“Lost City”: Public Housing, Urban Renewal, and Community in New London, Connecticut - Part 1, Mapping Urban Renewal
This is the first post in a two-part series. You can read the second post here.
On a clear and warm September day in 1963, onlookers gathered to take in an awesome sight (Figure 1). Across the street, a bulldozer’s claw pried a two-story clapboard house off its footing and sent it teetering to the ground in a cloud of dust. Moments earlier, the mayor offered a few words. “This area,” he said, “presently houses about 60 families; within eighteen months we hope to see public housing for 125 families, at least three industrial structures, and a neighborhood shopping center.” Urban renewal had arrived in New London, Connecticut.
Figure 1. 100 Winthrop Street was the first building to be demolished in the Winthrop Urban Renewal Project, 6 September 1963. The Day (New London, Conn.) and the Public Library of New London, Conn.
Standing among the crowd were the brothers Misarski, who had grown up in the house being demolished. “This was one of the most beautiful yards around,” grieved a relative. Down the same street, the family of Charles Potter had recently bought their first home. Potter was known in the city’s Black community, and decades later, his son sadly recalled the demolished “white two-story house with an enclosed sun deck overlooking an expansive yard.” Although the Potters were able to purchase property again, the depressed compensation and unfavorable mortgage terms eroded the family’s finances. Mr. and Mrs. Joseph P. Zilinski once rented another house in the area. Six years later, the family of six moved into a new apartment in the public housing high-rises built where that house had stood (Figure 2). They marveled at the built-in appliances and view of the river. “We’re all very happy about our new home,” beamed Mrs. Zilinski.[1]
Figure 2. Thames River Apartments (originally called Winthrop Apartments), 25 July 1982. The Day (New London, Conn.).
What you thought of urban renewal depended on what side of the street you saw it from.
Connecticut College recently completed grant-funded research focused on the 1962-1975 Winthrop Urban Renewal Project in our host city. This collaborative student-faculty-staff project resulted in a digital public history resource that uses StoryMaps with ArcGIS to present a narrative timeline of the midcentury redevelopment campaign, together with the largely contemporaneous project of interstate highway and bridge construction. A related edited volume is forthcoming from the New London County Historical Society in 2021. Together, the digital and print publications offer the first in-depth history of those transformative events.
“What you thought of urban renewal depended on what side of the street you saw it from.”
The federal urban renewal program, which sponsored large-scale redevelopment across the country between 1949 and 1974, is usually referenced through a bleak shorthand. To elevate real estate values in central cities, alliances of elite public and private interests razed tracts of historic architectural fabric and devastated settled low-income and minority communities, warehousing those displaced in chronically underfunded and racially segregated public housing projects. The course taken by urban renewal in New London contradicts as many of those assumptions as it confirms.
“Eminent Position”
Slum clearance was not the primary motivator of New London’s renewal.
Launched in April 1962, the Winthrop Urban Renewal Project eventually took up 104 acres in the central business district and residential areas along the Thames River waterfront (Figure 3). One of the first New England colonial towns, New London is situated on a deep-water port that made it a national center of the whaling industry in the nineteenth century, and a prominent site for the maritime defense industry in the twentieth. As such, the city did not suffer many effects of postwar deindustrialization experienced by others in the region—but had other pressing problems. New London does not collect income tax. In 1960, 70 percent of its revenue came from its “grand list” of taxable properties, rapidly shrinking as the state of Connecticut claimed large areas of eminent domain for an interstate highway (today, I-95). A large proportion of the city’s tiny 5.62-square-mile land area was already occupied by tax-exempt uses: colleges, a major hospital, parks. Today, more than half of New London’s area is non-taxable.
Figure 3. Maurice E. H. Rotival & Associates, Perspective of the Proposed Winthrop Urban Renewal Plan, ca. 1962. Private Collection.
Meanwhile, the exodus of white middle-class residents to the suburbs drained downtown of retail. New London was “the business and shopping center of Southeastern Connecticut,” and the loss of that “eminent position” was a looming threat.[2] The issue was not only economic, but went to the core of the city’s urban identity. The original Winthrop planning concept envisioned the city “as it used to be,” a “strong retail center, with industry and better housing,” a regional hub. The city sought to create a major retail center downtown, anchored by a national department store chain. An efficient connector to the state highway and extensive parking facilities were key to adapting the colonial-era fabric to automobile-age commerce. The designated renewal area, in between downtown and the highway, was in the path of that new infrastructure.
“Not Fit for a Human Being”
Although the city was at first reluctant to undertake large-scale demolition, “slum clearance” was used to sell the Winthrop Project to the electorate: “[Blight] eats away at the very prestige of our historic community,” claimed the promotional materials in 1962 (Figure 4).
Figure 4. [The New London Redevelopment Agency], “The New London of Tomorrow—Challenge of Today,” promotional flyer, ca. February 1962. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn.
