The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1911-11-01
Contention Over
 Greenwich Road
What Don C. Seitz and Highway Commissioner Mac Donald
 Say
(Hartford Courant.)

are interested it is in the section of the state road which is in process of construction from the Stamford line westward to the eastern side of Green wich borough. People who own au- tomobiles, those who still stick to the hOrSe-drawn vehicles and even the people who live on the byroads now used and torn and shattered by the automobiles because the main road is closed are interested. Banker E.. c. Benedict, friend of the late Grover Cleveland, thundered at the Green wich town meeting some two weeks ago without making any difference with the road. Don c. Seitz, business manager of the New York World, is even more interested in it than he would be in an advertiser and Repre- sentative Elliott of Greenwich brought up the subject in the General Assem- ply and secured the passage of a res Olution requiring Highway Commis sioner Macdonald to make public a copy of the contract for the construc tion of the road. The town of Green wich and the trolley line running through the town are both tangled up in the matter of it's construction and yet. when a reporter saw it few days ago he did not think it would be finished this winter, unless the winter is a good deal more open than most winters are
 What are the facts connected with it? They are involved and varied, but one of them is that it is a section of the old post road from New York to Boston and Mir SeiN says that during the year 150 automobiles pass over 1t every hour of Sundays and holidays. Now, MT. Seitz says. three or four years ago the state built road from Byram river, the New York line, into Greenwich which was very good and the section being practically a suburb of New York it got all the traffic that was coming to it. It was in work ing order when, so Mir. Seltz says. It was anonunced that the highway com missioner was prepared to build the other section, thus carrying the road practically across Greenwich from the New York line to Stamford.
 According to MT. Seitz, the next de- velOpment was that the lowest bid ders on the contract were Clark &, Son of Milford, firm of road build CTS whose bid was s22,0O0 for the job while the figures of local contractor, Joseph Christiano, were S13,0OO high CT NOW, so it is alleged in Green wich, the Clark bid called for a mac adam road sixteen feet wide composed of four and one-half inches of crushed stone upon a foundation of telford. It
 
 road would be too narrow in any event and a committee of the Green wich Board of Trade agreed to see Commissioner Macdonald and secure plans for a better road if possible and one at least forty feet wide. Of course the trolley company was involved, for it's tracks run through the road and they were willing to put their tracks in the middle of the road and pave the space between the tracks and the customary space outside.
 It was figured out that under this arran cement the cost of an adequate road would be s116.000 and if s50,008 could be secured from the highway commissioner the trolley company and the town would take care of the rest. Mr. Macdonald, MT. Seitz says, made no promise as to that sum, but said he would agree to hold back the work for further developments and, the con- tractor being willing, this was done. MT. Seitz says the next move was made late in 1909 or early in 1910 when he and the other members of the committee of the Greenwich Board of Trade had a conference with High way Commissioner Macdonald and Governor Weeks. and the former said that the road formed a good deal of proposition and he feared that the small towns of the state might ob- iect to such a large appropriation as 0,000 for a single town.
 Mr.Seitz says that after this confer ence he went to Japan, returned on October 10, 1910, and got word then that work was shortly to begin on the original contract In the meantime the town and the trolley company had got at odds, for the latter informed the former that if the trolley tracks ol,o oP ho lectmen the town would be required to pay half the cost, to which the town objected and the trolley tracks have remained where they were, some times on one side of the road and sometime on the other and sometimes. as they do near Diamond hill in, the Minaus district crossing it at long and dangerous angle.
 The contractor began work about October 20, 1910, according to MrSeitZ and was to complete his work in 103 days. In the meantime the borough of Greenwich had reached an agree ment with the trolley company by which the. latter has centered it's tracks and has laid an excellent vitri- fled brick pavement in it's part of the road. MT. Seitz and others who want it have copy of the contract for the state road and have found thereby that the contractor has lived up to his specifications And there you are.
 Now for the road: It is not finished and if winter sets in as it should it will not be finished this .wnter. It is closed to traffic and has been, so Mr. Seitz says. since last October. On the day the Courant man saw it, one of those queer animals known as motorcyclist disregarded the closed signs, went on to the road and off his machine and houndered about like a fly in 8 cream pitcher, while some of the remarks he made indicated that he was annoyed. The 16 feet of road way with the four and one-half inches of crushed stone is being strictly ad hered to, the grade is to the approval of most engineers, probably, but what strikes a layman is the suspicion that the road will not, to use a Yankee consists of very poor material It not and turned out to be a sort of vertical position and shot through the veins of hornblende and feldspar It is rotten and the soil is made up of it apparently, a coarse gravel with an occasional water worn stone in it. Where the rock is blasted it breaks up into all sorts of shapes and Mir. Seitz says the crushed stone is laid either upon these stones or upon the gravel which formed the roadbed before any thing happened If these is any pro- vision for drainage it is not visible, but the most obvious fly in the oint ment is the trolley line. In some places. it is IS inches or foot higher than the state road: in others it is as