Keeping Time

Every half-hour, between eleven and four, the whistle of the steamboat Sabino sounds. The one-hundred-plus-year-old boat carries tourists from the Mystic Seaport Museum on a short tour of the Mystic Estuary. The timing of her departure is dictated by another, more important, Mystic timekeeper: The bascule bridge. The span lifts at forty minutes past the hour, every hour, from April until November. At other times, boats must contact the bridge an hour in advance of their approach. The Sabino begins her steam downriver at the half hour in order to make the bridge at the forty. The raising of the bridge is preceded by the long sounding of a fire-alarm bell. The gates lower, and the the pedestrians, lulled into a false sense of security by the end of the bell, all jump when the steam whistle sounds. The procedure is reversed as the bridge lowers, all taking about ten minutes, depending on the amount of boat traffic on the estuary.

Main Street changes from East Main Street to West Main Street on crossing the bridge, and the town's (tourist-supported) business district follows along it. At the upper end of West Main, just after the bank, just before downtown ends, sits Mystic Pizza, Mystic's other landmark. Unlike the regimented sounds of the Sabino and the bascule bridge, Mystic Pizza's sound is constant; the speakers under the awning send rock and roll into the street as long as the restaurant is open.

Up West Main; UBC and Mystic Pizza.

Open since 1973, and famous since 1988, Mystic Pizza slavishly broadcasts nostalgia for a time not so long past. A scrubbed-clean version of Mystic Pizza (Petrie, 1988) plays non-stop within the restaurant.

At noon and six, this piped-in nostalgia provides counterpoint to another of Mystic's auditory landmarks: The bells of Union Baptist Church. One of the two conjoined buildings that form the aptly-named Union Baptist Church was the non-denominational Mariners' Free Church, built on the same location in 1825 by "the sea-faring men of the village." That building was connected, at a ninety-degree angle, with the Second Baptist Church in 1861, creating the structure that now sits just uphill of Mystic Pizza, and just downhill of the Mystic-Noank Public Library.

On walk up West  Main, it is possible to stand between Mystic Pizza and Union Baptist, and take in the hymns and the oldies simultaneously. Half an hour later, in the same place, you'll hear the whistle, then the bell, then second whistle. The town clock and the steeple were both blown down from Union Baptist in the hurricane of 1938, and not replaced until 1969. The aforementioned carillon was installed in the new steeple, but in downtown Mystic, the clock is superfluous.