Bridgeport

Tongue Point Light Lighthouse, also known as Bridgeport Breakwater or Bug Light, is a lighthouse on the west side of the Bridgeport Harbor entrance,... in the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut in the United States. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1990. The lighthouse was originally built at the end of a breakwater about 500 feet offshore. In 1919, the shipping channel was widened and the lighthouse was moved 275 feet inland. The light was automated in 1954. In 1967, the Coast Guard planned to remove the lighthouse but local boaters protested. The lighthouse remains an active aid to navigation. A modern optic replaced the original sixth order Fresnel lens in 1988. In 1990 Tongue Point Light was added to the National Register of Historic Places under reference number 89001478.
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Bridgeport Harbor Lighthouse was a lighthouse in Connecticut, United States, on the west side of the Bridgeport Harbor entrance and the north side of... Long Island Sound, Bridgeport, Connecticut in the United States. The original lighthouse was built in 1851. It was an octagonal tower, with a fixed red light from a sixth order Fresnel lens on the top of a box light structure on iron piles. There were no keeper's quarters. In 1871, a replacement lighthouse was built. This was a wooden dwelling with the tower attached to the roof, with a fourth order lens. The United States Coast Guard replaced the lighthouse with a skeletal tower in 1953. While dismantling the 102-year-old lighthouse to make way for an electric beacon, it caught fire and was destroyed.
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Iranistan was a Moorish Revival mansion in Bridgeport, Connecticut that was commissioned by P. T. Barnum in 1848. It was designed by the... Austrian-American architect Leopold Eidlitz. At this "beautiful country seat" Barnum played host to such famous contemporaries as Matthew Arnold, George Custer, Horace Greeley, and Mark Twain. The grandiose structure survived only a decade before being destroyed by fire in 1857. It was one of five such fires in the showman's life that "burned to the ground all his accomplishments". "Barnum’s most unique mansion" was designed by the New York architect Leopold Eidlitz, later a founder of the American Institute of Architects. It was a mix of Byzantine, Moorish, and Turkish decorative elements, inspired by the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, England, which Barnum visited shortly after its construction and admired. As such an architectural style had not yet become established in the United States, Barnum describes his efforts to have it built: I concluded to adopt it, and engaged a London architect to furnish me a set of drawings after the general plan of the pavilion, differing sufficiently to be adapted to the spot of ground selected for my homestead.
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Penfield Reef Lighthouse is a lighthouse in Connecticut, United States, on Penfield Reef at the south side of Black Rock Harbor entrance on the Long... Island Sound, off the coast of Fairfield, Connecticut. Constructed in 1874, it was one of the last offshore masonry lights. Most offshore lights built after this were cast iron towers built on cylindrical cast iron foundations. Penfield Reef has been called one of the most treacherous areas of western Long Island Sound. The structure is about 1.1 miles off Fairfield Beach, on one end of the reef. The lighthouse's foundation, structure and roofs were in good condition, according to a 2004 Town of Fairfield report, but the wood frame supporting the balcony around the tower was in need of major repairs. Other problems include asbestos tiles on the floor, lead paint on the walls, mold in most places and decaying brick and mortar work in the basement. The U.S. Coast Guard last had the lighthouse repaired in 2003. The lighthouse is connected to a two-floor keeper's quarters built of granite and timber frames on a concrete foundation surrounded by rocks. The Penfield Reef Light was constructed in 1874.
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Robert Charles Durman Mitchum was an American film actor, author, composer and singer and is #23 on the American Film Institute's list of the... greatest male American screen legends of all time. Mitchum rose to prominence for his starring roles in several major works of the film noir style, and is considered a forerunner of the anti-heroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and 1960s. Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, into a Methodist family. His mother, Ann Harriet , was a Norwegian immigrant and sea captain's daughter, and his father, James Thomas Mitchum, was a shipyard and railroad worker. A sister, Annette, was born in 1914. James Mitchum was crushed to death in a railyard accident in Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1919, when his son was less than 2 years old. After his death, Ann Mitchum was awarded a government pension, and soon realized she was pregnant. She returned to her family in Connecticut, and married a former British Army major who helped her care for the children. In September 1919 a second son, John, was born.
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John Deszo Ratzenberger is an American actor, voice actor, and entrepreneur. He is best known for his role as Cliff Clavin in Cheers and his... recurring supporting cast roles in Pixar films. Ratzenberger was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of Bertha and Deszo Alexander Ratzenberger. He attended St. Ann's School in Bridgeport and Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. In 1969 Ratzenberger was a tractor operator at the Woodstock Festival. He moved to London in 1971, living there for ten years. Ratzenberger was a house framer living in London when he began his career in the performing arts. His first role was a patron in The Ritz . Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s Ratzenberger appeared in various minor roles in major feature films, including Firefox; A Bridge Too Far; Superman as a missile controller; Superman II as the NASA control man; Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back as "Major Bren Derlin"; Motel Hell as a drummer; Outland as a doomed mine worker named Tarlow; and Gandhi, playing an American Lieutenant. Ratzenberger is well known for playing mail carrier Cliff Clavin on the sitcom Cheers.
