|
|
|
The 20th Century: New Haven's Commercial Apotheosis--and Beyond
|
Business New Haven
10/27/2003
By: Priscilla Searles
|
At the dawn of the 20th century, New Haven was the most important manufacturing center in Connecticut.
But not for long. By 1905 it had been surpassed by Bridgeport in the aggregate annual value of its manufactured products. Nevertheless, that same year the Elm City had 490 manufacturers producing hardware, foundry and machine-shop products, ammunition and firearms, carriages and wagons, malt liquor, paper boxes and corsets. Meatpacking was also an important industry. Total capital invested that year in New Haven manufacturing was $31,412,715, while the total product value was $39,666,118 - a gain of 13.7 percent in the half-decade since 1900.
In 1900, James Petries of New Haven invented the automobile self-starter. Previously, automobiles carried 72 pounds of batteries to get the engine started. The self-starter had a magneto attached to a flywheel to create a spark.
That same year Frank Pepe brought his family's recipe for tomato pies with him when he emigrated from Italy. From this basic recipe he eventually developed the pizza.
Figures were added and subtracted by hand until New Havener Fred Carroll came up with a computing machine in 1905 that could add and subtract, printing out its tabulations on a roll of paper.
Alfred Carleton Gilbert's interest in magic helped to pay his way through college and eventually led to the formation of the A.C. Gilbert Co. After graduating from Yale in 1906, Gilbert began to manufacture boxed sets of magic tricks under the name Mysto Manufacturing Co. In 1913 he introduced the Erector Set.
In 1916, when his company's sales surpassed the $1 million milestone, he changed the corporate name to A.C. Gilbert. That same year he added chemistry sets to his line. In the late 1930s he bought out the American Flyer train line.
A man of wide-ranging abilities and successes, Gilbert won a gold medal at the 1908 London Olympics (with a pole vault of 11 feet, 5.75 inches using the then-standard bamboo pole), trained in medicine at Yale University and established his first company when he was 25. He also established the Toy Manufacturers Association of America.
By 1941 the A.C. Gilbert had become the world's largest toy manufacturing company. Gilbert died in 1961. In 1967 the company closed. But his Erector Set lives on, manufactured by another firm.
In 1908, New Haven's assessed valuation of real and personal property was $119,592,508, net debt $3,854,498, rate of taxation 14.75 mills on the dollar.
In 1912 the New Haven Hotel, built in 1851, was closed to make room for the Hotel Taft, the fifth and (to date) final hotel to occupy the spot on the corner of College and Chapel streets. First occupied in the 17th century by an "ordinary," the corner's second business occupant was the Miles Tavern, opened in 1690.
Beers Tavern appeared in 1751. A combination inn and bookstore, the public house was often referred to as Washington Tavern because George Washington stayed there in July 1775, shortly after the Battle of Bunker Hill. The tavern was razed in 1850 to make way for the New Haven Hotel, which opened the following year.
With 450 rooms, the Taft became known as the temporary home of many famous stars who were in town to perform at the Shubert Theater. The Taft closed its doors in 1973. The Taft Annex, also known as the Hotel Adams, was closed in 1970 when the Culinary Institute of America stopped using the facility to house students. Vacant for many years, the Taft was converted into apartments, the form it assumes today.
In 1998, the four-star, 270-room Omni Hotel opened on Temple Street.
The Yale Bowl, built in 1913, was the first enclosed athletic field in the country. (A decade later, the subsequently much more famous Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. would be built as a Yale Bowl clone.) It seats 70,874. The first game played there was Yale vs. Harvard on November 21, 1914. (Harvard won the game.)
In 1920 Leo Frederick Rettger and Henry Chaplin of Yale University developed acidophilus milk (milk fermented using bacterial cultures, used to treat digestive disorders). Fairlea Farms Co. in Orange produced the product under the supervision of Rettger.
Ciro Paolella came to America in 1909 from Italy with little money and no job prospects. A mason and builder, he started a construction firm, only to see it fail. In 1922 he established the Plasticrete Corporation in Hamden. The company turned out 175 building blocks a day at first, and by 1950 was producing 40,000 Plasticrete building blocks a day.
New Haven continued to be known for firsts in the field of medicine.
