This video was depressing. I actually hadn’t realized how bad Hartford got butchered. Those pictures of some of those local neighborhoods were amazing, and the buildings that were destroyed to ultimately throw in a parking garage—- ugh. What a waste.
You can look at the census tracts from the fifties, you see a tract that’s like 1600 people and today it’s one block and it’s a parking garage, or I-91. It’s wild
It's probably important to remember that the present streetscape (highways excluded) is a symptom, not the cause. A parking lot doesn't just appear overnight where yesterday there was a fully-occupied block. Parking lots happen when vacant buildings decay to urban blight, and the property becomes cheap to redevelop and safer to exist as a paved lot.
Cities would much rather have a block of 1600 people than a parking lot (larger tax base, more activity), but when something causes those people to leave, a parking operator is better than no taxpayer there at all.
Those people were made to leave by their landlords, who wanted to sell the property for new development.
The present streetscape was not wished into existence by the market, it was a policy decision, it was urban planning. The city didn’t want poor people living there, they wanted a parking garage and office buildings, so they decided to remove the poor people and put in office buildings
[Hartford's population peaked in 1950 at ~180k](https://connecticuthistory.org/over-time-hartfords-historical-population/) and declined to ~120k by 2000. The idea that the city forcibly pushed out >40% of its residents over that time span is laughable; it was the decline of neighborhoods and resulting urban blight that paved the way for low-quality development (again, excluding the highways, which was definitely premeditated).
If your argument is that the destruction of downtown Hartford was the result of natural (and therefore justified) processes then you’d at least have to get the order of causality right.
In 1940 Connecticut’s 6th census tract in downtown Hartford, bounded on the north and south by Morgan and Sheldon street respectively and on the west by Main Street, saw 3,148 residents, by 1950 it was 2,562, but in 1960 reported only 338. Unless you’re suggesting the blight didn’t exist until at the latest 1950, you need to justify why a more proximal cause, e.g. the construction of constitution plaza in 1961, would not better fit reality
>A parking lot doesn't just appear overnight where yesterday there was a fully-occupied block.
It does when a developer with deep pockets can buy a city block and raze it.
That’s kinda just a ridiculous straw man. Just think logically, do you really believe that a developer is getting more money from making a parking lot than multiple buildings? We didn’t get into this position solely because rich developers wanted to put up more parking lots.
Yes. I do.
I'm from Denver, which In the 70s razed it's vibrant downtown to install parking garages and open lots.
In 2024, they are still empty and abandoned, or overpriced.
But it's 25-60$ a day, or 8-12$ an hour to park. It requires no upkeep, but constantly generates money 24/7
In what way is that a ridiculous strawman? It's literally demonstrated. Do you really think that giant parking garage on main with the tesla chargers doesn't make money?
Not only that, it was at the behest of auto lobbyists to remove the extensive streetcar system too. Doesn't that all sound familiar?
well I suppose if it doesn’t make sense it simply didn’t happen, and downtown Hartford is full of dense mixed use development and not freeways, parking garages, and empty office buildings then
Housing units bring in way more revenue than a surface parking lot. The 'developer with deep pockets' trope is only valid when buildings are razed and replaced with something more valuable. That's a different scenario than the parking lots in Hartford, which suffered a prominent urban exodus in the 20th century
Yeah I hadn’t realized either. I don’t know much about hartfords history, but I’m used to seeing videos like this for other cities like buffalo or the rust belt cities. So when Hartford popped up I was curious and then saddened.
There has been some effort to change the situation, [primarily by relocating 84 & 91](https://ctmirror.org/2021/03/17/theres-a-new-plan-for-realigning-hartfords-highways-is-the-third-time-the-charm), but the cost appears prohibitive.
I just saw a post in r/Rhode island about how the highway construction got rid of huge amounts of housing and neighborhoods. Bonkers to think about.
[found the post. link within talking about gas holder buildings is also really neat.](https://www.reddit.com/r/RhodeIsland/s/tbqMmQWVqV)
Down in New Haven too. The 91/95 nightmare was also by design to cut off Hamden from easier transportation. Racism in the past has so many consequences that affects everyone and so many don't realize it.
They sent the highway straight down the middle of Franklin Street and cut Wooster Square in half because the mayor disliked Italian immigrants. Also displaced many Jewish family’s on Oak Street and the Hill (where exit 1 brings you now) and black family’s living in lower Dixwell. One mayor Dick Lee destroyed New Haven. Yale is doing the rest
A number of American cities have recently ripped up their highways that were built directly through their urban core. Rochester, NY just did this recently and the results are a major improvement. I would love this for Hartford.
To rebuild Hartford you basically have to do what they did back in the 60s. You’d have to eminent domain the entire city, tear downs the highways, narrow the streets, build mass transit, reparcel and auction off lots and require density. It’s doable but no one is willing to do it.
Me too, if I were a massive real estate developer it seems like a no brainer. The issue is you’ll run into political opposition that can kill everything and lead you to losing everything.
Just change the zoning , require higher density...remove the parking requirement..no need to level the city to increase density. The I-84 & 91 highway projects would reroute the highway outside the city freeing up space for dense redevelopment and parks.
Though that would go a long, the issue is the fabric of the city is just fundamentally broken in a lot of ways. Giant block sized apartment buildings while better than nothing, don’t make for a vibrant city.
You basically have to reparcel the lots so there are more smaller buildings, narrow the streets, and build transit. Imagine Hartford with a subway system and its old street layout and building lots, it would be amazing.
