Those in Tuesday’s celebration included, from left: Pat Mead, who sold the property; Chuck Woerner of Fairfield County Bank; Keeler Tavern Executive Director Hildegard Grob; Keeler Tavern President Joel Third; Helen Pat Curry, Cass Gilbert’s great-granddaughter; and First Selectman Rudy Marconi, a neighbor from across the street. —Macklin Reid photo
History’s roots deepened their reach into Main Street’s soil, the Cass Gilbert family’s local legacy was again affirmed, and the Keeler Tavern Museum expanded both its campus and its possibilities for the future this week with the purchase of the red-brick Georgian building next door to the tavern and garden house.
“It’s really exciting, because it’s all coming back,” said Hildegard Grob, executive director of the Keeler Tavern Museum.
The Keeler Tavern Museum paid $1.15 million to re-acquire the 1.1-acre property at 152 Main Street, including the 1937 brick building originally designed as a memorial to architect Cass Gilbert, who lived in the Keeler Tavern building.
Gilbert designed many well-known and highly regarded buildings, including the Woolworth tower in Manhattan and the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., but is best known in Ridgefield for his gift to the town of the fountain at the intersection of Main Street and West Lane.
The acquisition will add the property, for decades the house and dental office of the late Dr. Robert Mead, to the main 2.7-acre Keeler Tavern Museum property at 132 Main Street — including the Keeler Tavern, the Garden House, the barn, and the caretaker’s cottage — creating a 3.8-acre whole. It will extend the Keeler Tavern Museum’s frontage on Main Street to 350 feet.
“If you look at Main Street, this is sort of the gateway,” Grob said of the vista that includes the Cass Gilbert fountain, the Keeler Tavern building Gilbert lived in, and now the brick building designed as a memorial library to house his papers.
“We’re basically doubling our Main Street frontage,” Grob said.
“It’s nice to give it to the community, make it dedicated as a public space,” Grob said.
Joel Third, president of the Keeler Tavern Museum, celebrated the acquisition.
“Fifty years ago, farsighted Ridgefield people created a museum that they believed could become a center for history and a valuable community asset,” he said. “By reuniting these properties, we are taking this once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve our capacity to show visitors — especially young people — how relevant the tavern’s three-century history can be in understanding not only where we’ve come from but also where we are going as a community and country.”
Third spoke briefly Tuesday, Feb. 23, as Keeler Tavern board members and staff welcomed supporters and news media to the newly acquired property.
“I want to welcome everyone, our neighbors, supporters, friends,” he said. “It’s a great occasion for the Keeler Tavern.”
Keeler Tavern Museum officials were careful to say that they would have no official plans for the property until the Planning and Zoning Commission approved them.
“Our challenge now is to unite the two properties within whatever Planning and Zoning allows us to do,” Grob said.
She did say that “the Seymour house” — a historic structure that was taken down off Silver Spring Road a few years back to make way for new construction, and donated to the Keeler Tavern — is envisioned as part of the plan for the site. The museum had run into difficulty finding a satisfactory location on its property for the Seymour house.
Among those on hand Tuesday was First Selectman Rudy Marconi, who, in addition to being the town’s chief elected official is one of Keeler’s Tavern’s neighbors, living with his wife, Peggy, just across the tavern on Main Street.
“As first selectman, this is a definite steal for the Keeler Tavern Museum and for the town of Ridgefield to be able to recover this building,” Marconi said. “As a neighbor, it’s great. Obviously, they take excellent care of the Keeler Tavern Museum. I’m sure that whatever plans exist for this property will only complement the entire Main Street.”
Helen Post Curry of New Canaan, the architect’s granddaughter, also attended Tuesday’s opening celebration.
“We used to spend summers here,” she said. “This house, at the time it was occupied by my family, was my cousin’s.”
Her great-grandmother — Cass Gilbert’s wife, Julia — had given the house to her aunt and uncle.
“I remember playing here with my cousin, and I haven’t been here since,” she said. “My family stayed in the caretaker’s cottage.
“Isn’t this exciting?” she added. “It’s so fabulous. I’m so happy. I want it to look just exactly the way it did when I was 4.”
The adjoining one-acre property had been part of the original historic parcel dating back to
1713. It was sold by Gilbert’s heirs in 1958; since that time, the red-brick Georgian-
style building has been the professional office and home of Dr. Mead.
“We’ve been museum neighbors for all of its 50 years,” his wife, Pat Mead, said, “and my husband, Bob, hoped that when the time came the property could be returned to the Keeler Tavern. I’m thrilled for Ridgefield and for us that our hope is now a reality.”
The Gilbert memorial was originally designed as a museum and library to house the architect’s vast collection of papers, drawings, blueprints, and photographs. It is expected to become a natural complement to Keeler Tavern Museum by providing additional visitor and exhibit space, archival and collections storage, and essential facilities for an expanding education initiative. Gilbert purchased the tavern property in 1907 as a summer home. Following his death, Gilbert’s widow, Julia, commissioned the memorial building.
“Julia Gilbert set about creating a Ridgefield memorial to her distinguished husband — a quasi-public library to house the papers, drawings, and artifacts from his career,” Keeler Tavern board member Charles Pankenier says in the Keeler Notes column in this week’s Press. “Architect-son Cass Jr. built a Georgian-style red-brick building that echoed his father’s own design vocabulary.”
The building was dedicated in October 1937 in a ceremony led by Connecticut Gov. Wilbur Cross.
Pankenier said during Tuesday’s celebration that he believed the family found the building wasn’t adequate to store all the many papers left from Gilbert’s career — papers now held, for the most part, by the New York Historical Society.
“There’s a story, if you had all the boxes of Gilbert’s papers the New York Historical Society has, and piled them up, it would reach the height of the Woolworth building, which is 792 feet,” Pankenier said.
“I don’t know whether that’s true or not,” he added.
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