The Highways Tried to Kill Hartford. But I See Seeds Sprouting.
Historian Niall Ferguson said, “The fatal mistake is to write history as if it was bound to happen the way it happened.”
This perspective has made me consider the pivotal choices that shape a place. For Hartford, the turning point was the construction of the interstate highways through the heart of the city.
This quote has lodged in my brain because it has led me to think so much about the “what ifs” while also understanding that we have the power and agency to shape the future.
What if the U.S. never built those highways through city centers? After all, Hartford was once the richest city per capita in the nation. Mark Twain said of Hartford, where he lived for 30 years, “Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see, this is the chief.” Today Hartford is one of the poorest cities in the nation.
Yet, Ferguson’s quote also reminds me that the future isn’t inevitable either. Last week, I went to the city myself to make sense of Hartford’s past, present, and future. I planned to do what I do when I explore cities, find a coffee shop, a place a eat, and experience it on foot as I imagine the locals do.
The Interstate System Tried Its Best to Kill Hartford
After arriving at Hartford Union Station on Amtrak, my girlfriend Shylin and I began walking towards Semilla Cafe and Studio, a coffee shop on the border of Hartford’s North End and Downtown.
I knew from my research that Hartford used to have a lively downtown. Steve Harris, a Hartford local who grew up before the highways said in the podcast, The Road That Killed a City “Going downtown was like an adventure. We would dress up to go downtown. Downtown was like this mecca. You could tell when you entered the downtown because it was bustling, it was busy.”
Yet, we were the only pedestrians in sight. To my left and my right were parking lots, the only souls in a dried-up ocean. Later, I learned that 17% of Downtown Hartford is covered in parking lots.
While Semilla was only a 12-minute walk away, it involved crossing over Interstate 84. On Google Maps, this walk over the highway looked much less intimidating than in person. As we approached, the loud noises of cars filled my ears and the air shifted to a faint but unpleasant smell of exhaust pipes. To talk, I verged on a scream. I could feel the impact of just how much physical space a highway takes up.
As I crossed, I thought again of Ferguson’s quote. What was this before the highway? What could it have been today? What could it be in the future? The answer to all three was vibrant city blocks.
We crossed I-84 and into Hartford’s North End. Now I could feel just how disconnected this neighborhood is from downtown. If I lived here, I wouldn’t walk across that bridge much either.
After crossing one more parking lot, we were now in Hartford’s North End. The noise of the highway faded to a buzz and a city block, or at least one side of a block, emerged. I already jumped with excitement.
As we walked in, I breathed a sign of comfort. Semilla had everything you could want in a friendly upbeat space. It would fit right in as a trendy New York or Chicago coffee shop.
I noticed the used records in the back for sale, the DJ setup, and the local newspaper next to the cream and sugar with a Puerto Rican flag on the front page. What stood out most, though, were the t-shirts on a side wall that said, “querían enterrarnos, pero olvidaron que somos semillas.” They wanted to bury us, but they forgot that we’re seeds.
The Damage The Highways Cause
The story of the construction of the interstate system across the United States is one of tearing cities apart. In particular, tearing through multicultural neighborhoods. One famous example is the Cross Bronx.
That’s exactly the case of I-84, and they didn’t even try to hide the racist intent. In the 1949 plan, a group led by Robert Moses wrote in their proposal, “We feel that the federal slum-clearance and public housing provisions of the federal housing law should be invoked and taken advantage of to wipe out two bad substandard areas between Main Street and the Connecticut River…”
To be clear “wipe out two bad substandard areas” meant forcing the highway directly through a predominantly black and brown community.
The consequences were predictable.
When the highways went up, those who could afford to left. Or more accurately, those who could qualify for federal mortgage subsidies (only white people at the time) left.
The United States is Still Segregated: The Myth of Racial Progress
Through the construction of the highways, the U.S. federal government used our tax dollars to entrench and exacerbate segregation in Hartford and countless other cities. At the same time, Martin Luther King Jr. was giving his I Have a Dream Speech.
I-84 opened in Hartford in 1969, one year after MLK was assassinated in Memphis. With its opening, the interstate created the roadways for the great transfer of wealth from the city of Hartford, out to its suburbs.
Those in the suburbs with their creation now had a route, paid for by taxpayers, to get to their offices in cities in a shorter amount of time. Over the years cleared up nearly a fifth of its downtown space for their private vehicles.
Thanks to explicit “redlining” policies, as long as they were white, these suburbanites could buy cheap homes with a federal mortgage subsidy, while people of color were often kept out of the opportunity for home ownership.
Taxpayers paid for only the white to get the chance to build wealth, extracting it from inner cities like Hartford.