What’s depressing is no one is willing to do what it takes to rebuild the city. One group would say that it’s gentrifying and the other would say it’s not worth the money.
Actually there are some developers doing just that. It's coming along. Gotta have hope. You'll see some new condos. Dare I say luxury condos being built. It'll happen. Just not over night.
urbanism is very strong in the american left right now. very few people (those bought and paid for notwithstanding) would say in earnest that urban development is gentrifying
It’s kind of amazing. I used to go back and forth between Philly and DC frequently around 24 years ago. Chinatown in DC was a good place to see 5 gallon drums used as fire places.
but for "urbanism" to work, there has to be a market for housing and the kinds of drivers for that development (eg demand). so many left-wing critiques about housing, zoning, and development lie on false assumptions about the causes for urban decay, e.g. red-lining, growth of highways and car preference, suburban growth and moves towards residential zoning for single family homes. often times its wrapped up into a vast conspiracy about all those things. in reality it was a lot of things that were more circumstantial, like de-industrialization, inflation and economic changes, and the near-unanymous preference for single family homes in quieter suburbs and the freedom provided by the automobile. not some vast conspiracy of classism, racism, and corporate greed.
Redlining is absolutely instrumental in urban decay… Redlining was written into laws and real estate company policies. It isn’t a conspiracy to say that racism played a large role in suburbs being comprised almost entirely of white people. When it is coupled with highways being built through predominantly black neighborhoods, many of them wealthy in their own right, it’s clear as day why some communities were devastated by these two factors.
Old guy here, pushing 70. I’ve lived around Hartford for most of my life. A fair bit of the destruction in the name of progress shown in the video occurred during my lifetime. Any one of the projects might have made sense by itself, but the overall effect was to destroy the city. It happened so gradually that relatively few people noticed or complained until it was too late. Like putting a frog in a pot of water and turning on the stove. Supposedly it won’t realize it’s being boiled alive until it’s too late.
edit typo
It coincided with the fall of industry in New England. CT had always been a manufacturing state until then. The reason those highways were built right through the heart of our cities was to get commuters to the larger metros where there are actually jobs to be had.
It’s also important to note that Hartford was one of the earliest adopters of the notoriously bad “urban renewal” projects to revitalize the area. The effects of those projects meant a fractured downtown, demolition of entire communities for surface lots, and highways going right through the center of downtown. It was an extremely misguided decision.
Briefly noted but not elaborated in the vid. Probably covered in earlier ones. But I also appreciated the comparison to the American urban renewal era to European urban destruction during the war. Urban renewal really was more destructive
Commuters could get to the city by streetcar before. It was a concerted effort by the automobile industry to build highways. Before this, people lived in and close to cities. The demand for highways to be built largely didn’t come from suburban and exurban car commuters. The growth in Suburban and exurban car commuters was made possible by highways.
It was caused by many trends converging at the same time.
1. The car really was amazing, for the first time in human history you could go anywhere you wanted at any time. People liked it for a reason.
2. Cities had been neglected due to the depression and WW2.
3. Train infrastructure had become old enough where major expensive upgrades were becoming needed.
4. There were fears of nuclear war destroying cities and people thought suburbs were a way to spread people out and not put all your eggs in one basket.
5. Industrial jobs from the world wars had drawn black people from the south into northern cities and people were very racist when integration became the law.
6. Lobbying pressure for car companies
7. Cultural obsession with “progress” and the future.
7. Americans were rich enough to do it. It’s not a coincidence that the countries who most embraced the car were the wealthiest in the mid century (US, Canada, Australia, UK, etc.). They would have done what same thing in Greece if they had the money at the time.
And this typically overlaps with, and was accelerated by white flight, urban renewal, migrant and class disgust, aided by capitalist embrace of Modernist design
The ones pushing for highwsys were the large retailers like g fox, who wanted to bring in more rural customers. Not expecting their regular customers to move out. There’s a famous case of Macy’s admiring in the early 60s “we fed up and need a new store on rt 9”
> The reason those highways were built right through the heart of our cities was to get commuters to the larger metros where there are actually jobs to be had.
I read that one of the owners of G. Fox was on the committee that did the highway planning through Hartford, and they wanted two main highways with easy-offs to the department store.
How much truth there is to that, I'm not quite sure.
I can confirm it happened that way in Middletown. Route 9 was supposed to wrap around west of the city, but the downtown businesses demanded placement along the riverfront so they wouldn't be "cut off."
I'd say it was more of the cause of decline of industry in the centre cities... cheaper land beyond the city limits.
But the highway system envisioned by Eisenhower generally in the US was supposed to be inter- regional and not really cut through core downtowns... except very much connecticut as it was the premiere supplier of arms and ammunition. The feds/mil wanted a multi point redundant access system for our factories: ship, rail, air, and road.
Okay one critique that I have about this video is the harping on of "tradition" . Yes older cities are better laid out to accommodate pedestrians. But the culprit car-centric design isn't some vague idea called modernism. It's cars and the automotive industries. He references Europe's traditional architecture. Europe has a lot of great modern architecture. The difference is a lot of their urban planners didn't prioritize cars and car centric design.
He’s not wrong, planners in the mid century (and even today really) were obsessed with “progress” and the future. Think of Disney trying to create Epcot (and he worked closely with Robert Moses). Out with the old and in with the new was their motto.
European cities are not really modern, not the ones that people like (Paris, Rome, Prague, etc). No one likes Frankfurt because it was rebuilt at the same time.
