care about the status of living in an old town with nothing but forgotten history. Happy to go to Waterford to hit the Walmart…they dont want that in THEIR town, but they want to shop there non-the-less…It wont fail…its still just two little villages where people who work somewhere else commute home to.
March 9th, 2009 at 7:04 am
Eventually, people tire of having to drive 5 or 10 miles for a loaf of bread and a head of lettuce.
…and I think the discussion was primarily focused on Downtown, Niantic, rather than the whole town of East Lyme… We may have wandered off topic…
The Downtown. last I saw it, was fairly dead. Even McDonald’s gave up the ghost. The one that was on Main Street failed, and is now a credit union.
People who responded to the newspaper article were complaining about the MItchell Trust not cutting the rent (by half, according to some reports) so McTurk could keep operating. Is the town going to offer Mitchell a tax abatement? I’m sure the property tax on that spot is outrageous. What about maintenance costs for the building and grounds? Are those going to be similarly reduced? Mitchell couldn’t make a supermarket fly in downtown Niantic, and wisely got out of the business before he lost his shirt. I’d be willing to bet you it won’t be long before commercial real estate in Niantic also dries up, because there’s no traffic, and there’s no traffic because there’s no reason to go to Downtown Niantic. Rents are high, in part because taxes are high. Taxes are high because too few taxpayers are demanding too many services from the town.
Now that the last grocery store in Downtown Niantic is gone, the people who, for one reason or another (e.g. old/handicapped/young-and-poor), have gotten by without a car, are screwed. There is no reliable public transportation to speak of, and the nearest “proper” grocery store is now in Flanders. If you’ve got a car, it’s no sweat. Walking it sucks. Especially carrying ice cream and veggies in the summer. Those kinds of people… people without cars… need a “downtown” with its constellation of easily accessible businesses (bank, phramacy, grocery, drygoods, hardware and so on). The people who depend on the centrality of the “downtown” will leave, further reducing the traffic, and the sales and the tax revenue, meaning the taxes (and, rents) have to go up. More businesses go under, less people visit Downtown, sales decline, lather, rinse, repeat.
Downtown Niantic has been circling the drain for at least a decade, and it’s a shame, because it *is* a beautiful spot, with charm and character, and it seems that, more and more, the only people who can really afford to live there are Ph.D.s, MBAs, and CXOs working at Pfizer. They, of course, demand “nothing but the best for their children”, placing more budget demands on the school system, driving up property taxes, and pushing out even more young families and retirees who are (or were) just squeaking by. Less local traffic means more local business close.
As the headcounts at the schools diminish (with the exodus of lower-middle-class families), the large, expensive school facilities become a burden, because of the bonds that the town had to issue to satisfy the demands for the Pfizer “bedroomers”. Smaller tax base, with flat (or increasing) expenses, means higher tax rates.
Eventually, the tax rate will be so high as to push out even the McMansion set. It just won’t make sense to pay so much in taxes in a dried up berg that doesn’t even have a supermarket (because eventually, Super S&S will probably bail out), when the tax rates in, say, Waterford are *so much less*.
That’s when the bottom falls out. The town has an insufficient tax base to support its debt load. It can’t afford to lower taxes in order to attract new residents and businesses, and, strangely, it can’t afford not to. Catch-22.
…or I could be completely wrong, and everything will work out fine
March 9th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
One thing to factor into your calculations: the McMansion set may leave sooner than you think. Pfizer’s share price has been dropping, they’re preparing for an expensive buyout of another company, their patents are expiring with no new ones on the horizon… and that adds up to an urgent need to reduce headcount. Pfizer’s had round after round of layoffs in the last few years, and the folks who were “impacted” have been pulling up stakes (or trying to) and moving away. This has happened at every level of the salary stratum, including the higher salary ranges.
(In the interest of full disclosure, my GF works at Pfizer, so she’s seeing this happen firsthand.)
I doubt that Niantic will remain a “bedroom community” of Pfizer for much longer. What will replace it, I don’t know.
March 9th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
You make a good point, Scott. The closest thing to “inside info” I had from/about Pfizer was late 2004, when I got laid off. Things weren’t great then. The patent problem was already swirling around.
As I understand it, there are a couple other firms for which Niantic is the bedroom, but I tend to think that more or less, the impending outcome is the same.
BTW, to put Pfizer’s sadness in perspective, their shares are now trading below their price before sildenafil citrate was approved for treatment of erectile dysfunction.
Amusingly, Lilly/ICOS’s competitor to sildenafil in the ED treatment space is called “tadalafil”… HA-HA! “Ta-da!”
April 3rd, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Wow, Warwick RI now that a place we all can relate to. Get real..
April 5th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
I am real, James…
Warwick, RI is not on Mars, y’know… it’s about an hour away from Niantic. You want something closer? How about Groton, Waterford, Mystic… or even… like… Old Saybrook…
Niantic would be a lot more livable if they’d let some clean industry into the town and lift some of the tax burden off the homeowners.
Unfortunately the people who grew up in Niantic, are still in Niantic, and intend to die in Niantic are probably going to take it with them.