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New Haven Is in New England
Poor New Haven. What a pitiable little orphan.
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Business New Haven
4/5/1999
By: BNH
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Once upon a time, New Haven touched greatness. Internationally known home to Yale University. Co-capital of Connecticut. Site of what Mark Twain called “the most beautiful street in America.” Wellspring of some of the greatest innovations in industrial history. (And, need we add, Birthplace of the Nation's Greatest Hits.)
How the mighty have fallen. So far, apparently, that some urban experts want to attach us to some larger, more robust, entity.
In this week's “On the Record”(see page 3), regionalist Robert Yaro suggests that one of the ways New Haveners ought to think of themselves is as the easternmost “bookend” to the New York metro area, the counterweight to Princeton, N.J. at the opposite terminus. Yaro even recommends how New Haven could market itself to enterprises looking to expand beyond landlocked Manhattan: We could call ourselves “the Upper West Side, with trees,” he says.
Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce President Matthew Nemerson, among others, is frequently heard to characterize New Haven as the outermost suburb of New York, a link which will only be reinforced by the advent of high-speed rail placing midtown Manhattan scarcely an hour from Union Station.
Nemerson and Yaro are hardly alone. In the March 8 BNH, we reported on urban designer and author Norman Mintz's visit to the annual meeting of the Town Green Special Services District, whose members had asked him for suggestions on jump-starting downtown retail. Do what we did in Manhattan's 34th Street shopping district, Mintz said, and you will see positive results.
All these are thought-provoking notions, and if they spur reflection and debate about the Elm City's future, so much the better.
However, another point of view deserves airing, too, and here it is: New Haven isn't New York. It's New England. History, geography and psychology all say so.
Founding New Haven fathers such as the Davenports and Eatons were staunch English Puritans who regarded their Dutch Reformed Knickerbocker neighbors to the south as little more than godless blasphemers (a sentiment that would be echoed much later, when Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the godless Yankees for 40 pieces of silver, or $100,000 in 1919 currency).
The history of New Haven commerce suggests an affiliation with a region running not east and west, but north and south - the old Farmington Canal corridor, which linked the Elm City with Hartford, Springfield and Northampton. Pre-rail, the transportation link that defined our region was the Boston Post Road.
Where regionalists run into trouble is in erecting artificial constructs that are out of synch with what people want. Residents of Guilford, for example, don't want easier and faster rail access into and out of their community. If they wanted greater mobility, or to breathe Gotham's rarified air, they'd move to Stamford.
Ten years ago a campaign to “Save Our Sound” generated real regional cooperation, casting together residents of both Madison and New Haven in a common quest to clean up the waters of Long Island Sound. That effort resulted in genuine environmental improvement because residents of pristine shoreline communities understood that the fate of their waterway was closely linked with that of their urban neighbors to the south and west.
Connecticut residents care deeply about issues like clean waterways. They'd rather be like Vermont than New Jersey.
Perhaps it is that cantankerous, New England-y independent streak that opponents of the Hartford stadium embrace so stubbornly. The NFL, after all, is the Big Time. True New Englanders don't want to be Big Time - they mostly just want to be left alone.
For 363 years, New Haven has been a New England city, and a good one at that. Surely that legacy ought to be good for a few more years yet.
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