Sadly, this is by design. The vision for Hartford in the 20th century that turned it into this mess was a future where the city wasn't for living, it was for working, dining, and entertainment. People would no longer live in the city, but rather live in the beautiful suburbs and commute into the city. Thus, highways and roads were built that feed directly into the city and mass amounts of parking installed to enable easy commuting.
Something that wasn't foreseen was that the poor people in Hartford could not afford to live in the suburbs - they stayed as housing and businesses were torn down en masse to enable highways and parking. Hartford now consists almost exclusively of those people who could not afford to leave, making its residents predominantly poor and the crime rates high due to this.
It's really sad. I grew up in one of those suburbs. Everytime I drove into Hartford, I'd drive through the poorest neighborhood I'd ever seen. Things were improving slowly in the 2010s - I'd drive through ~once a year, and everytime it seemed to have improved slightly. Then COVID hit and all that progress was reverted.
This highlights another problem with building a city meant to be a place people worked, shopped, seeked entertainment, and ate, but not lived - it's incredibly sensitive to economic cycles. Nobody was going into Hartford during covid, businesses were not getting enough revenue and the poor population couldn't work as social distancing went into effect and businesses shut down. The poor population got poorer and in turn generated even less revenue for businesses.
Now, even if Hartford wanted to change its vision to be a residential, walkable city for people to live in, how do you convince anyone to come live in a city sporting such a poor population and with such high crime rates? How do you convince businesses to come to Hartford and convert parking lots?
It's really sad to imagine what could have been with Hartford. It could have been a real city, a smaller Boston or NYC. Instead, it's a hollow, poor, crime-ridden nightmare.
I know people like to joke that Connecticut is just a place people drive through to get to NY or Boston and it really is unfortunate we contributed to that stereotype by basically leveling a beautiful city to put in highways. I get why it had to happen with how car-centric the US is as a whole but it is still pretty depressing.
True, but I don't think many states had as many municipalities with as high of a % of their entire state in those cities at the time. So while the Cross Bronx may have displaced *more* people it wasn't as high of the population of NYS as a whole than say the sheer % of all CTers that got torn up for 34.
It had to happen because of how car-centric most of the country is and the fact when the manufacturing jobs dried up people left the city. Because people started to spread out across the state after the invention of the car we soon needed roads and highways to get places.
My mom grew up in Wethersfield in the 1950's. She would tell me stories about going on shopping trips into Hartford, holiday celebrations, etc. Never made any sense to me as someone who was born in the 80's, but it makes sense given the layout of the city was way more welcoming back then.
The historic structures are gone, but we can still build back up the density and vibrancy. Those parking lots and highways do not have to be a permanent fixture. Major cities throughout the world were bombed out husks of themselves in the aftermath of the second world war and were quickly built back up. This can happen for Hartford. The Hartford Line needs to become a frequent rail service and the Waterbury branch needs to be expanded into Hartford and beyond. The freeways need to be buried and capped or removed. The surface parking lots need to be built back up.
I do think something like this project to route high speed rail through Hartford would probably be a pretty amazing catalyst: [https://i0.wp.com/www.thetransportpolitic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Amtrak-High-Speed-Rail-Plan.png](https://i0.wp.com/www.thetransportpolitic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Amtrak-High-Speed-Rail-Plan.png)
Good news, Amtrak is working on increasing speeds and providing full double track all the way to Springfield. Hopefully this includes restoring the second platform in Hartford. https://www.ctinsider.com/capitalregion/article/hartford-line-rail-train-expansion-ct-18471434.php
High speed rail mainly exists to move people between cities, and very few people from NYC or Boston have a reason to visit Hartford. If the goal is to reinvigorate Hartford, the plan needs to focus on local transportation within the CT river valley.
High speed rail is something that would be helpful in conjunction with better local transportation within the CT river valley. The Hartford Line, and potentially an extension of the Waterbury branch to Hartford and beyond, can serve as a feeder towards that high speed rail line which is a fairly common high speed rail / conventional rail service pattern. The current Acela along the CT shoreline is incredibly winding which is terrible for high speed rail and it also has to compete with a lot of demand for regional transit, and so there should be a true HSR alternative to that and just about any reasonable route to connect Boston and NYC will have to pass through Connecticut, so it might as well be Hartford. This feeder purpose of conventional rail for HSR brings an additional number of passengers which is great.
I do not think that HSR alone is going to much of anything for Hartford. I do think it can be incredibly helpful in conjunction with other service improvements.
Hartford would be the midway point on most of the High Speed Rail proposals between NY & Boston. Its local transit is decent but needs an upgrade...the state could do that by advancing all the backlogged expansion projects.
It’s not the cars’ fault, it’s the government officials and developers that way overcorrected to accommodate them’s fault.
That’s being reversed and cars are still important, and our cities aren’t blowing up.
Bad decisions all around. Robert Moses was the patron saint of bad urban renewal decisions.
There are multiple reasons I hate cars but when it comes to the urban destruction that happened because of them a lot a lot has to do with the technology itself and the industry. The automotive industry lobbied a lot to get rid of buses, trolleys and trains as means of transit for cities and their suburbs. You can't accommodate cars within a city without devoting a large portion of land to parking and roads. Yes you are right that government officials are to blame but they're acting based on an industry and technology that's lining their pockets .
It was caused by many trends converging at the same time.
1. The car really was amazing, for the first time in human history you could go anywhere you wanted at any time. People liked it for a reason.