The subsidized homes, highways, and city space for parking have created generational wealth for whites, along with well-funded public schools, all at the expense of majority black and brown inner cities like Hartford.
Just as MLK fought to end Jim Crow in the South, the United States in many places became even more segregated and unequal. The town from which I took the train, just a few minutes north, is 89% white according to the 2020 census. The North End of Hartford, where we walked in excited to order a cafe con leche, is just 4%.
Segregation still exists.
Often, we think of segregation as a vestige of the past. Not only does it persist, but in many respects it has grown worse. Every day that cars fly by and over Hartford, it creates more damage for Hartford’s communities.
Those who live near highways suffer from higher asthma rates thanks to air contamination, and living near highways is linked to depression and other mental health disorders. After walking over the highway myself, I could see why.
Let alone the physical health damage, I found it dystopian to be a pedestrian surrounded by parking lots where there should have been shops, apartments, and people walking their dogs on a picture-perfect spring Saturday morning. That alone, I could imagine, could crush the soul of those who call this city home.
But Hartford Has Sprouted New Seeds
“First time in?” A man with a warm smile greeted us as we walked in. “Yup!” I said, beaming. “Where you coming in from?” Oh, boy. That’s always a hard question for me these days since I’ve lived without a lease for over two years. Eventually, we came to a lame answer. Shylin said she grew up in the suburbs, and I, Vermont.
I asked him where he was from. He told us he was from Hartford, then he moved away, and then he came back. It reminded me of a line from the podcast, The Road That Killed a City. “If you live in Hartford long enough, you realize you almost have to be an activist. The general maintenance of the city depends on the residents stepping up and taking action.”
I felt him perhaps wanting to ask, “Why did you come into Hartford?” But I beat him to it.
“I love exploring cities, and I write about urbanism. I was reading about how the highways split The North End apart. But I was telling my girlfriend, there have to be some cool spots in Hartford. And I was researching and found Semilla so we came down for the day.”
His excitement to tell us about Hartford reminded me of how I can talk about New York and Barcelona.
He began rattling off other places and streets to check out. Lunch spots, lounges for the evening, streets and parks to walk around. Then he said, “Yeah… those highways.” He was being too polite.
“Has there been any activist-led movements to tear them down?” I inquired.
“We’re trying to improve our blocks, our areas,” he told me as he handed us our coffees. It was a little-by-little approach. I could tell he had the confidence yet humility of someone who’s seen how hard it is to make change firsthand. I, on the other hand, am naive, still hopeful that if we could just go ask the state of Connecticut nicely to tear down the highway, they would say yes.
He made us incredible lattes. Shylin got the cafe con leche, and I the coconut latte.
Half a dozen other people sat, laughed, and chatted. Each new person who walked was greeted with a “Hey, it’s nice to see you!” followed by a question about their lives, their job, or their weekend plans.
When customers came in they almost always were on a first-name basis with the employees. Some were young people with tattoos who came to work on their computers, like us. Others were parents who brought their kids to relax while they got a coffee to go. Others still, came in, ordered a coffee, grabbed the local paper, and read.
Here, in Semilla, I felt the seeds of Hartford.
After writing for a little bit, I turned my attention to reading my book Twain’s World: Essays on Hartford’s Cultural Heritage, which I got at The Mark Twain House the week before, during my first Hartford excursion. I was searching for more of Hartford’s seeds.
In this book, published in 1999, I learned about the Charter Oak Cultural Center. The author of the essay Lary Bloom wrote, “Like so many other historic Hartford places, it had been slated for demolition. It was saved, however, by preservationists and turned into a community center.”
Although the book was 25 years old, I looked it up and found out it was still thriving. Today, they have programs like “Beat of the Street,” a newspaper “which is written and distributed by individuals who have experienced, or are currently experiencing, homelessness and their allies.” The one that stood out to me was “Eats of The Street,” where they hire those without homes to care for vegetable gardens, which are then available to anybody in need.
The seeds of Hartford were all here. The lounges, restaurants, places to grab your morning coffee, and a community that’s working together, who often know you on a first-name basis.
The interstate system really did try to bury Hartford, but those like Robert Moses who deliberately aimed to displace these communities didn’t know they were seeds, already germinating and sprouting.
Hartford’s Multiculturalism Has Always Been a Strength
As the caffeine high gave way to hunger in the afternoon, we looked up where to eat. A seven-minute walk away was the type of restaurant I used to take the NYC subway to Queens to eat at. It was a Puerto Rican restaurant called “Aquí Me Quedo.”
Another short, easy walk. In theory. We walked further away from the highway into the heart of the North End. The block where Semilla is had about one-third abandoned storefronts, one-third Dominican hair salons, and one-third weed shops.
