The first thing Heritage Village asks of a new resident is a slower pace. Not the pace of a suburb, but of a place — shared walkways between twenty-four neighborhoods, an evening that begins before anyone has left home.
Heritage Village sits on a shared set of grounds in Southbury, Connecticut, and has since 1967. It is made up of twenty-four adjoining condo associations, 2,580 dwellings in all, and more than three thousand six hundred residents — enough, by most measures, to be the largest residential community of its kind in the northeast. What it does not have is a main street. The grounds, the paths, and the common buildings are the street; every door is on one of them.
The community is held together, day to day, by two legal entities that most residents come to know well enough to name. The first is the Master Association, which looks after the residential units themselves, the grounds that connect them, and the tradesmen who keep both in working order. Its work is the kind you notice only when it has been skipped — a fallen limb still on the path, a walkway still iced over at ten.
The second is the Foundation, which looks after everything the houses themselves cannot hold — the amenities, the activities buildings, the library, the meeting house, and Heritage Village Center. Its work is measured in hours rather than limbs: an open library on a Tuesday morning, a meeting room warm on a Thursday evening, a Saturday lecture that three hundred people attend and another four hundred read about, later, in the Record.
Two Entities, One Village
It would be simpler if the two entities were one, and for a community of a different size they might have been. But the arithmetic of 2,580 dwellings and twenty-four condo boards is not simple, and the separation turns out to be load-bearing. The Master Association answers to the residents as owners; the Foundation answers to them as neighbors. The distinction is small, as distinctions go, and it is how Heritage Village has managed to be a single community with twenty-four front doors.
What a new resident hears on the path, then, is not silence. It is the quiet of a place that was built, almost sixty years ago, to keep it — and of a community that has, more patiently than most, let it be.