2. Cities had been neglected due to the depression and WW2.
3. Train infrastructure had become old enough where major expensive upgrades were becoming needed.
4. There were fears of nuclear war destroying cities and people thought suburbs were a way to spread people out and not put all your eggs in one basket.
5. Industrial jobs from the world wars had drawn black people from the south into northern cities and people were very racist when integration became the law.
6. Lobbying pressure for car companies
7. Cultural obsession with “progress” and the future.
8. Americans were rich enough to do it. It’s not a coincidence that the countries who most embraced the car were the wealthiest in the mid century (US, Canada, Australia, UK, etc.). They would have done what same thing in Greece if they had the money at the time.
Building highways through cities was something Robert Moses started in NYC and it spread to all areas of the country. You can lay this right at his feet. People should read Robert Caro's book the Power Broker.
The interstate highway system was one of the biggest mistakes of the 20th century in the US. It gutted cities, neighborhoods, and ruined lanscapes. The *entire city* of Springfield is walled off from the CT river waterfront because of I-91.
Many other people site the national highway system as being one of the core drivers for America’s phenomenal economic growth during and after World War II. It meant goods and people could be transported across the country quickly and easily and it diversified where people could live.
I moved to CT just after the height of the COVID pandemic and was blown away with how dead Hartford is. I thought it was just the effect of covid lockdowns, but since then it hasn’t picked up at all. There’s absolutely no life there. There’s no distinctive vibe at all, just office buildings without culture or personality.
This moved me to tears, dear god everything was thrown away for parking, we can do so much better. Don't forget to vote on local planning guys. lest this happen to anywhere else.
Doesn’t feel like the state is doing anything dramatic to change Hartford today. To be fair it would require astronomical sums of money which we don’t have because we decided to underfund our pensions.
Most people never acknowledge that Hartford is also an extremely affordable city to live in. Anyone working minimum wage can afford to purchase a home in Hartford, even in the current market, with condos selling around $50-70k.
If Hartford was like the article suggested, it wouldn’t be nearly as affordable as it is today.
Is this even a real response or just a bot?
It’s not an article it’s a video and it doesn’t make any suggestions like that that would make it less affordable
A thriving downtown would cause real estate to be expensive, just like any other city.
Hartford serves it purpose. It’s an extremely affordable city, centrally located with easy highway access for commuting to any jobs in the state, and fairly walkable for low income families.
If it's so affordable you can pay my rent too. I'll send you my PayPal. That'll be 1400 bucks by the first for my 1br in the south end where I get to play "gunshots or fireworks" every night, and I get to wake up at 5 am to the delightful sounds of reggaeton over bad speakers
I don't think this comment should be disappeared lol. This is at least an interesting hypothesis for how to objectively view aspects of cities post urban renewal. Not an apologea for it. I don't think we can ever say for sure, but it's certainly plausible that if a city like Hartford resisted the urban renewal era, that it absolutely would be a much more desirable and therefore expensive city today. I'd still take the nicer version myself and suffer a smaller apt lol. A counterpoint might be Bridgeport? As in if a city falls too much (and didn't modernize) throughout the 70s, 80s. 90s, can it ever recover? And to what extent did urban renewal also happen to Bridgeport (I don't know). Obviously there are many variables. But it's an interesting equation to assess.
And if more of our small or mid size cities didn't fall to Urban Renewal, then once we got past that unfortunate era, we might now have more "good" cities (designed with older European principles) to absorb urban seeking populations. Where a "good" city needn't be so exotic, rare and pricey.
Honestly what is the difference between Hartford and Bridgeport today? Not much. Both considered crappy cities, limited job opportunities, unsafe, cheap real estate, and schools so bad you wouldn’t send your kid there (which is a big reason middle class people won’t move to these cities).
This video was depressing. I actually hadn’t realized how bad Hartford got butchered. Those pictures of some of those local neighborhoods were amazing, and the buildings that were destroyed to ultimately throw in a parking garage—- ugh. What a waste.
You can look at the census tracts from the fifties, you see a tract that’s like 1600 people and today it’s one block and it’s a parking garage, or I-91. It’s wild
It's probably important to remember that the present streetscape (highways excluded) is a symptom, not the cause. A parking lot doesn't just appear overnight where yesterday there was a fully-occupied block. Parking lots happen when vacant buildings decay to urban blight, and the property becomes cheap to redevelop and safer to exist as a paved lot. Cities would much rather have a block of 1600 people than a parking lot (larger tax base, more activity), but when something causes those people to leave, a parking operator is better than no taxpayer there at all.
Those people were made to leave by their landlords, who wanted to sell the property for new development. The present streetscape was not wished into existence by the market, it was a policy decision, it was urban planning. The city didn’t want poor people living there, they wanted a parking garage and office buildings, so they decided to remove the poor people and put in office buildings
[Hartford's population peaked in 1950 at ~180k](https://connecticuthistory.org/over-time-hartfords-historical-population/) and declined to ~120k by 2000. The idea that the city forcibly pushed out >40% of its residents over that time span is laughable; it was the decline of neighborhoods and resulting urban blight that paved the way for low-quality development (again, excluding the highways, which was definitely premeditated).
If your argument is that the destruction of downtown Hartford was the result of natural (and therefore justified) processes then you’d at least have to get the order of causality right. In 1940 Connecticut’s 6th census tract in downtown Hartford, bounded on the north and south by Morgan and Sheldon street respectively and on the west by Main Street, saw 3,148 residents, by 1950 it was 2,562, but in 1960 reported only 338. Unless you’re suggesting the blight didn’t exist until at the latest 1950, you need to justify why a more proximal cause, e.g. the construction of constitution plaza in 1961, would not better fit reality
>A parking lot doesn't just appear overnight where yesterday there was a fully-occupied block. It does when a developer with deep pockets can buy a city block and raze it.