The logic of “blight” was notoriously slippery. The lack of established legal criteria allowed planning consultants to dial their assessment of a neighborhood until it clicked into the precise place desired by city officials.[3] In New London, dilapidated conditions in the area were common knowledge. “How could anybody,” opined one local, “who’s seen some of that area around Main Street not be in favor [of renewal]?” Years later, a former resident described the house she lived in then as “not fit for a human being.” But the rhetoric of “blight” had a vicious underside that blurred distinctions between a neighborhood’s building stock and its residents. The first half of the twentieth century brought waves of new arrivals to the city: in the teens and twenties, Eastern and Southern Europeans, and in the forties and fifties, African Americans. New Londoners were not always kind to the newcomers, especially the latter. The Winthrop area had high proportions of all those groups. In 1960, the city had a 7.8 percent “nonwhite” population, but the redevelopment area was between 15 and 24 percent Black.[4] Was the appeal to the “prestige of our historic community,” threatened by creeping “blight,” calculated to stir up racially-tinged xenophobic sentiments along with civic pride?
“The course taken by urban renewal in New London contradicts as many assumptions as it confirms.”
While slum clearance was not the core motivation of city officials, in any public campaign it pays to know your public. The Winthrop project may well have been more acceptable to some New Londoners because the area housed a large proportion of Black residents. Still, New London’s renewal fares well by comparison with other similarly-sized northeastern cities, where changing racial demographics played a determining role.[5]
“The Key to the Entire Idea”
In a high-turnout referendum election in April 1962, an overwhelming 80 percent of New London voters approved the Winthrop Urban Renewal Project.
In order to qualify for federal funding, a city had to ensure that all displaced families had access to “safe, decent, and sanitary housing.” Because such accommodations could not be found for 125 out of about 450 families within the Winthrop area, new public housing became the linchpin, “the key to the entire idea of urban renewal in New London.”[6] As in most cities, the well-being of New London’s neediest population was far from the core motivations of renewal, but the structures built to address those needs became renewal’s most conspicuous legacy.
“A Lack of Cooperation”
The city’s redevelopment was no well-oiled “growth machine.”
In the 1960s, New London’s power structure was diffuse and often fractious. Governance was divided between city council (which appointed one of its seven elected members mayor for a mere one-year term) and the city manager, a staff position. The city had an impressive 110-plus citizen groups and associations. That civic body rarely, if ever, came together in consensus. As such, decision-making in the city was controlled by a “complicated web of organizations, agencies, professionals and politicians,” often in “open conflict” with one another.[7]
“Black community activism shaped the course of New London’s renewal, securing more equitable outcomes for those displaced of all races.”
Throughout renewal, tensions abounded between the Redevelopment Agency (RA), a five-person volunteer unit appointed by council, and the business community. In 1961, prominent merchants and other large businesses due to be displaced by renewal formed a corporation to secure major development contracts for the area. But the RA instead contracted Adson Industries, an established company based in New York City. After that, the business community was ambivalent about redevelopment. Downtown merchants formed an association in 1967, eventually contributing $50,000 toward a pedestrian mall. But when Adson fell through and the RA struggled to attract outside developers, its entreaties for help to local business leaders were met with mistrust. One local company accused the city of a “lack of cooperation.”[8]
In large cities, effective coalitions between major business interests and municipal officials produced some of renewal’s worst inequities. New London, on the other hand, may have fared better with a little bit more cooperation between business and government. Meanwhile, small businesses suffered some of the worst consequences of displacement. Fifty-eight of the 190 businesses located in the Winthrop area closed after renewal—approximately one-third of them.
“One Slum to Another”
Black community activism shaped the course of New London’s renewal, securing more equitable outcomes for those displaced of all races.
A 1963 study revealed that renewal projects in Connecticut tended to “re-segregate” cities, moving Black residents from “one slum to another.”[9] New London was determined to be different. Throughout the Winthrop project, the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and related organizations relentlessly pushed for equity in relocations and area resident representation on the RA, and even provided volunteer services. The NAACP extracted a non-discrimination pledge from the RA months before President John F. Kennedy issued his pioneering Executive Order 11063 of 20 November 1962, which forbid segregation in federally funded facilities. Unlike the existing state-funded white-only public housing complexes in New London, Thames River (originally, Winthrop) Apartments would be racially integrated. At its opening in 1967, 65 percent of the tenants were reportedly white.
New London was marginally less segregated at the close of the Winthrop project than it had been prior to it (Figure 5). While only 39 percent of nonwhite families in the city lived in “sound” housing facilities in 1960, nearly 100 percent occupied such units by 1970.[10]
Figure 5. Segregation by race in New London, Conn., before and after renewal. Map graphics by Beverly Chomiak, 2020.
“A Magnificent, Grandiose Project”
Renewal could not restore the city’s waning status as a regional retail hub, but it met many of its humbler promises. Still, public criticism grew.
