An Aerial View of Guilford's Town Green

HE LADIES OF GUILFORD may no longer rake the green, but many in town still look on it as their own parlor, none more so than those who live and work in the houses, stores, churches, and public buildings that surround it. "It symbolizes the way people relate to the town," says David Dudley. "For example, 16 or 17 trees on the green came down in the last hurricane. Some people and I cranked up a fundraiser to plant new trees, and it was a real easy sell. In no time at all we had raised enough money to replant the trees, and we even had some left over."

Dudley has lived in town all his life and says the green hasn't changed a great deal. "The same things are going on -- band concerts, softball. A lot more people use it as a park now; they like to stroll with their babies. They got upset about dogs fouling the grass, so the town passed a leash law.

"What's changed is not the green, but the community. The green was the center when I was a kid because there wasn't any Route 1 shopping area. Now the center of commercial activity has shifted away, and people were afraid the center might die. But there's been a backlash. Stores on the green are prospering."

Early Each Morning the Street in Front of the Guilford Food Center is Swept Clean

"We're not going anywhere," says Bill Rosa, who owns and operates the Guilford Food Center, an old-fashioned market with wooden floors and narrow aisles, where fresh produce is still displayed in wooden crates on the sidewalk under an awning. He competes successfully with the larger chain supermarkets on Route 1 by buying from the largest wholesaler in New England, but mostly by personal service, "We know our customers," he said from behind the deli counter. "Like Priscilla, here," he added, grinning at a lady who was eyeing the potato salad.

Service is also the hallmark of another institution on the green, Page Hardware & Appliance Company, or, more familiarly. Page's. "When Page's goes, I go," declared one local resident, neatly summing up local attitudes.

"Just be fair and honest, and try to treat people the way we'd want to be treated," says Stephen Page, stating the family credo since his father, Harry Logan Page, Jr., bought Butler's Hardware in 1939. "My mother says Mr. Butler was in the back office soaking his feet and moaning to my father about how difficult the hardware business was," Stephen relates. "My father said, 'Why don't you sell it?' Mr. Butler said, 'Why don't you buy it?' So he did."

Like just about everyone in his family, Stephen started working in the store at age 10, sweeping floors. Over the last 28 years he's seen the business expand, taking over a bank building on one side, a former restaurant on the other. "We tried not to change the character of the buildings, though," he adds. "We didn't want to change the look of the green."

Across the street at Douden's Drug, owner Richard Dudley was greeting the usual morning coffee group, whose members were sitting down at a card table wedged into a corner by the pharmacy. "I inherited them along with the business, 27 years ago, he said fondly "We've lost a few over the years, but somebody always replaces them."

The coffee drinkers used to imbibe at the soda fountain in the old Douden's, a few rods north of its present location, famous all over the world for its checkerberry sodas. "I was at an international Rotary convention in New York a few years ago," Dudley recalls, "and I met a man from Algiers. When I said I was from Guilford, Connecticut, the guy's eyes lit up. 'Ah, checkerberry sodas!' he said."

Dudley's new location has no fountain, but he still sells the syrup, concocted from a secret Douden family recipe, which when added to vanilla ice cream and soda water, makes a checkerberry soda. "It's sort of a wintergreen flavor," he says, then adds confidentially, "I think it tastes like Pepto-Bismol, myself."

Like the Food Center and Page's, Douden's Drug is one of the anchors that keeps the commercial area on Guilford's green secure. But the area is vulnerable, warns Richard Greene, owner of an art gallery and gift shop that also rims the grassy heart of the town. "It's a tenuous, delicate, almost ecological thing," says Greene. "If we lost Page's, or the Food Center, or the Town House, the downtown would go down the tubes."

Greene worries that Guilford folk take their green for granted. "I was alive when the great elms were there. It was like a Gothic cathedral. It was much more beautiful then than it is now. I've also seen at least ten historic buildings on the green bulldozed or otherwise ruined. So when people say the green is intact, they don't really know what they're talking about."

If David Dudley is a watchdog, Richard Greene is a gadfly. "If somebody defaces the green, I'm very aware of that. A while ago, they put these ugly modern lamps on the green -- they look like poisonous mushrooms. I protested. I've protested for ages the 50-gallon oil drums they use for waste containers out there. Can you imagine? Oil drums on this historic green?"

He doesn't like the new monuments built on the green in recent years, and he objects to the way the trees are placed and pruned. He worries that the town center could become "too precious, too cutesypie." In short, he cares desperately about the green and the community around it.

"My father, who founded the Guilford Keeping Society, was not from Guilford originally," Greene said. "People coming in here from places where they've seen the ravages of development say, 'I don't want it to happen here.' I worked for 15 years to get a historic district established. The first time we tried for it, a local businessman wrote a letter to the newspaper warning that people wouldn't be able to paint their houses if it passed. We didn't have time to respond, and 75 percent of the voters were against it. The second time around, 87 percent were for it."

The historic district is one of the largest in the Northeast, encompassing more than 2,000 acres from the green to the shoreline. First selectman Frank Larkins, who works in the Town House on the east side of the green, thinks the historic district, tough four-acre residential zoning requirements, and the absence of sewer lines will preserve the small-town feeling in Guilford, even though its population has quadrupled in the last three decades from 5,500 to 21,000.

The dark side of that protection, he fears, is that "we're losing the diversity that has always made this an outstanding community. I was able to build a house here, but I doubt I'd be able to afford it today. My son is having trouble finding land he can afford. A lot of our volunteer firemen are young guys who can't find a place to live in town." (go to part three)