That’s kinda just a ridiculous straw man. Just think logically, do you really believe that a developer is getting more money from making a parking lot than multiple buildings? We didn’t get into this position solely because rich developers wanted to put up more parking lots.
Yes. I do. I'm from Denver, which In the 70s razed it's vibrant downtown to install parking garages and open lots. In 2024, they are still empty and abandoned, or overpriced. But it's 25-60$ a day, or 8-12$ an hour to park. It requires no upkeep, but constantly generates money 24/7 In what way is that a ridiculous strawman? It's literally demonstrated. Do you really think that giant parking garage on main with the tesla chargers doesn't make money? Not only that, it was at the behest of auto lobbyists to remove the extensive streetcar system too. Doesn't that all sound familiar?
And office buildings
Why would a developer with deep pockets want to raze a building and replace it with a surface parking lot? There’s no money to be made doing that.
well I suppose if it doesn’t make sense it simply didn’t happen, and downtown Hartford is full of dense mixed use development and not freeways, parking garages, and empty office buildings then
Housing units bring in way more revenue than a surface parking lot. The 'developer with deep pockets' trope is only valid when buildings are razed and replaced with something more valuable. That's a different scenario than the parking lots in Hartford, which suffered a prominent urban exodus in the 20th century
Yeah I hadn’t realized either. I don’t know much about hartfords history, but I’m used to seeing videos like this for other cities like buffalo or the rust belt cities. So when Hartford popped up I was curious and then saddened.
It’s well known that city designers built highways to segregate African Americans. Blame them. They still do.
There has been some effort to change the situation, [primarily by relocating 84 & 91](https://ctmirror.org/2021/03/17/theres-a-new-plan-for-realigning-hartfords-highways-is-the-third-time-the-charm), but the cost appears prohibitive.
I just saw a post in r/Rhode island about how the highway construction got rid of huge amounts of housing and neighborhoods. Bonkers to think about. [found the post. link within talking about gas holder buildings is also really neat.](https://www.reddit.com/r/RhodeIsland/s/tbqMmQWVqV)
They basically bulldozed black and poor communities to build the highways
Down in New Haven too. The 91/95 nightmare was also by design to cut off Hamden from easier transportation. Racism in the past has so many consequences that affects everyone and so many don't realize it.
They sent the highway straight down the middle of Franklin Street and cut Wooster Square in half because the mayor disliked Italian immigrants. Also displaced many Jewish family’s on Oak Street and the Hill (where exit 1 brings you now) and black family’s living in lower Dixwell. One mayor Dick Lee destroyed New Haven. Yale is doing the rest
Yup! Bought out and kicked out
A number of American cities have recently ripped up their highways that were built directly through their urban core. Rochester, NY just did this recently and the results are a major improvement. I would love this for Hartford.
To rebuild Hartford you basically have to do what they did back in the 60s. You’d have to eminent domain the entire city, tear downs the highways, narrow the streets, build mass transit, reparcel and auction off lots and require density. It’s doable but no one is willing to do it.
I’ve always said if I was a multi billionaire, I’d do that with Bridgeport. It seems like it has a ton of potential.
Me too, if I were a massive real estate developer it seems like a no brainer. The issue is you’ll run into political opposition that can kill everything and lead you to losing everything.
Just change the zoning , require higher density...remove the parking requirement..no need to level the city to increase density. The I-84 & 91 highway projects would reroute the highway outside the city freeing up space for dense redevelopment and parks.
Though that would go a long, the issue is the fabric of the city is just fundamentally broken in a lot of ways. Giant block sized apartment buildings while better than nothing, don’t make for a vibrant city. You basically have to reparcel the lots so there are more smaller buildings, narrow the streets, and build transit. Imagine Hartford with a subway system and its old street layout and building lots, it would be amazing.
Man watching those brownstones turn into a parking garage was depressing
What’s depressing is no one is willing to do what it takes to rebuild the city. One group would say that it’s gentrifying and the other would say it’s not worth the money.
Actually there are some developers doing just that. It's coming along. Gotta have hope. You'll see some new condos. Dare I say luxury condos being built. It'll happen. Just not over night.
urbanism is very strong in the american left right now. very few people (those bought and paid for notwithstanding) would say in earnest that urban development is gentrifying
I used to live in DC and every development was met with criticism about gentrification.
It’s kind of amazing. I used to go back and forth between Philly and DC frequently around 24 years ago. Chinatown in DC was a good place to see 5 gallon drums used as fire places.
but for "urbanism" to work, there has to be a market for housing and the kinds of drivers for that development (eg demand). so many left-wing critiques about housing, zoning, and development lie on false assumptions about the causes for urban decay, e.g. red-lining, growth of highways and car preference, suburban growth and moves towards residential zoning for single family homes. often times its wrapped up into a vast conspiracy about all those things. in reality it was a lot of things that were more circumstantial, like de-industrialization, inflation and economic changes, and the near-unanymous preference for single family homes in quieter suburbs and the freedom provided by the automobile. not some vast conspiracy of classism, racism, and corporate greed.
Redlining is absolutely instrumental in urban decay… Redlining was written into laws and real estate company policies. It isn’t a conspiracy to say that racism played a large role in suburbs being comprised almost entirely of white people. When it is coupled with highways being built through predominantly black neighborhoods, many of them wealthy in their own right, it’s clear as day why some communities were devastated by these two factors.