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Walter Crawford Kelly, Jr. , or Walt Kelly, was an American animator and cartoonist, best known for the comic strip, Pogo. He began his animation... career in 1936 at Walt Disney Studios, contributing to Pinocchio and Fantasia. Kelly resigned in 1941 at the age of 28 to work at Dell Comics, where he created Pogo. The subsequent comic strip is where Kelly's works began to include political and philosophical commentary. In 1973, Kelly died of diabetes in Woodland Hills, California. Walt Kelly was born of Irish-American heritage in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Walter Crawford Kelly, Sr. and Genevieve Kelly. When he was two years old, the family moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut. After graduating from Warren Harding High School in 1930, Kelly worked at odd jobs until he was hired as a crime reporter on the Bridgeport Post. He also took up cartooning and illustrated a biography of fellow Bridgeport native P. T. Barnum. Kelly was extremely proud of his journalism pedigree and considered himself a newspaper man as well as a cartoonist.
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Larry Kramer is an American playwright, author, public health advocate, and LGBT rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while... working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to London where he worked with United Artists. There he wrote the screenplay for Women in Love in 1969, earning an Academy Award nomination for his efforts. Kramer introduced a controversial and confrontational style in his 1978 novel Faggots, which earned mixed reviews but emphatic denunciations from the gay community for his portrayal of shallow, promiscuous gay relationships in the 1970s. Kramer witnessed the first spread of the disease that became known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome among his friends in 1980, and he co-founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis , which has become the largest private organization to assist people living with AIDS in the world. Not content with the social services GMHC provided, Kramer expressed his frustration with bureaucratic paralysis and the apathy of gay men to the AIDS crisis by writing a play titled The Normal Heart which was produced at The Public Theatre in New York City in 1985.
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Lumidee Cedeño is an American singer-songwriter and rapper. Cedeño was born in Spanish Harlem where she was raised by her grandparents.... She quickly rose to fame in 2003 with the release of her song "Never Leave You ", which reached the top ten in over ten countries and number one in various European countries. Cedeño's father died in 1995, and she and her four siblings were raised by her grandparents. She began singing and rapping at the age of twelve. She was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at the age of fourteen, after she was misdiagnosed with lupus. After graduating high school, she collaborated with a local neighborhood producer named DJ Tedsmooth to record her debut single, "Never Leave You " for an independent record label called Straight Face. Lumidee cites Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliot, MC Lyte and Mary J. Blige as her major influences. She signed with Universal Records, where she released her debut album called Almost Famous on June 23, 2003. Her single peaked at number 3 in the U.S. and number 2 in the UK, but it was her only hit until the 2007 release of "She's Like The Wind.
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Brian Mannion Dennehy is an American actor of film, stage and screen. Dennehy was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of Hannah and Edward... Dennehy, who was a wire service editor for the Associated Press; he has two brothers, Michael and Edward. Dennehy is of Irish ancestry and was raised Roman Catholic. The family relocated to Long Island, New York, where Dennehy attended Chaminade High School in the town of Mineola. Rather than immediately chase his dreams of stage and screen, Dennehy enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1959, actively serving until 1963. Although he said in numerous interviews that he had spent five years fighting in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, even telling harrowing tales of being hit by shrapnel, it was revealed in the 1998 book Stolen Valor by B.G. Burkett that Dennehy had never served overseas at all during his time in the military. Later that year, Dennehy admitted to the tabloid The Globe "I lied about serving in Vietnam and I'm sorry. That was very wrong of me. There is no real excuse for that. I was a peace-time Marine, and I got out in 1963 without ever serving in Vietnam.
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John Deszo Ratzenberger is an American actor, voice actor, and entrepreneur. He is best known for his role as Cliff Clavin in Cheers and his... recurring supporting cast roles in Pixar films. Ratzenberger was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of Bertha and Deszo Alexander Ratzenberger. He attended St. Ann's School in Bridgeport and Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. In 1969 Ratzenberger was a tractor operator at the Woodstock Festival. He moved to London in 1971, living there for ten years. Ratzenberger was a house framer living in London when he began his career in the performing arts. His first role was a patron in The Ritz . Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s Ratzenberger appeared in various minor roles in major feature films, including Firefox; A Bridge Too Far; Superman as a missile controller; Superman II as the NASA control man; Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back as "Major Bren Derlin"; Motel Hell as a drummer; Outland as a doomed mine worker named Tarlow; and Gandhi, playing an American Lieutenant. Ratzenberger is well known for playing mail carrier Cliff Clavin on the sitcom Cheers.
