A piece of Hartford history that probably won't be missed

A Hartford institution that opened in 1940 and served pretty much everyone who had anything to do with the city is about to disappear.

Don't rack you brain for the name of a bank, restaurant, or store. We're talking about the landfill in the North Meadows.

The Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority (CRRA), which has leased the landfill from the city since 1982, announced this week that it has awarded an $11.6 million contract for the final phase of capping the site.

Reading a CRRA fact sheet on the landfill serves as a reminder that not everything about Hartford's past deserves the glow of nostalgia:

The City of Hartford opened the landfill on Leibert Road in the North Meadows for use as an open-burning dump in 1940.

In 1951, the Hartford Fire Department burned shacks erected on the landfill by "dump dwellers."

Between 1953 and 1977 all waste produced in the City of Hartford was burned in the then-state-of-the-art Hartford incinerator. Byproducts from the burning were emitted into the air without any pollution controls. During this period the landfill received incinerator ash and bulky wastes.

The city leased the landfill to the CRRA in 1982. By 1988, the landfill's days of accepting raw garbage were over. Instead, CRRA began using it to deposit ash from its Hartford trash-to-energy plant, along with assorted bulky and special wastes. Still, it emitted a smell that gave visitors driving into Hartford along Interstate 91 a bad first impression of the city. It was no fun for the neighbors, either.

In 2008, CRRA began the process of installing a state-of-the-art synthetic cap over the entire 80-acre landfill. The cap, made of a thick plastic material, will mean there will be 90 percent less infiltration of the landfill by rain water, according to CRRA.

The agency also announced that the closing will allow the making of more history. The final section to be capped, measuring about 35 acres, will have photovoltaic panels mounted on top of a special artificial turf. The project is expected to generate about one megawatt of electricity, or enough to power about 1,000 homes at peak efficiency."The Hartford landfill will be the first in the state – and one of only a handful in the country – to generate solar power," according to CRRA.

WNPR kicks off 'Basement Tapes Project' with recording of MLK at The Bushnell

Connecticut Public Radio (WNPR-FM, 90.5) has launched "The Basement Tapes Project," an effort to find "long-lost audio gems" and put them on the air. The station invites listeners to scour their basements and attics for records, tapes, or any other audio recording that represents a piece of Connecticut history. (Look under the "Services" tab on the left side of the station website for contact information.)

To prime the pump, the station has posted a recording of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech at The Bushnell in 1959. King, invited by the University of Hartford’s Hillyer College to give a speech on "the future of integration," was just 30 at the time. The U of H has posted an article on the visit, along with audio clips from the speech, the flyer advertising the speech, and King's publicity photo from the period.

By the way, check the Hartford Courant's Capitol Watch blog for Chris Keating's MLK Day entry on the summers a teen-aged King spent working on a Simsbury tobacco farm. It was King's first time out of the segregated South, and his wonder at the different way of life here was apparent in his letters home. The most moving quote: "Yesterday, we didn't work, so went to Hartford. We really had a nice time there. I never thought that a person my race could eat anywhere, but we ate in one of the finest restaurants in Hartford."

Things on my plate in '08 and books of '07

Happy new year! Among my resolutions: to thoroughly overhaul wwww.hartfordhistory.net and blog more regularly. On the latter score, I never got around last year to mentioning the publication of several books that deal in one way or another with city history. So I'll take the opportunity to list them here:

• "The Hartford Whalers" is another addition to Arcadia Publishing's indispensable series, Images in History. This pictorial tribute to "The Whale," put together by Brian Codagnone, traces the team's history from its membership in the upstart World Hockey League to its absorbtion into the National Hockey League, which eventually allowed the team to move to -- ugh! -- North Carolina. Relive the fun and heartbreak.
  
  
• "Victorian Hartford Revisited," another Arcadia photo book, is Tomas Nenortas's follow-up to his "Victorian Hartford," a compilation of postcards from Hartford's days as one of America's wealthiest and most beautiful cities. According to Arcadia, this volume contains "many never-before-published images."
  
  
• "House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City," tells the true story of five gifted Hartford boys who met as high school athletes and promised to stay in the city and work for its improvement. Intertwined with it is author Michael Downs' soul searching over whether to remain in Hartford, the scene of so much of his family's history. The book is published by the University of Nebraska Press.
  
  
• "Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir" actually appeared at the end of 2005, but I can't resist plugging this amazing book, which has since been published in paperback. Author Mary-Ann Tirone Smith uses the 1953 murder of an 11-year-old classmate as a spur to explore her Hartford childhood, which included living with an autistic brother who could not bear many everyday sounds -- this in a time when autism was little recognized, let alone understood. Those nostalgic for the kinder, gentler Hartford of the 1950s will find lots of fodder here, but Smith also dissects the repressive mindset that led the adults around her to all but pretend the death of her friend never happened. Smith's experience as a mystery writer shows too, as she gives a riveting, step-by-step account of the movements that brought her friend into the path of her killer. This is an absolute page-turner.