By Anne W. Semmes
Beverly Smith is an award-winning lawyer. She designed and maintained her three-quarter acre lawn at Cos Cob, with its 95 types of plants that “deer don’t eat.” She is proud that her lawn has been unveiled on the annual scale at the Grandiflora Gardens at the Greenwich Botanical Center. She is also a member of the Riverside Garden Club and is its historian, and has been haunted across the Lake Avenue Bridge on Merritt Parkway.
Return to the fall of 2018, when Smith was on his gcR historian project, “to combine a GCR story for his June 2019 centenary.” In his research, he came across two desirable black-and-white images of 8″X 10,” circa 1940, of the Lake Avenue Bridge showing a giant rock with an inscribed plaque: “This plantation became imaginable through the cooperation of the Riverside Garden Club.” The rock looks like it’s surrounded by laurels.
Smith went to the bridge to place this plaque on his rock under the Lake Avenue viaduct, but discovered, “The median was narrow to provide more area on the pavement, so the plate and rock disappeared.”
She began researching the history of Merritt Parkway, yes, named after Republican Congressman Schuyler Merritt of the 4th Congressional District. But she seeks the participation of other gardening clubs in southwest Fairfield County. “I discovered an image of the Fairfield Garden Club’s plaque,” he says, but did not discover any other involvement in the Greenwich Gardening Club. Nor did it locate what those original plantations would have been on the Lake Avenue Bridge site. He discovered online, on the National Register of Historic Places of the National Park Service on Merritt Parkway, that “trees and shrubs in bloom, especially thousands of cornices, bay plants,” were donated through ten gardening clubs and civic teams in Fairfield in any of the countries. months before the final touch of the entire length of the walk. Parkway ended in 1934.
Along its 37-and-a-half-mile stretch with 68 bridges, Smith discovered the specially designed Lake Avenue Bridge. In those black-and-white images from the 1940s, he saw the design of the bridge’s black steel grille, but during its scale in the fall of 2018, he saw his design painted faded blue. He was extremely happy to see his 2019 recovery with his sublime original design painted in black and gold.
He learned that the design of the vines and grapes was founded on the seal of the state of Connecticut, with its 3 vines in the center, supporting and bearing fruit. (On this label is the state motto, “Sustinet Who Transtulit” or “Who is transplanted supports”).
It turns out that the lake avenue bridge design is a laureate, reports Wes Haynes, director of Merritt Parkway Conservancy, “he won a national award of excellence from the National Scenic Byways Foundation and a state award for Connecticut Preservation (formerly Connecticut Confidence).”
Haynes, who has just given a virtual lecture at the Greenwich Library on “The Wonderful Bridges of The Merritt Parkway,” says that George Dunkelberger, the architect of all Parkway bridges, had “designed to use the vines of the state seal, and then hired a young Irishman. Kenneth Lynch, an immigrant metal craftsman, to design the motif and relief of the vine. Lynch had in his credit the remarkable gargoyles of the Chrysler building in New York. But Lynch faced the global metal shortage of World War II when he learned his design, Smith would learn.
Haynes cites a recognizable Art Deco motif in Lynch’s grid design. “There is much more to what architectural historians now call Art Deco in some facets of almost each and every bridge in Merritt, to the point that some call Merritt the largest Art Deco structure in the country.” (Dunkelberger had only called them “simply modern”). Haynes has named many bridges as presenters of the “Art Deco Principles” with “details of the 1925 exhibition of ornamental and commercial arts in Paris that introduced the art deco movement”.
With regard to his wisdom from the gardening clubs involved in the plantations, he knew nothing of those involved, but he felt that it was “prudent to say that the maximum if not all the clubs of the cities crossed by Merritt did so. This is vital component of Merritt’s story, because after years of debatable planning, the citizens of Fairfield County were despite everything they gained through the promise of the modern but charming path they demanded, a lesson in local democracy in action, with the Garden Clubs among the leaders effort.
History Press’s 2014 publication, “The Merritt Parkway – The Road That Shaped A Region,” states that “of the nearly 70,000 trees and shrubs needed to expand the boardwalk, 47,700 were mountain laurels. And “Many organizations, Fairfield County lawn clubs and Americans have donated plants for the walk.”
In her research, historian Beverly Smith has highlighted her Riverside Garden Club as the well-documented gardening club in Greenwich that has contributed to this waterfront landscape, along with the Lake Avenue Bridge.
His century-old e-book has grown to 165 pages. “We take credit for the archives of the Greenwich Historical Society,” she says. He also retrieved portions of RGC’s old albums, scanned items, handwritten parts and typed pages.
“I’ve been interested in history for decades,” she says. “And those two black-and-white images of this rock and this plaque intrigued me,” she says, “so I embarked on an adventure in the story. The research is a laugh for me and the praise is to succeed.”
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