I hear there was once quite a controversy about the standpipe that the water company is removing on Peaceable Ridge Road. What’s the story?
The controversy was not over the existence of the standpipe, but the word “standpipe.”
What is now Peaceable Ridge Road had been known as Standpipe Road starting soon after the Ridgefield Water Supply Company erected the pressure-building standpipe around 1900. However, in 1960, 22 residents of the road decided Standpipe Road was unattractive. All but one resident of the road petitioned the selectmen for a change.
This attracted the attention of Harry Golden, a humorist, author and nationally syndicated columnist. In his column of June 30, 1960, in The New York World Telegram, headlined “A Case of Economy on Standpipe Road,” Mr. Golden reported the petitioners wanted the “some allusion to the natural characteristics of the road rather than one descriptive of an artificial utility.’”
The dissenting resident felt “Standpipe Road is not only a distinctive name, and accurate, but also very New Englandy,” Golden wrote.
The columnist felt this was a sign of a sububuran attitude about labels. “In the suburbs, people are very interested in the right name, or in the right word,” he wrote. “No one in the suburbs ever says, ‘We’re broke’ or ‘We have no money.’ They say, ‘We are economizing.’
He said he had talked to a seven-year-old suburban girl who had a bright red lunchbox because her parents could no longer afford school lunches. “I told her it was very pretty and she said it was brand new. I told her she must have been a good girl to have received such a pretty present and she said, no, she got it because her family was ‘economizing.’
“All those economizers out on Peaceable Ridge are getting more and more exact in inventing new words to describe where they live and what they do,” the columnist concluded. “But they do it all by code.”
The selectmen didn’t care about codes and approved the new name — from something distinctive to something confusingly similar to three other road names. Ridgefield already had Peaceable Hill and two Peaceable Streets (the second being a small portion of a Redding road that enters Ridgefield in Branchville). In an emergency, such as a fire, auto accident or heart attack, the response might be to western Peaceable Street or Peaceable Hill instead of Peaceable Ridge. Confusion could take a fire truck or ambulance nearly two miles and several long minutes in the wrong direction.
If a new name were necessary — and we side with the lone dissenter who found Standpipe Road distinctive, accurate, and New Englandy — something less confusing should have been chosen. —J.S.