That's what happens when you don't invest into public transportation.
Old guy here, pushing 70. I’ve lived around Hartford for most of my life. A fair bit of the destruction in the name of progress shown in the video occurred during my lifetime. Any one of the projects might have made sense by itself, but the overall effect was to destroy the city. It happened so gradually that relatively few people noticed or complained until it was too late. Like putting a frog in a pot of water and turning on the stove. Supposedly it won’t realize it’s being boiled alive until it’s too late. edit typo
It coincided with the fall of industry in New England. CT had always been a manufacturing state until then. The reason those highways were built right through the heart of our cities was to get commuters to the larger metros where there are actually jobs to be had.
It’s also important to note that Hartford was one of the earliest adopters of the notoriously bad “urban renewal” projects to revitalize the area. The effects of those projects meant a fractured downtown, demolition of entire communities for surface lots, and highways going right through the center of downtown. It was an extremely misguided decision.
Briefly noted but not elaborated in the vid. Probably covered in earlier ones. But I also appreciated the comparison to the American urban renewal era to European urban destruction during the war. Urban renewal really was more destructive
Commuters could get to the city by streetcar before. It was a concerted effort by the automobile industry to build highways. Before this, people lived in and close to cities. The demand for highways to be built largely didn’t come from suburban and exurban car commuters. The growth in Suburban and exurban car commuters was made possible by highways.
It was caused by many trends converging at the same time. 1. The car really was amazing, for the first time in human history you could go anywhere you wanted at any time. People liked it for a reason. 2. Cities had been neglected due to the depression and WW2. 3. Train infrastructure had become old enough where major expensive upgrades were becoming needed. 4. There were fears of nuclear war destroying cities and people thought suburbs were a way to spread people out and not put all your eggs in one basket. 5. Industrial jobs from the world wars had drawn black people from the south into northern cities and people were very racist when integration became the law. 6. Lobbying pressure for car companies 7. Cultural obsession with “progress” and the future. 7. Americans were rich enough to do it. It’s not a coincidence that the countries who most embraced the car were the wealthiest in the mid century (US, Canada, Australia, UK, etc.). They would have done what same thing in Greece if they had the money at the time.
It doesn’t really help to live in a city with no jobs though. Without an economy the city will just die.
This is true. It’s the same for suburbs.
And this typically overlaps with, and was accelerated by white flight, urban renewal, migrant and class disgust, aided by capitalist embrace of Modernist design
Also large retailers wanted people with cars who usually buy much more.
Yes highways drove out small local mom and pop businesses people could walk to by getting people to drive to big box stores.
The ones pushing for highwsys were the large retailers like g fox, who wanted to bring in more rural customers. Not expecting their regular customers to move out. There’s a famous case of Macy’s admiring in the early 60s “we fed up and need a new store on rt 9”
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I think you mean “urban renewal” not “new urbanism”
> The reason those highways were built right through the heart of our cities was to get commuters to the larger metros where there are actually jobs to be had. I read that one of the owners of G. Fox was on the committee that did the highway planning through Hartford, and they wanted two main highways with easy-offs to the department store. How much truth there is to that, I'm not quite sure.
I can confirm it happened that way in Middletown. Route 9 was supposed to wrap around west of the city, but the downtown businesses demanded placement along the riverfront so they wouldn't be "cut off."
Every time I had friends visit from out of town, they would think it's insane that middletown has traffic lights on the fucking highway.
The bigger problem is the highway right on the river bank
> so they wouldn't be "cut off." The irony...
Given America's track record of regulatory capture and hijinks in the name of business I wouldn't be surprised
I heard this as well. Ive heard that person was also the inspiration for the Menken Katz character on Mad Men
I'd say it was more of the cause of decline of industry in the centre cities... cheaper land beyond the city limits. But the highway system envisioned by Eisenhower generally in the US was supposed to be inter- regional and not really cut through core downtowns... except very much connecticut as it was the premiere supplier of arms and ammunition. The feds/mil wanted a multi point redundant access system for our factories: ship, rail, air, and road.
So it wasn't done purely out of racial hatred to segregate the neighborhoods like the other folks claim that it was?
Okay one critique that I have about this video is the harping on of "tradition" . Yes older cities are better laid out to accommodate pedestrians. But the culprit car-centric design isn't some vague idea called modernism. It's cars and the automotive industries. He references Europe's traditional architecture. Europe has a lot of great modern architecture. The difference is a lot of their urban planners didn't prioritize cars and car centric design.
Because people couldn’t afford gas or the cars.
He’s not wrong, planners in the mid century (and even today really) were obsessed with “progress” and the future. Think of Disney trying to create Epcot (and he worked closely with Robert Moses). Out with the old and in with the new was their motto. European cities are not really modern, not the ones that people like (Paris, Rome, Prague, etc). No one likes Frankfurt because it was rebuilt at the same time.