At Winthrop’s close in 1975, in addition to several housing complexes and commercial buildings, the RA built two large parking garages and a small public park, upgraded aging utilities and undertook major roadwork. But the project’s lodestar, a major department store, failed to materialize. Eighty percent of the area demolished was rebuilt, the grand list of taxable properties in the area increased by more than $8 million (adjusted for inflation), and the RA balanced its books. Yet, public disaffection with renewal was at a high point. Planners’ diagrams gave no warning of the violence of large-scale demolition, and Winthrop’s results paled in comparison to the visions that launched the project. Renewal, recalled a disenchanted resident in 1972, “had been originally supposed to be a magnificent, grandiose project.”[11]
“Community memory today mourns the physical and social fabric of the demolished neighborhood, but this was far from the top public concern at Winthrop’s close.”
New Londoners who had been led to believe renewal would solve the city’s ills now blamed it for problems it had not, in fact, caused—mainly, a steadily rising tax rate. The Winthrop project faltered on exaggerated promises and poor public messaging.
“The Type of People”
Community memory today mourns the physical and social fabric of the demolished neighborhood, but this was far from the top public concern at Winthrop’s close. Instead, opposition focused on federally subsidized housing.
More than five hundred units of housing were built under the Winthrop project. Altogether, the city replaced 30 percent of its total housing stock in the sixties, and approximately 12 percent of it was subsidized—the highest percentage in the state, and “one of the highest, if not the highest, of any community in the nation.”[12] This drew the ire of the New London Taxpayers’ Association, a strong conservative lobby that had been the lone citizen group to oppose renewal in 1962. The association relentlessly attacked the RA through the decade, accusing it of wasteful spending and a lack of transparency. But subsidized multifamily housing incensed them the most. “The type of people we brought into the Winthrop project housing,” protested a Taxpayer, “has led to more crime throughout the city.” Not bothering to parse the evidence, the group linked New London’s economic problems to demographic change, and blamed both on renewal. Its arguments resonated with many. Thames River Apartments, along with the twenty-acre moderate-income residential complex Winthrop Square, became the most visible legacy of Winthrop urban renewal.
A note from the author: This post is excerpted from my chapter “Urban Renewal and the New London Community,” in Anna Vallye, ed., Urban Renewal and Highway Construction in New London, 1945-1975 (New London, CT: New London County Historical Society, forthcoming 2021). Many hyperlinks in this post connect to entries in the digital publication, Mapping Urban Renewal in New London: 1941-1975.
Notes
[1] Gina Muzzi, “First Residents Move into Apartments,” The Day (New London, Conn.), 20 March 1967. From here on: The Day.
[2] Southeastern Connecticut Chamber of Commerce, “New London, Conn.: A Good Harbor—Afloat or Ashore,” New London City Directory (New Haven: The Price & Lee Company, 1966), 14. This was a common rationale for urban renewal projects in small and medium-size cities.
[3] According to initial estimates, 35 percent of the 667 families residing in the Winthrop Urban Renewal area were very low income, and 28 percent were considered middle-class or above. Of the 416 structures, just 60 percent were deemed substandard. Of the 106 business establishments, 45 percent were substandard. For more on “blight,” see, e.g., Daniel M. Abramson, Obsolescence: An Architectural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
[4] The precise numbers are not known. Nationwide, two-thirds of those displaced by urban renewal were people of color. In many small cities, the proportion was usually reversed. However, even when those displaced were mostly white, the percentage of Black residents exceeded their overall share of the population.
[5] For example, Newburgh, NY (1960 population 30,679), 83.4 percent white but highly segregated, targeted an 85 percent Black neighborhood for clearance. Rapid expansion of the city’s Black population was also a factor in Easton, PA (1960 population 31,955). In addition, both the racial and ethnic composition of the designated area there were decisive in its selection. The area was 27 percent nonwhite to the city’s overall 4 percent nonwhite population in 1960.
[6] “Low-Income Public Housing Held Key to Redevelopment,” The Day, 19 May 1961.
[7] Alice Nicole Rogoff, “The Political Power Structure of New London, Connecticut” (honors thesis, Connecticut College, May 1972), 122.
[8] Seymour S. Hendel, Hendel Manufacturing Co. vice president, quoted in Norm Soderberg, “Some on Renewal Ship Fear Sinking,” The Day, 24 August 1968.
[9] The June 1963 report by the Connecticut Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission studied Bridgeport, Hartford, New Britain, New Haven, and Norwalk. “‘Resegregation’ Danger Cited in Urban Renewal,” The Day, 29 June 1963.
[10] William J. Cibes, Jr., New London Connecticut, Twenty Years After Brown v. Board of Education: A Report Submitted to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Order No. CR4 AD 189 (New London, CT, 1973), William J. Cibes, Jr. Papers, unprocessed, Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College, New London, CT, 20 and table 10.
[11] Anonymous interview of 4 February 1972, conducted for Rogoff, “The Political Power Structure of New London, Connecticut.”
[12] Anonymous interview notes for Cibes, New London Connecticut, Twenty Years After.