In 1940 the Hospital of Saint Raphael opened a School of Medical Technology, one of the first in the nation. In 1950 the hospital opened southern New England's first radiation therapy center and was one of the first community hospitals in New England to perform open-heart surgery.
In 1960 Saint Raphael's opened one of the first cardiac catheterization labs and cardiac care units in the state. It was the first Catholic hospital in the U.S. to establish a recognized pastoral care department.
New Haven Hospital (today Yale-New Haven Hospital) pioneered the first successful use of penicillin in the nation, in 1942. That same year the hospital initiated the first use of chemotherapy as a cancer treatment.
In 1945 Grace Hospital, which opened as a homeopathic hospital in the Mallory mansion on West Chapel Street in 1889, was merged with New Haven Hospital, creating Grace-New Haven Hospital.
William H. Swell Jr. and William Glen developed a prototype heart-lung machine at Yale-New Haven Hospital in 1949. A major breakthrough in modern medicine, this bypass equipment allows physicians to perform delicate operations directly on the heart while blood flow proceeded normally.
In 1965 New Haven Hospital formed a formal agreement with Yale University, becoming Yale-New Haven Hospital.
In 1913 a group of New Haven businessmen organized the Employees Association of New Haven County, later the Manufacturers Association of New Haven County Inc. for the purpose of providing an exchange of ideas and information to help business and the community progress and prosper.
Thomas Osborn isolated vitamin A in 1913. The vitamin was chemically produced at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven.
New Haven has always had a wealth of cultural and artistic resources. Offering numerous theater and musical productions, the city attracts some of the world's finest talent. Theaters have come and gone, replaced by other ventures, but New Haven continues to be rich in cultural offerings.
The New Haven Symphony Orchestra is the fourth-oldest symphony in America. In the late 19th century New Haven was considered too small to support a symphony orchestra, but Morris Steinert, a recent immigrant and piano merchant, felt differently. Teaming up with Horatio William Parker, then head of Yale's newly founded Department of Music, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra began its first rehearsals in 1894. Today its music director, Jung-Ho Pak, leads an orchestra that numbers more than 70 instruments.
"We open in New Haven," was the fate of Broadway producers since time immemorial - at the Shubert, of course. It became the favorite place to try out plays before opening on the Great White Way.
Opened in 1914 before "talkies," television or rock concerts, the Shubert became known as "The Birthplace of the Nation's Greatest Hits." It has witnessed the premieres of more than 200 productions, including The Sound of Music, The King and I and Long Day's Journey into Night.
The Shubert brothers built the College Street playhouse just two years after opening their first Shubert Theater in New York City. Lee and J.J. Shubert named the playhouse the Sam S. Shubert Theater after their brother, the founder of the Shubert organization. The opening production was The Belle of Bond Street, which featured "A Beauty Chorus of 40." Seats for the opening engagement were priced from 25 cents to $1.50.
The Shubert brothers operated the playhouse from 1914 through the 1940-41 season, establishing the pattern of show try-outs. Of the 14 musicals presented during the first season, four were new shows playing the Shubert before New York openings.
In the fall of 1941, Maurice H. Bailey and Morris Nunes took over the theater. Nunes died in 1948, but Bailey remained at the Shubert's helm for 35 years.
The Shubert closed in 1976 and destruction seemed its inevitable fate, considering the prime real estate it occupied. Spared the wrecking ball by a community fundraising campaign, the theater re-opened in December 1983. The old Adams Hotel on College Street was razed to provide an expansive new theatre lobby and plaza. The auditorium has more recently been extensively refurbished and equipped with state-of-the-art sound and lighting systems.
In the early 1960s Yale alumni Jon Jory and Harlan Kleinman dreamed of starting a resident professional theater company in New Haven. A group of community leaders and patrons of the arts got behind the idea. The pay-off was Long Wharf Theatre.
Named for the Long Wharf that once extended far into New Haven Harbor, the theater was built in a vacant warehouse space in a busy food terminal, its main stage originally stocked with seats borrowed from a retired movie house. The theater looked to one of America's greatest playwrights, Connecticut resident Arthur Miller, for its first production. In 1965 Miller's The Crucible opened for a two-week engagement.