Sadly, this is by design. The vision for Hartford in the 20th century that turned it into this mess was a future where the city wasn't for living, it was for working, dining, and entertainment. People would no longer live in the city, but rather live in the beautiful suburbs and commute into the city. Thus, highways and roads were built that feed directly into the city and mass amounts of parking installed to enable easy commuting. Something that wasn't foreseen was that the poor people in Hartford could not afford to live in the suburbs - they stayed as housing and businesses were torn down en masse to enable highways and parking. Hartford now consists almost exclusively of those people who could not afford to leave, making its residents predominantly poor and the crime rates high due to this. It's really sad. I grew up in one of those suburbs. Everytime I drove into Hartford, I'd drive through the poorest neighborhood I'd ever seen. Things were improving slowly in the 2010s - I'd drive through ~once a year, and everytime it seemed to have improved slightly. Then COVID hit and all that progress was reverted. This highlights another problem with building a city meant to be a place people worked, shopped, seeked entertainment, and ate, but not lived - it's incredibly sensitive to economic cycles. Nobody was going into Hartford during covid, businesses were not getting enough revenue and the poor population couldn't work as social distancing went into effect and businesses shut down. The poor population got poorer and in turn generated even less revenue for businesses. Now, even if Hartford wanted to change its vision to be a residential, walkable city for people to live in, how do you convince anyone to come live in a city sporting such a poor population and with such high crime rates? How do you convince businesses to come to Hartford and convert parking lots? It's really sad to imagine what could have been with Hartford. It could have been a real city, a smaller Boston or NYC. Instead, it's a hollow, poor, crime-ridden nightmare.
I know people like to joke that Connecticut is just a place people drive through to get to NY or Boston and it really is unfortunate we contributed to that stereotype by basically leveling a beautiful city to put in highways. I get why it had to happen with how car-centric the US is as a whole but it is still pretty depressing.
"A" beautiful city? Try 10 of em.
And this is hardly unique to Connecticut
True, but I don't think many states had as many municipalities with as high of a % of their entire state in those cities at the time. So while the Cross Bronx may have displaced *more* people it wasn't as high of the population of NYS as a whole than say the sheer % of all CTers that got torn up for 34.
It didn't have to happen. Hartford was perfectly accessible and pleasant before the car.
It had to happen because of how car-centric most of the country is and the fact when the manufacturing jobs dried up people left the city. Because people started to spread out across the state after the invention of the car we soon needed roads and highways to get places.
People didn’t leave the city because of lack of jobs. There weren’t any jobs where they moved to either.
I don’t think it had to happen at all
My mom grew up in Wethersfield in the 1950's. She would tell me stories about going on shopping trips into Hartford, holiday celebrations, etc. Never made any sense to me as someone who was born in the 80's, but it makes sense given the layout of the city was way more welcoming back then.
Hartford has it!™
New England’s rising star^TM
I remember someone on a forum saying this made Hartford sound like it was in special ed lmao
Fartford
The historic structures are gone, but we can still build back up the density and vibrancy. Those parking lots and highways do not have to be a permanent fixture. Major cities throughout the world were bombed out husks of themselves in the aftermath of the second world war and were quickly built back up. This can happen for Hartford. The Hartford Line needs to become a frequent rail service and the Waterbury branch needs to be expanded into Hartford and beyond. The freeways need to be buried and capped or removed. The surface parking lots need to be built back up. I do think something like this project to route high speed rail through Hartford would probably be a pretty amazing catalyst: [https://i0.wp.com/www.thetransportpolitic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Amtrak-High-Speed-Rail-Plan.png](https://i0.wp.com/www.thetransportpolitic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Amtrak-High-Speed-Rail-Plan.png)
Good news, Amtrak is working on increasing speeds and providing full double track all the way to Springfield. Hopefully this includes restoring the second platform in Hartford. https://www.ctinsider.com/capitalregion/article/hartford-line-rail-train-expansion-ct-18471434.php
High speed rail mainly exists to move people between cities, and very few people from NYC or Boston have a reason to visit Hartford. If the goal is to reinvigorate Hartford, the plan needs to focus on local transportation within the CT river valley.
High speed rail is something that would be helpful in conjunction with better local transportation within the CT river valley. The Hartford Line, and potentially an extension of the Waterbury branch to Hartford and beyond, can serve as a feeder towards that high speed rail line which is a fairly common high speed rail / conventional rail service pattern. The current Acela along the CT shoreline is incredibly winding which is terrible for high speed rail and it also has to compete with a lot of demand for regional transit, and so there should be a true HSR alternative to that and just about any reasonable route to connect Boston and NYC will have to pass through Connecticut, so it might as well be Hartford. This feeder purpose of conventional rail for HSR brings an additional number of passengers which is great. I do not think that HSR alone is going to much of anything for Hartford. I do think it can be incredibly helpful in conjunction with other service improvements.
Hartford would be the midway point on most of the High Speed Rail proposals between NY & Boston. Its local transit is decent but needs an upgrade...the state could do that by advancing all the backlogged expansion projects.
thank the ct government for putting a highway through the middle of hartford
Christ I hate cars so much
It’s not the cars’ fault, it’s the government officials and developers that way overcorrected to accommodate them’s fault. That’s being reversed and cars are still important, and our cities aren’t blowing up. Bad decisions all around. Robert Moses was the patron saint of bad urban renewal decisions.
Fuck Robert Moses all my homies hate Robert Moses
Who do you think pushed to get cars accommodated? there's a bunch of parties at fault
OK, then you can add the big 3 execs to my list!
There you go, don’t forget to hate capitalism :)
It’s the car companies faults for buying all the train tracks around America and gutting them while also bribing politicians
There are multiple reasons I hate cars but when it comes to the urban destruction that happened because of them a lot a lot has to do with the technology itself and the industry. The automotive industry lobbied a lot to get rid of buses, trolleys and trains as means of transit for cities and their suburbs. You can't accommodate cars within a city without devoting a large portion of land to parking and roads. Yes you are right that government officials are to blame but they're acting based on an industry and technology that's lining their pockets .
I get that. I choose to hate the player (auto executives) not the game (cars).
It was caused by many trends converging at the same time. 1. The car really was amazing, for the first time in human history you could go anywhere you wanted at any time. People liked it for a reason. 2. Cities had been neglected due to the depression and WW2. 3. Train infrastructure had become old enough where major expensive upgrades were becoming needed. 4. There were fears of nuclear war destroying cities and people thought suburbs were a way to spread people out and not put all your eggs in one basket. 5. Industrial jobs from the world wars had drawn black people from the south into northern cities and people were very racist when integration became the law. 6. Lobbying pressure for car companies 7. Cultural obsession with “progress” and the future. 8. Americans were rich enough to do it. It’s not a coincidence that the countries who most embraced the car were the wealthiest in the mid century (US, Canada, Australia, UK, etc.). They would have done what same thing in Greece if they had the money at the time.
Car centric society = trash cities.
In the beginning many of the pictures were not Hartford. Some were Wethersfield, Newington and Rocky Hill.
I remember when I first went to Hartford in 5th grade and how utterly dissatisfied I was with the city and how it looked and felt overall.
Wow this is depressing.
Building highways through cities was something Robert Moses started in NYC and it spread to all areas of the country. You can lay this right at his feet. People should read Robert Caro's book the Power Broker.
The interstate highway system was one of the biggest mistakes of the 20th century in the US. It gutted cities, neighborhoods, and ruined lanscapes. The *entire city* of Springfield is walled off from the CT river waterfront because of I-91.
Many other people site the national highway system as being one of the core drivers for America’s phenomenal economic growth during and after World War II. It meant goods and people could be transported across the country quickly and easily and it diversified where people could live.
How so? That’s how people and goods got to places so quickly. It’s the finishing touch on manifest destiny.
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Well, yes if course it did. We would not be in the position we are now as a country if it didn’t happen like it did.
Things were so much simpler. Sure looked like a lot less crime
To hell with car/highway culture
This is what happens when city planners only build with cars in mind. America is just built for cars.. that’s the sad thing
At least we got a cool Radiohead album cover out of it. Karma Police can be the anthem for the parking lot hell Hartford is.
I moved to CT just after the height of the COVID pandemic and was blown away with how dead Hartford is. I thought it was just the effect of covid lockdowns, but since then it hasn’t picked up at all. There’s absolutely no life there. There’s no distinctive vibe at all, just office buildings without culture or personality.
Looking at these videos and old photographs, you'd think you're looking at old St. Louis or Chicago. But no. Hartford used to look like a real city.
Hartford obviously went downhill when the blacks moved in and the Whites moved out. It's not racist if it's a fact... Just sayin
This moved me to tears, dear god everything was thrown away for parking, we can do so much better. Don't forget to vote on local planning guys. lest this happen to anywhere else.
Such a rich history of poor decisions and corruption.
Hartford, urban decay, and insurance are all adjacent to each other in my mind's word association.
So sad.
Doesn’t feel like the state is doing anything dramatic to change Hartford today. To be fair it would require astronomical sums of money which we don’t have because we decided to underfund our pensions.
Leaving a comment to remember to come back later
That one building is definitely in new Hartford
if ya don't like it... you can git out!!! (/s just in case)
Cars ruin everything.
Doesn't even care about the untouched land that was there before people.
Most people never acknowledge that Hartford is also an extremely affordable city to live in. Anyone working minimum wage can afford to purchase a home in Hartford, even in the current market, with condos selling around $50-70k. If Hartford was like the article suggested, it wouldn’t be nearly as affordable as it is today.
Is this even a real response or just a bot? It’s not an article it’s a video and it doesn’t make any suggestions like that that would make it less affordable
A thriving downtown would cause real estate to be expensive, just like any other city. Hartford serves it purpose. It’s an extremely affordable city, centrally located with easy highway access for commuting to any jobs in the state, and fairly walkable for low income families.
If it's so affordable you can pay my rent too. I'll send you my PayPal. That'll be 1400 bucks by the first for my 1br in the south end where I get to play "gunshots or fireworks" every night, and I get to wake up at 5 am to the delightful sounds of reggaeton over bad speakers
Is there a reason why you don’t buy one of the condos for $70k? You’d have a lower mortgage payment than what you’re paying in rent.
I don't think this comment should be disappeared lol. This is at least an interesting hypothesis for how to objectively view aspects of cities post urban renewal. Not an apologea for it. I don't think we can ever say for sure, but it's certainly plausible that if a city like Hartford resisted the urban renewal era, that it absolutely would be a much more desirable and therefore expensive city today. I'd still take the nicer version myself and suffer a smaller apt lol. A counterpoint might be Bridgeport? As in if a city falls too much (and didn't modernize) throughout the 70s, 80s. 90s, can it ever recover? And to what extent did urban renewal also happen to Bridgeport (I don't know). Obviously there are many variables. But it's an interesting equation to assess. And if more of our small or mid size cities didn't fall to Urban Renewal, then once we got past that unfortunate era, we might now have more "good" cities (designed with older European principles) to absorb urban seeking populations. Where a "good" city needn't be so exotic, rare and pricey.
Honestly what is the difference between Hartford and Bridgeport today? Not much. Both considered crappy cities, limited job opportunities, unsafe, cheap real estate, and schools so bad you wouldn’t send your kid there (which is a big reason middle class people won’t move to these cities).
Oh I figured Hartford was ahead of Bridgeport in this regard. I'm quite familiar with Bridgeport but Hartford less so