100-year-old Town Hall seats to be replaced in Wallingford

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Wallingford—The wooden seats in the City Hall Auditorium will be replaced by softer ones, and when Bristol-Myers Squibb cleaned up the furniture for demolition, the city snapped up Got these seats.

The rows of cast iron and laminated wood folding seats in the Robert F. Parisi Town Council Chamber may have been installed more than 100 years ago when the building was the original location of Lyman Hall High School.

This is the consensus of Mayor William W. Dickinson, Director of Public Works Henry McCully, and Dr. Stephen Hogg. Dr. Stephen Hogg is the former Lyman Hogg chairman of the Lyman Hall Sports Hall of Fame. Coach.

Hogg said: "I hope they choose to let people who want them pick them up." Hogg served as the co-chair of Lyman Hall's Centennial Committee in 2017. "It has emotional value for people."

Dickinson said that the old seat was "not very comfortable."

He said: "The situation has seriously deteriorated." "Laminated wood is separated on many seats and cannot be used due to deterioration of the wood."

McCully said the new seats are dark red and come from the BMS teaching auditorium. The town also purchased other office furniture, such as chairs, desks and filing cabinets, for the city hall, David Doherty city building and fire station.

The furniture was donated by BMS. All the town has to do is hire porters to transport the furniture out, at a cost of about $10,000.

He said: "Of course we got furniture worth more than $10,000." "This means a lot to the town."

Although there is no installation date yet, McCully hopes that the project will be completed this winter.

The new seats will be installed in the lower area first. He said that there may not be enough space to change seats on the balcony, which has been locked most of the time but has already been used.

Hogg said there was a "brilliant history" in those old seats.

He said that when the seats were installed around 1915 to 1916, the Lehman Concert Hall was "the center of everything. Art, entertainment, big town meetings."

The four-story opera house on the Simpson Court is another large auditorium in town.

But Hogg said that when the French ambassador visited once, he went to the Lehman Concert Hall.

The seats in Lyman Hall are universal chairs, and their structure is similar to the seats in the Wilkinson Cinema and Opera House.

He said: "The music at Lehman Hall could have been sustained, and obviously it can."

Even though the auditorium was renovated, these seats survived when Lyman Hall became a town hall in 1988.

Hogg said: "The stage and the maintenance area were all replaced when it became the city hall," which has a different purpose. To be sure, they will replace all these chairs at some point. "

It is not clear what will happen once the old seat is removed. Dickinson said that selling unwanted items through auction is a procedure in the town, and anything that is not taken will be scrapped.

Hogg said: "I hope I can be ranked first."

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