The frogs of legend how to#
Reich said.Figure out how to find the talking frog, then eat, drink, and be merry. ''It's art and it's history rolled into one - it's not 36 rocks lined up in a row. ''We'd like to create a similar urban legend, but with frogs - and probably not involving virgins,'' she said.īut it is also a serious project, they say. Reich said someone came back from Serbia with a travel guide that tells of a bridge with dragons on each end that are supposed to wag their tails when a virgin walks over it. Residents are having a good time with the project as well. The frogs look pretty nonchalant, as though gazing into the distance for a fly, lacking the energy to actually go off in search of food.
''This is going to be something unique.'' ''The interest in this has been amazing - people from as far away as Newtown have called about it,'' Mr. The first one went to a home not in Windham, but distant Guilford. He has begun casting four-foot models at Cavalier Renaissance Foundry in Bridgeport for garden sculptures. The 14-inch-diameter eyes will be gilded, and reflect movement down on the street, so they look almost alive. The plan is for the frogs to be eight feet, nose to tail, sprawled on eight-foot spools, set on seven-foot piers. He made a quarter-scale wooden model of his proposed design, with the frog perched lazily atop the spool of thread, one foot hanging down, the other knee bent and poked high into the air. A frog doesn't look like much from the bottom - it looks like a beanbag.'' ''A big problem I had was, frogs are always seen from the top. ''I'm usually asked to do generals and politicians and the like, so I was really interested,'' Mr. Jensen, a friend, who was also intrigued by the project. gets jumped on by the community if they try to make a bridge too utilitarian, and by the media if they try to make it look nice,'' Mr.
''People want it to 'fit' with a community.''īut, he said, the state often does not have the option. ''Progress cannot be measured simply by the number of lanes on a new bridge,'' Mr. Grover said he agreed to the idea because he saw it was an important part of local history. Frogs became part of the official town seal, and the high school ring. Residents wrote poems of the battle, produced an operetta - ''The Frogs of Windham'' - that has survived 100 years. The old Windham Bank soon issued currency with frogs on it. The townspeople were held up as the butt of jokes, but they refused to slink off in shame. His 1984 book, ''Legendary Connecticut,'' documents almost 250 legends from around the state. Philips wanted to take it one step further, to frogs. And he suggested giant spools mounted at each approach to the bridge, reflecting Willimantic's once being known as Thread City, and the American Thread Company's producing some of the finest thread in the world.īut Mr. It was largely Victorian in nature, reflecting the fact that Willimantic has one of the heaviest concentrations of intact Victorian architecture in the country. Residents were intrigued with his first proposal. Grover, a partner in Centerbrook Architects in Essex, was called on to design the bridge.
Both spans have to be closed in heavy rain because of fear that the water will rip them away, which means Route 32, one of the major north-south roads in the eastern part of the state, is impassable.
The Bridge Street bridge is even older, built in 1868. It is just 22 feet wide, with an 11-foot, 6-inch underpass at the south end that frequently snags unsuspecting truckers. The bridge at Jillson Hill, which runs through the middle of the old American Thread Company property, was built more than a century ago. Town leaders have been lobbying the state for a new bridge for many years, deeming the two bridges currently connecting the north and south ends of town inadequate. It will consist of four lanes, two in each direction, including two left-turn-only lanes, and will run from Jackson Street on one side of the Willimantic River, to South Street on the other. The bridge project will go out to bid next year, and is expected to cost about $14 million. ''However, there's no reason the local community can't do it, and we would be happy to accommodate it.'' ''We can't do the whole thing as part of our project,'' Mr. Butzgy, design engineer for the Transportation Department, said there was nothing in state regulations to prohibit that kind of decoration, and that the designer would incorporate bases for the statuary.
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