Dominium

A story about ownership and corruption of eminent domain

Today’s New York Times Spelling Bee letters:

C, I, M, N, O, U, and center D (all words must include D)

Merriam-Webster says…

Silly little dictionary! Don’t you know dominium can’t possibly be a word if the New York Times says it ain’t?

For further fascinating facts, check out the Spelling Bee Master.

What’s your favorite dord* from today’s puzzle?

My Two Cents

Writing today’s column brought back a lot of memories and has made me nostalgic about my trips to a town in Connecticut called New London.

Master of your domain

If you get the reference, you must be a Seinfeld fan. (I confess I am one too, Michael Richards notwithstanding.)

These term dominium comes from the Latin word meaning “ownership”. There are a few important types:

In other words, dominium directum implies direct ownership, or control of the property, but not necessarily the rights to its use. For example, a holder in life tenure has dominium directum but not dominium utile, because he may control the property but not exhaust all its resources.

On the other hand, there is…

Dominium utile gives beneficial ownership of an estate. A holder of the reversion of a life estate holds the dominium utile of the property (although not the control or dominium directum) because he has the right to the long-term utilization any resources (mineral, vegetative, etc.) on the property but not to the immediate use of the property, which the holder of the life estate does.

Sometimes these two can be combined into… yes, correct! Dominium directum et utile! A double whammy.

And there’s dominium eminens, the very-much feared concept of eminent domain. In many countries, the government of a state or country uses this power to take private property away from its owners for public use. This public use is supposed to be something that will truly help the community, but as many of us known, that’s not what always happens. I know it from having lived in Venezuela and hearing from friends about the eminent domain abuses committed by Hugo Chávez after I left… and also sadly from a well-known legal case in the U.S. where I was living at the time it happened.

Which brings us to…

A tale of eminence gone bad

When I was a married man living in the United States, we used to drive all the way from New York to New London, Connecticut, to eat at a place called Hughie’s. It wasn’t a short trip, so we’d make a day of it by also stopping at some local cigar shops that always seemed to have good deals and at the Crystal Mall in Waterford.

Yep, that Waterford. Not the Irish town famous for the manufacturing of the lead crystal, but the U.S. town named after the Irish town famous for the manufacturing of the lead crystal.

As I said, our main objective was Hughie’s, a restaurant owned by a man named… you guessed it! Hughie. Well, his birth name was Hugh Devlin, but everyone called him Hughie. I actually didn’t, mainly because I never met him in person. But I did get to eat his famous Love Salad, that featured iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, salami, provolone cheese, and garlic.

Lots and lots and lots of garlic. Hughie loved to add garlic to everything. So much so, that you could smell the condiment as soon as you got out of your car in the parking lot! The restaurant was a small, simple, place. It looked like it had been taken out of a movie about a philosopher bouncer who rips out a guy’s throat while challenging the town’s bully millionaire over the plight of a tiny bar, all the while romancing the local hot doctor. Sorry, got off track reminiscing about Road House.

The menu was handed out on sheets cut out to look like boxing gloves.

The entire place was boxing-themed, and even featured posters of a Hughie Devlin boxer, whom I thought must have been the owner… but now I’m not so sure. Anyway, we used to order the N.Y. Strip and the Shrimp Scampi, preceded by the awesome Love Salad.

We used to make this trip a few times a year, and did so for several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Then one day we arrived at 345 Banks Street to discover the restaurant was no longer there. Neither were a bunch of other properties. Inquiring around, we discovered that in 2000 the New London Development Corp. filed eminent domain papers and paid Devlin $1.1 million as part of the planned redevelopment of the neighborhood… to “benefit” Pfizer, which was going to build a huge office complex and plant there… which it never did.

This eminent domain fiasco ended up in a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. You can read about it here.

I wanted to include a photo of the outside of Hughie’s, but I found only on a Pinterest account, and I don’t want to risk a fight over copyright. So instead I’ll link to the picture here, and you can check it out on its original webpage.

And here is the website of the Muddy Waters Cafe, opened by Hughie’s daughter Susan.

Now you know. If you’re ever in New London, Connecticut, stop by the Muddy Waters Cafe and order a Love Salad. Even if you’re not a garlic lover, you gotta try this beauty at least once in your life. But don’t talk with the locals about the awful case of dominium eminens they dealt with… especially because the editors of the Spelling Bee decided that dominium is a dord*.

You can check out my previous entry on another dord* here:

What the heck is a dord, you ask? Here’s the answer: