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Oak Street Story
Recalling the teeming heart and soul of the 'other downtown'
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Business New Haven
3/17/2003
By: Priscilla Searles
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The Oak Street of yesterday is but a faint memory to all save those few remaining souls who grew up in the once-close neighborhood. To those, the Oak Street community is remembered fondly as a close-knit group of people living and working together, all struggling for survival. Even at its worst, Oak Street was a lively, colorful ethnic ghetto, the air pungent with languages from around the world and the aroma of bagels, kosher dills, fish and other exotic aromas.
Those who lived outside the imaginary barriers of Oak Street regarded the entire area as a blight on New Haven, a high crime area plagued with health problems. The memory of the 10,000 rats that had to be eliminated when the area was leveled in the 1950s simply reinforced the general consensus of opinion that New Haven could no longer live with the squalor that Oak Street engendered.
In 1872 the New Haven Register characterized Oak Street as "the Italian section of the city." By the end of the 19th century African-Americans lived in the Oak Street area, too, among other places, but most were crowded out and increasingly found their way to the 20-block Dixwell Avenue section of the city. Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe gradually replaced Irish and German immigrants by the early 20th century.
The highly congested Oak Street area was lined with small businesses of every description: groceries, bakeries, butcher shops, tailors, blacksmiths, shoemakers. Peddlers pushing carts sold fruit, fish, hot sweet potatoes, junk and anything else they could think of.
Customer peddlers carried a pack of dry goods from door to door. Some of the young men worked for the O. B. North Co., manufacturers of hardware for carriages and wagons, and many of the young women worked as sewing-machine operators at Strouse-Adler, a manufacturers of corsets. Newspapers sold on Oak Street reflected the diversity of the community - Yiddish, German, Polish, Italian, Lithuanian.
Buildings, primarily owned by absentee landlords, were two or three stories high, of mixed frame and masonry construction. Retail businesses occupied the first floors, while upper floors were rented to tenants in cold-water flats that, even into the 1950s, lacked some basic amenities.
Many shopkeepers lived with their families in back of their shops. Oak Street was a tight community where hundreds of people lived and worked within a few blocks, rarely venturing too far out of their own little world.
Sinclair Lewis, a 1907 Yale graduate, was fascinated by the Oak Street ambience. He pointed out to his fellow students that, "All of us can learn many things about New Haven, to our exceeding profit. How many of the Class in 'American Social Conditions' think that only New York has slums?"
In 1917, Lewis published Young Man Axelrod. In one scene the main character visits New Haven's ghetto just after daybreak in late October:
"Down on Oak Street, a place of low shops, smoky lights and alley mouths, they found the slum already astir. Gil contrived to purchase boxed biscuits, cream cheese, chicken-load, a bottle of cream. While Gil was chaffering, Knute stared out into the street milkily lighted by wavering gas and the first feebleness of coming day; he gazed upon Kosher signs and advertisements in Russian letters, shawled women and bearded rabbis; and as he looked he gathered contentment which he could never lose. He had traveled abroad tonight."
Oak Street teemed with families working together endless hours each day just to survive, unfulfilled dreams pushed away under the grime of the street. But eventually the community began to look beyond Oak Street. Children were pushed and encouraged by parents from another world to aspire to higher goals - to become lawyers, teachers, doctors, professionals. One of the many who left the neighborhood for bigger and better things was Arthur Orchowsky, whom the world came to know in later years as legendary bandleader Artie Shaw.
Oak Street was the center of Jewish life in New Haven. The street came to a standstill at sundown on Friday as the community observed the Sabbath, only to spring to life anew on Saturday evening. Shoppers came to haggle over the price of a pair of shoes or a piece of fruit. Some headed to the Russian bath, since a bath was a luxury not available in most of the tenements.
Richard Lee had gotten to know Oak Street during his campaign for mayor, and after one visit recalled, "I came out from one of those homes on Oak Street, and I sat on the curb and I was just sick as a puppy. Why, the smell of this building; it had no electricity, it had no gas, it had kerosene lamps - light had never seen those corridors in generations. It was just awful, and I got sick."
Whether Lee ought to be blamed or praised - or both - for the demolition of Oak Street is an argument that will probably go on until the last resident of that area has left this world but none would argue that the wreaking ball destroyed a neighborhood and away of life for hundreds of New Haven citizens. For the people who lived and worked there, it was home.
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