I couldn’t help but be drawn by the jagged sidewalk cement with trash and broken glass, the vacant buildings, and the empty lots with overgrown grass and rusty fences.
I’d seen places like this before, only in non-touristy parts of Colombia or El Salvador.
I saw two “cashed checks” stores, which from reading Poverty: By America, I learned, exist to prey on poor communities. In exchange for offering them cash immediately for their checks, they have extremely high fees. I know these places are tell-tale signs of poverty.
There across the street, we saw Aquí me quedo.
I sprang to life once again. We walked in and saw Hartford’s Hispanic diaspora sat enjoying their Saturday lunch, laughing and talking with reggaetón music on in the faint background. “Dos para comer aquí,” I said to the hostess. For the next hour, Shylin and I enjoyed incredible carne guisada with habichuelas and fried plantains. We got an obscene quantity of food for a reasonable price.
We’d found another gem of Hartford. “I wish I could eat here every day.” If finding this place without much effort was any sign, I know Hartford really is filled with vibrancy, culture, and warmth. You may have to walk around broken glass to get there, but behind closed doors, safe from the highway noise and pollution, I felt Hartford fighting for a better future.
The Highways Need to Go
The time for drastic change is now. That starts by getting rid of I-84. Reroute it. There are many examples to learn from. Boston put I-93 underground in the Put in the infamous Big Dig project of the early 2000s, which has now resurrected many parts of urban life in Boston.
Valencia, Spain, seeing the dangers highways posed to citizens, turned a highway into a garden.
Today in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, they have a project called “Rethinking I-94” project, which is working to turn the interstate into a multimodal boulevard, something that looks like what I wrote about with Barcelona’s Gran Via. Hopefully one day it will have dedicated bus lanes, bike lanes, and a center strip for pedestrians.
The seeds in Hartford can only grow so high as long as the highways are there, blocking the essential nutrients they need to flourish.
We Need More Transit
Along with getting rid of the highways, we need to give better options. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. In the book, she has a chapter titled “Erosion of cities by automobiles, or attrition of automobiles by cities.”
The thesis of this chapter is simple: we either build cities for people or for cars. They don’t go together and every action puts us towards one or the other.
More cars require the widening of roads or the shortening of sidewalks, making the roads and crosswalks more dangerous and less practical for pedestrians. This leads pedestrians to turn to cars. It’s a vicious feedback loop that leads to the creation of wider roads, more highways, and more parking lots, all of which further push people towards using an automobile.
To Connecticut’s credit, in some respects, they’re working to undo this. They’ve expanded the frequency and service of The Hartford Line on Amtrak an, which runs with decent frequency and comfort from Springfield to New Haven, ideal for many commuters.
But the focus shouldn’t be on the suburban commuters. It should be on giving those people who actually live and pay taxes in the city more multimodal options. Around 30% of Hartford, despite its car centricity, live without a car. Often, I suspect this is out of financial necessity. This means they should focus on making safer routes for pedestrians, expanding bike lanes, and improving public transit in the city. This will improve life and expand opportunity for this 30%. It will also lead more people to abandon the highways for cleaner, healthier, and less expensive options. (As I wrote about, the costs of car dependency aren’t always in plain sight.)
After the Puerto Rican food, it was time to make the treacherous walk across I-84. Our day trip left me both inspired and sad. Yet, I know there’s only one choice. Trading the highway for other options is an ethical imperative. Fortunately, there’s already some discussion for getting I-84 out of Hartford.
We Need More Bricks
When I think of Hartford, I think of Neck Deep’s political anthem, We Need More Bricks. “Bricks” is a metaphor for taking action towards building a better world. Bricks can be used to build new buildings and tear existing structures down. We can use bricks to tear down highways and build more mass transit, more community gardens, and more small businesses that will be the seeds for a new revival.
More on Hartford: Recommended Resources
If you’re interested in diving deeper into this topic, I have a few recommendations. First is Jim Krueger’s excellent podcast The Road That Killed a City. It’s only a few episodes and they’re all short.
I also recommend this excellent piece of journalism, Living with the Highway: Hartford residents navigate the divide caused by Connecticut’s urban highways, which goes deeper into what I wrote about here.
Most importantly, go to Hartford! It’s not just a city to drive through. The Mark Twain House is a must. Head to Semilla and get some Puerto Rican food.
There’s more for me to explore, including the Parkville Market, the Wadsworth Museum, and a list of recommendations from the locals at Semilla.
If you want to see how the people experience it, traverse Hartford on foot and by bus. For a U.S. city, the bus system is pretty decent (and I’ve been on a lot of U.S. buses.) If you cross a highway, you’ll see just how dystopian they are. Try to imagine that it’s a block like you’d see in New York. Someday in the future, it can be.
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