Allan Appel Photo
Ordinary partners Sobocinski and Cabral beside Ordinary’s timeline, created by local historian Colin Caplan.
Welcome to This Day In New Haven History as our time-traveling program celebrates its one-year anniversary at Ordinary.
“Ordinary” is the archaic British word for a tavern. It’s also the extraordinary place at 990 Chapel St. across from the Green where all kinds of New Haven events, from the very public to the very private, have occurred.
Count among them the meetings of the 19th-century legislature and visits by George Washington, Abe Lincoln, and Marlon Brando. Washington liked the tavern so much he brought Martha back for another visit.
It all began, oh, call it 1659, when Ordinary’s vocational forbears opened the fledgling colony’s first Puritan tavern right about on the present site.
How could we go anywhere else to mark a year of broadcasting our time-traveling program that celebrates the deeply historical ground on which we walk every day>
Jason Sobocinski showed us the secret hiding places in Ordinary’s gorgeously preserved 1850s wood paneling. Tim Cabral descended with us beneath Ordinary to the chipping vaulted arches of what was the elegant hotel ballroom of 1911 — and the adjacent speak easy from 20 years later.
Sobocinski, with his brother Tom, Cabral, and Mike Farber, are the four guys, very conscious of the past, who also wanted to make something new, which is why they brought the place lovingly back to life three years ago.
Jason Bischoff-Wurstle Photo
Site of the Taft Hotel speakeasy and ballroom three floors below Chapel Street.
Have a listen (by clicking on the box at the top of this article) to our special longer edition of the program, full of Jason’s and Tim’s tales not only of how this was the first air-conditioned (and of course male-only) tap room in New England, but also of how a couple of hundred years before that, Benedict Arnold stormed in to jump-start the American Revolution.
Cabral said history — as Michael Jackson pointed out in His Story — is at its most fundamental simply people gathering to talk to each other, to make friends, to seal a deal, to enter politics, to fix the sidewalk.
In the next year, in addition to my regular co-host Jason Bischoff-Wurstle of The New Haven Museum helping me deliver our daily dose of what happened on each day in New Haven history, we’ll be doing more of these very special longer editions of the program.
History has it that some marriages begun with meet-ups at Ordinary have led to wedding rings, after the divorce, being mounted on Gunther the Moose.
Through them we’ll be traveling to venerable and extraordinary places, such as Ordinary — from places that will range from Toad’s to the Palladium Building, and we’ll be talking there to the people who remind us of New Haven as it used to be as we move together into the future.
Cheers!