Long Wharf Theatre has come a long way from the first year's budget of $294,000 when the theater played to slightly more than 30,000 patrons. Recognized as a leader in American regional theater, Long Wharf has become an organization of international renown with a $6.5 million budget and an annual audience exceeding 100,000.
Robert Brustein, "master teacher" of the Yale School of Drama, founded the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1966, serving as its first artistic director. Yale Rep opened its doors on December 6, 1966 with a production of the comic opera Dynamite Tonight by Arnold Weinstein, with music by William Bolcom.
On the transportation front, Tweed-New Haven Airport was dedicated in 1931. The 236 acres of land for the airport was purchased in 1929 for $65,000. Then known as the Municipal Airport, for three decades it was managed by John Tweed, who became his namesake following his retirement.
At present the airport has two runways, a 5,600 feet north-south runway and a cross-wind 3,200 feet runway. In 1998 a quasi-public airport authority assumed the responsibility for the management and operation of the airport from the city of New Haven.
Inspired by a Jules Verne story and Leonardo da Vinci's mechanical drawing of an imagined flying machine, Russian-born Igor Sikorsky spent years perfecting an aircraft that was propelled in the vertical plane. In 1923 he founded the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corp. By 1929 his company had become a division of United Aircraft. Today a division of the United Technologies Corp., Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., headquartered in Stratford, is one of a number of Connecticut businesses involved in the defense industry.
Meanwhile, in 1934 the Eastern Color Printing Co. of Waterbury produced the first regular newsstand comic book, Famous Funnies.
The nationally renowned Merritt Parkway opened in stages from 1938 to 1940 in Fairfield County. It was named after Stamford congressman Schuyler Merritt; the connecting Wilbur Cross Parkway was named after the Connecticut governor who endorsed building the Merritt in 1925.
The Wilbur Cross served as the eastward extension of the Merritt, part of a plan to connect Fairfield County with Hartford and an eventual statewide expressway network. The section from the Housatonic River to Route 34 opened on December 24, 1941, but the rest was delayed by World War II restrictions. The section from Dixwell Avenue to Meriden opened in November 1947; for the next two years, state road maps showed motorists how to navigate New Haven streets from one segment to the other. On November 1, 1949, the West Rock tunnel in New Haven (the only highway tunnel in New England going through a land feature) opened, completing the parkway route from Greenwich to Meriden.
On September 25, 1948, the last trolley operating on the streets of New Haven and in the state of Connecticut was retired. The age of private automobiles and buses had arrived. Electric streetcars had been operating in New Haven since 1892.
In 1940 the New Haven Terminal was established as a warehouse for goods, developing into one of the largest docking, storage and transportation centers of petroleum, chemical and metals in the Northeast.
World War II created an opportunity for women to work in place of men at traditionally male jobs, especially manufacturing. Until that time, there were few opportunities for women in business. When the men returned from the war, they wanted their jobs back but women had gotten a taste of working in fields previously held by men. As a result they were more willing than ever to compete with men for good jobs. It took several decades before women's place in the workplace was permanently secured, and gradually women began to be placed in positions of authority.
An epidemiologist, virologist and polio pioneer, Dorothy Horstmann was the first woman appointed a professor at the Yale School of Medicine. In 1978 Jean Handley was named vice president of corporate relations and advertising of SNET. She was the company's first-ever female vice president.
Born in Germany, Emmy Nowak arrived in the U.S. at age three. Believing that only in America could someone arrive as an immigrant and build his or her own successful business, she proceeded to do just that, becoming the owner, president and CEO of Alloy Engineering Co. in Bridgeport.
Betty C. Tianti was the nation's first woman president of a state AFL-CIO federation and Connecticut's first female commissioner of labor - the final step in a 30-year career of assuming positions never before held by women.
During World War II General Electric was asked by the U.S. War Production Board to synthesize a cheap substitute for rubber. In 1943 New Havener James Wright developed a supple compound he called "nutty putty."
There were big things ahead for "nutty putty." In 1949 toy storeowner Paul Hodgson happened to witness a demonstration of the "nutty putty" at a party. He bought 21 pounds of the putty for $147, hired a Yale student to separate it into half-ounce balls, and marketed the putty inside colored plastic eggs as Silly Putty. When it outsold every other item in his store, Hodgson mass-produced Silly Putty as "the toy with one moving part," selling up to 300 eggs a day.
