In Hartford, all eyes are fixed on the city’s future: How to improve education, decrease crime, pump up the downtown scene. The past, when it comes up, is usually limited to colonial settlers or Mark Twain.
But James Szerejko’s early resume is like a tour through the City That Was.
“A lot of the places I worked for are out of business now,” Szerejko says. A native of the city, he started out delivering newspapers for the old Hartford Times. In college, he busted a shoplifter during his stint as a security guard for famous department store G. Fox’s.
In the present-day location of Agave Tequila Bar on Ann Street, a high school-aged Szerejko worked at Sobol’s Sporting Goods, fishing secondhand tennis shoes out of bins for customers.
Szerejko now works a few blocks away from the old sporting goods location as an attorney at Halloran & Sage. Growing up, he kicked around various Hartford jobs throughout his youth and college years, working at a number of well-known businesses around town.
He worked for Capewell Horse Nail Co., another Hartford landmark. During his stint there, Szerejko mostly hauled materials from place to place around the facility. But when the factory needed an extra pair of hands working at the sandblaster, Szerejko stepped up to help smooth the edges off saw blades. He remembers it being gritty work.
“I looked like I just drove in the Indianapolis 500,” he said. “I put these goggles on and probably sandblasted half my face.”
Szerejko also laid some of the groundwork for Hartford today. When he worked a summer for the Charter Oak Construction company, he was part of the crew that put in electrical lines to Bushnell Tower, with a transfer box at Main and Gold streets. When Interstate 84 was being built in the West End of Hartford, Szerejko’s crew worked in blistering 90-degree heat to raise the grade of Boulevard and Sisson Avenue, near the present-day Wood n’ Tap restaurant.
Food And Drink
Szerejko has a long list of different occupations, but before he settled into law he spent much of his time as a waiter and bartender, in establishments that went from the blue-collar neighborhood bar to high-class nightclub. In high school he’d held a busboy job in a swanky West Hartford joint called The Camelot, which Szerejko describes as “like something out of a 1930s movie”: live music, lobster on the menu, uniforms for the wait staff.
After circulating with West Hartford’s high end, Szerejko’s next food job went a bit more casual – he worked in the neighborhood pizza joint, called Rico’s Pizza at Hillside Avenue in Hartford’s Behind the Rocks neighborhood. At the time there were a couple mom-and-pop grocery stories nearby, plus a drugstore half a block away. The restaurant itself had no air conditioning, but it did have a pinball machine and a jukebox to draw in the neighborhood residents.
“It was somewhat of a hangout type place,” Szerejko said. In those days, you knew most of the people who walked in the door; some of them had been on his old paper route.
Szerejko’s bartending career took him all over the social scene – he worked a small “Archie Bunker-type bar” on New Park Avenue one summer but did a complete 360 when his next bar job took him to the Knickerbocker Pub in Newington, a flashy 1970s scene with lights, a smoke machine and a far different selection of drinks.
“I went from a shot and a beer to making Singapore Slings and Pink Squirrels – a whole different clientele,” he said. “Certain drinks you’d say, ‘What the hell is that?’ ”
Hartford natives are hard to find in the downtown professional jobs, he said. It seems like everyone is from somewhere else – that’s the nature of a growing city, he said, but it still means that Szerejko is a rare storehouse of information and memories about latter 20th-century Hartford.
That’s something to keep in mind as everyone plans for coming years: “It’s important that as a community grows, [people] remember what it used to be like.”