History of New Haven

By Brian Levinson and David S. Wertime
Copyright © 2003 The Yale Herald.
Reprinted with permission.

One could argue that New Haven's origins lie in Puritan paranoia: It was fear that God was on the verge of punishing England for its "manifold and persistent wickedness" that provoked the minister John Davenport and 500 of his followers to land on the shores of Long Island Sound on April 24, 1638. Davenport hoped to found a new Zion on the banks of the Quinnipiac River, a utopia where his group of predestined saints could prepare for the second coming of Christ and the Day of Judgment. With Davenport came the wealthiest group of merchants to arrive in any New England settlement before 1660, a group that was supposed to found a commercial empire stretching from the Sound all the way to the Delaware Bay.

Things started well. The settlers negotiated with the local Quinnipiac tribe, securing a huge amount of land in exchange for "12 coats of English trucking cloath, 12 alcumy spoons, 12 hatchetts, 12 hoes, two dozen of knives," as well as promises of protection from the neighboring Mohawks. They built a town on a grid of nine squares with a large public green in the center and named it New Haven. They were good Puritans, banning all activity on the Sabbath, from cooking to shaving to kissing one's own children, and giving the death penalty to any person who questioned their ideology. But they kept slaves-Davenport himself was a slave owner.

Events that followed further belied such orthodoxy. During the 1770s, New Haven was a bastion of revolutionary activity. "The Stamp Act is unconstitutional and therefore not binding on the conscience," Samuel Bishop wrote in the Town Record. "We have already bravely gone too far to retreat: If we are fit for anything but the chains of slavery, if we have the spirit of a free people, the most threatening danger cannot shake us." When the war began, Yale President Ezra Stiles, Class of 1746, watched through a telescope as British troops landed in the city's harbor. These same troops ultimately defeated New Haven's militia and plundered the defeated town.

The 19th century brought the Amistad affair to the Elm City. A group of Africans who had been unlawfully seized in Sierra Leone took control of the Spanish slave ship Amistad on which they were being transported to the Carribean. The Africans demanded to be brought back to their homes, but the Amistad was taken by the United States government and the Africans thrown into the New Haven County Jail on Church Street. Abolitionist Yalies and New Havenites worked together to supply the Africans with a legal defense fund and provided for their education and physical well-being. Eventually the Africans were acquitted of the charges that had been brought against them, and the living members of the original group were returned to their homeland.

Town-gown relations were not uniformly peaceful, however. In 1854, a mob followed a group of students from a concert back to the Yale campus. When the students broke into a traditional student song after reaching the upper Green, the mob started throwing bricks, and the students reacted by firing their pistols into the crowd. In the confusion, the mob leader was stabbed to death, and the students had to hide in a dorm and wait for the police to come and save them from a cannon attack. In 1858, another group of students had a violent confrontation with the local fire department, and a fireman was fatally shot. From then on, Yalies were forbidden to carry weapons.

While the battle between students and New Haven citizens raged, the city's economy shifted from agriculture to industry, sending small arms, garments, tools, and other products to world markets. Waves of immigration from Europe ballooned the city's population from 10,678 in 1830 to 40,000 between 1850 and 1860. The structure of the city was also changing. Wooster Square became the city's manufacturing center as cramped, congested tenement dwellings began to spring up there. Meanwhile, the other, bleaker side of town was beautified by the work of James Hillhouse, the man whose tree-lined streets earned New Haven the nickname "The Elm City." According to Charles Dickens, these elms seemed "to bring a kind of compromise between town and country; as if each had met the other halfway and shaken hands upon it."

However, much of today's New Haven was built between the 1890s and 1920s, as the city completed its transformation into an industrial center. Its population reached 162,537 by 1920, thanks to yet another wave of immigration consisting of Southern Italians, Eastern Europeans, and African Americans hailing from the American South.

But by the '50s, the age of expansion and prosperity had ended in New Haven. Middle and upper income families moved out of the city and into the suburbs. New Haven's population held steady and then declined while the population of the suburbs exploded. As business and industry mimicked the upper class's exodus, the city's tax base began to erode. New Haven then went through an unsuccessful urban renewal plan initiated by eight-term Democratic mayor Richard C. Lee. Neighborhoods were razed to build the six-lane Oak Street Connector, a highway intended to link downtown New Haven to the highways that pass through the city. The Chapel Square Mall displaced struggling businesses. The changes did little to help New Haven's economy. The department stores in the mall soon closed, the Oak Street Connector went unfinished, and, by the late '70s, New Haven teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, unable to pay the electric bills for its own street lights.

Fortunately, in the last two decades, the city has again tried to revitalize the downtown area, this time with more success. New Haven has applied facelifts to the Broadway and Chapel Street areas, with new stores springing up along the fresh brick sidewalks. It has also pumped money into the Ninth Square area near the New Haven Coliseum, renovating a strip of Orange Street in an effort to lure new clubs and restaurants. In 1998, the four-star, 270-room Omni Hotel opened on Temple Street.

Your parents might stay at that same Omni for your graduation, but the town around you will be vastly different by 2007. City Hall claims to be at the forefront of a $1.5 billion plan to "renew Southern Connecticut." The government plans to build a recreational center around the new Yale boathouse, located on the Housatonic River in Derby ($28 million), and has erected a new downtown train station at State Street. In addition, you can now see trolleys on the streets of downtown-this project was designed to supplement the mass transit system in a tourist friendly and environmentally concious manner.

A new Public Improvements Program and Small-Business Initiative will ensure the longevity of some of New Haven's distinct and historic neighborhoods and establishments. At the same time, Yale University Properties is again altering Broadway, having just replaced some of its older buildings with a shopping complex that comes replete with a variety of chain stores, such as Urban Outfitters and J. Crew. This increased focus on the city center comes after the recent defeat of a proposed shopping mall on nearby Long Wharf.

In another venture, the decaying Chapel Square Mall was sold in mid-2002 to the Baltimore based development firm Williams Jackson Ewing. The company has worked on projects such as Grand Central Station and the renewal of the area around the University of Pennslyvania in the past, and has promised to completely revamp the mall. Scheduled to open starting in the fall, new stores rumored to be included in the project include Crate & Barrel, Papyrus, and the cosmetics firm L'Occitane. In addition, the facility will include a food market and be connected to the Omni Hotel.

New Haven has found a new energy, but that does not preempt the city's long-standing penchant for controversy. The city's unions are very active, and despite a recent attempt at friendlier negotiations between Yale and its workers, many New Haven residents who work for the University are resentful of Yale's role within New Haven and its treatment of its workers.

Just as it did during the '50s and at the turn of the century, New Haven is changing. But, with this uncertainty comes a new opportunity-Yalies have a unique chance for involvement in the remaking of a modern New Haven.