When Democrat Richard C. Lee was elected mayor of New Haven in 1953, the city was in decline from its days of manufacturing glory through the Second World War. Slums were spreading throughout the city and the downtown district was in poor economic and physical condition.
In 1956 New Haven established the first business relocation office in the nation. Major redevelopment marked the end of the Oak Street neighborhood, the first area to be addressed. By 1958, New Haven under Lee's leadership had received the largest per-capita federal funding for redevelopment of any city in the nation. Although many still question the wisdom of Lee's redevelopment plan, the label "Model City" lasted for more than a decade.
By the mid-1960s New Haven had seen its corporate base shrink. Non-profit organizations were struggling to survive, too, competing with one another for limited corporate dollars.
People looking for tangible evidence of redevelopment could point to the newly relocated Malley's department store, opened in 1963, and Macy's the following year. The Chapel Square Mall opened in 1967, displacing struggling businesses.
The changes did little to help the city's economy. The department stores in the mall soon closed, the Oak Street Connector was never completed, and by the late 1970s New Haven teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, unable to pay the electric bills for its own street lights.
The number of New Haveners employed in manufacturing jobs continued to decline, dropping from 50 percent in 1950 to 25 percent in 1971. In 1963 alone a total 86,900 jobs were lost.
In 1958 Marcel Bich, recognizing the potential wide appeal of a cheap, mass-produced ballpoint pen, turned his attentions to the American market, buying the Waterman Pen Co. in Seymour. In 1963 Waterman-Bic moved to its present site in Milford, today site of the headquarters of Bic Corp.
Built at a cost of approximately $410 million, the Connecticut Turnpike (today Interstate 95) was officially opened (from Exit 5) on January 2, 1958, making travel for commercial vehicles, which were not permitted on the Merritt Parkway, considerably more efficient. The 129-mile turnpike extends from Greenwich, at the New York State line to Killingly on the Rhode Island line.
Interstate 91 originates at the intersection of I-95 in New Haven and extends north through Meriden, Hartford and Enfield, where it leaves the state. On October 27, 1965, the 11-mile section from Hartford to Meriden opened. On January 7, 1966, the 18.8-mile section of I-91 from Meriden to New Haven opened, constructed at a cost of $54.5 million. The entire 58 miles of I-91 in Connecticut was completed at a cost of $200 million.
In 1968, the first New Jersey barriers in the state were used, on I-91 in New Haven.
Branford was the location of the first hospice in Connecticut and the nation, opening in 1974. Much of the credit goes to Florence S. Wald, who envisioned the need to maximize the quality of life for the terminally ill.
In 1979 German-based Bayer AG established its Pharmaceuticals Division in West Haven.
The Bayer Research Center was founded in 1988 as the North American research headquarters for the Pharmaceutical Division. But in spite of the expansion of its research facilities, in 2002 Bayer announced plans to consolidate one of its drug production units from West Haven to a plant in Pennsylvania. The move will mean the loss of 450 jobs in Bayer's West Haven facility.
The late 1980s marked the beginning of the growth of bioscience firms in greater New Haven. Neurogen, a small-molecule drug-discovery and -development company, got its start in Branford in 1987. In 1991 CuraGen Corp., a genomics-based pharmaceutical company, was founded. Headquartered in New Haven, the company has additional facilities in Branford. In 1997 Genaissance Pharmaceuticals, a world leader in the discovery and use of human gene variation for the development of personalized medicines and DNA diagnostics, set up shop in New Haven's Science Park.
Today greater New Haven is home to five publicly owned biotechnology companies and 22 privately owned ones. The latter include Alexion Pharmaceuticals, CuraGen, Genaissance, Neurogen and Vion Pharmaceuticals.
By 2002 New Haven manufacturing companies accounted for about 15 percent of the state's manufacturing employment total. In November 2002, 35,500 worked at manufacturing companies in New Haven, 1,100 fewer than in November 2001.
New Haven has been in a state of continuous change for 365 years. But the imagination, inspiration and innovation of its residents and business leaders have helped New Haven to address its challenges and continue to move ever forward.
|
Go FirstGo PreviousGo
NextGo LastGo
to Index
|
|
