From January 26th to April 26th, the Westport Historical Society is presenting an exhibit of New Yorker covers, many depicting Westport, Connecticut. After the Second World War, a number of artists—including Helen Hokinson, Garrett Price, Perry Barlow, Edna Eicke, Arthur Getz, and Charles Saxon—moved out of the city, to Connecticut. For decades, until the early nineties, covers of The New Yorker seemed to show New England as often as New York City. We talked to Roz Chast, who grew up in Brooklyn and moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1990, about this phenomenon.
“Where we are is not super-country, and it’s not super-urban. We’re not on the train line—that’s why it’s affordable,” Chast said. “Westport, which is about a half hour away, is fancier—a lot of New Yorker artists moved there at one time. We lived in the city until the second kid. We needed more space, and the public schools are good up here, and that was pretty much why we moved.”
Unlike the previous generation of artists who relocated to Connecticut, Chast has yet to wholeheartedly adopt the local lifestyle. “Bill, my husband, looks around our house and says, ‘This looks a little bit like the inside of an apartment.’ I know what he means. It’s an older house and there are no … I think they call them ‘cathedral ceilings’? Nothing like that. There’re just regular rooms: there are bedrooms and there’s a living room. There’s no ‘family great room.’ ”
“If somebody asks where I’m from, the first answer that pops into my head is New York, because I don’t feel like I’m from Connecticut,” Chast continued. “We bought a whole house for what a crummy two-bedroom apartment in the city would have cost and, yes, it’s different. First, I had to learn how to drive—there is no public transportation up here. And also, the taxi thing—you can’t stand out in the middle of Elm Street and wait for a yellow cab to pick you up. It’s just not going to happen—standing there with your arm in the air, you’ll just look like a crazy person.”
Chast also highlighted the positive side of life in the suburbs: “I miss the city a lot, but there are also real advantages. One is that there’s not a whole lot to do. I mean, we have a nice museum in our town, but it’s not like we have ten great museums and all these galleries, so you’re sort of forced to work—and to procrastinate about working. Also, my son, Ian, recently went through a juggling phase. He juggles torches, and I don’t think that’s something that you’d want to do inside an apartment. You don’t even want to be on the grass. You need to be in a big place, where there’s asphalt.”
See below for a slide show of some of the New Yorker covers shown in the Westport exhibit.
“December 18, 1948,” by Edna Eicke.
“June 2, 1951,” by Garrett Price.
“October 11, 1952,” by Perry Barlow.
“May 2, 1953,” by Arthur Getz.
“December 19, 1953,” by Arthur Getz.
“August 7, 1954,” by Garett Price.
“June 30, 1956,” by Edna Eicke.
“August 30, 1958,” by Arthur Getz.
“August 22, 1959,” by Whitney Darrow, Jr.
“September 1, 1962,” by Arthur Getz.
“January 9, 1965,” by Albert Hubbell.
“May 1, 1965,” by Charles Saxon.
“August 20, 1973,” by Albert Hubbell.
“July 8, 1974,” by Albert Hubbell.