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Dan Curtis was an American director and producer of television and film, probably best known for his miniseries The Winds of War and War and... Remembrance, his afternoon TV series Dark Shadows, and the made for TV movie, Trilogy of Terror. Dark Shadows originally aired from 1966 to 1971 and has aired in syndication for nearly 40 years. Curtis was responsible for the 1991 remake of Dark Shadows, which was canceled due to low ratings. He was the executive producer for Dark Shadows for The WB Television Network; however, it was canceled before the pilot episode aired. His series of macabre films include The Night Stalker , Intruders, The Night Strangler, House of Dark Shadows, Night of Dark Shadows, Burnt Offerings, Trilogy of Terror, The Norliss Tapes , Curse of the Black Widow, Dead Of Night, Scream of the Wolf and others. He worked frequently with sci-fi/horror writer Richard Matheson. Curtis was producer and/or director of a number of television adaptations of horror-related productions including The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
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Vinnie Vincent is an American guitarist and songwriter, well known as a former member in the band Kiss. Vincent picked up the guitar at an early age... and was inspired by bluegrass and rock and roll. In 1980, Vincent moved to Los Angeles, California where he became a staff songwriter for the television series Happy Days and Joanie Loves Chachi where many of the series songs were written on Vincent's acoustic guitar while sitting at the "Cunningham's" kitchen table on the "Happy Days" set, during off-time from the show's rehearsal schedule. Vincent has said the times of working at the Paramount lot were genuinely "happy days". According to the site "Kiss Related Recordings", Vincent has played with the bands Hunter, Warrior, Hitchhikers, and Heat going as far back as 1970. After befriending Gene Simmons, Vincent was brought in as the replacement for guitarist Ace Frehley. Vincent's personality meshed well with Simmons and Paul Stanley. However, Vincent's refusal to sign the employment contract strained the relationship.
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Larry Kramer is an American playwright, author, public health advocate, and LGBT rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while... working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to London where he worked with United Artists. There he wrote the screenplay for Women in Love in 1969, earning an Academy Award nomination for his efforts. Kramer introduced a controversial and confrontational style in his 1978 novel Faggots, which earned mixed reviews but emphatic denunciations from the gay community for his portrayal of shallow, promiscuous gay relationships in the 1970s. Kramer witnessed the first spread of the disease that became known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome among his friends in 1980, and he co-founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis , which has become the largest private organization to assist people living with AIDS in the world. Not content with the social services GMHC provided, Kramer expressed his frustration with bureaucratic paralysis and the apathy of gay men to the AIDS crisis by writing a play titled The Normal Heart which was produced at The Public Theatre in New York City in 1985.
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Lumidee Cedeño is an American singer-songwriter and rapper. Cedeño was born in Spanish Harlem where she was raised by her grandparents.... She quickly rose to fame in 2003 with the release of her song "Never Leave You ", which reached the top ten in over ten countries and number one in various European countries. Cedeño's father died in 1995, and she and her four siblings were raised by her grandparents. She began singing and rapping at the age of twelve. She was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at the age of fourteen, after she was misdiagnosed with lupus. After graduating high school, she collaborated with a local neighborhood producer named DJ Tedsmooth to record her debut single, "Never Leave You " for an independent record label called Straight Face. Lumidee cites Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliot, MC Lyte and Mary J. Blige as her major influences. She signed with Universal Records, where she released her debut album called Almost Famous on June 23, 2003. Her single peaked at number 3 in the U.S. and number 2 in the UK, but it was her only hit until the 2007 release of "She's Like The Wind.
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Brian Mannion Dennehy is an American actor of film, stage and screen. Dennehy was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of Hannah and Edward... Dennehy, who was a wire service editor for the Associated Press; he has two brothers, Michael and Edward. Dennehy is of Irish ancestry and was raised Roman Catholic. The family relocated to Long Island, New York, where Dennehy attended Chaminade High School in the town of Mineola. Rather than immediately chase his dreams of stage and screen, Dennehy enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1959, actively serving until 1963. Although he said in numerous interviews that he had spent five years fighting in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, even telling harrowing tales of being hit by shrapnel, it was revealed in the 1998 book Stolen Valor by B.G. Burkett that Dennehy had never served overseas at all during his time in the military. Later that year, Dennehy admitted to the tabloid The Globe "I lied about serving in Vietnam and I'm sorry. That was very wrong of me. There is no real excuse for that. I was a peace-time Marine, and I got out in 1963 without ever serving in Vietnam.
more