3. A Dream of Social Order
THE GOVERNMENT SEGREGATES A NEIGHBORHOOD
In the 1940s and ’50s, the apartment at 530 Park Street was, like so many dwellings in the neighborhood at the time, a cold-water flat. The Vanns, a family that included Anthony, an Italian American, and Anita, whose family was French Canadian, moved in when Tony returned from duty in World War II.
Living without hot water meant that bath times revolved around a routine. Anita Vann would run water in the tub, while Tony, who ran a luncheonette in downtown Hartford and worked as a superintendent for their building, heated kettles of water on the kitchen stove for their two daughters.
One of those daughters, Korky, would be a longtime Hartford Courant writer, and her Hartford bona fides are securely in place. Korky’s mother had gone to the neighborhood’s St. Anne’s School, where French was spoken as much as English. Korky Vann attended school there herself. Her grandfather worked at Royal Typewriter, and her grandmother was a furrier in downtown Hartford.
St. Anne’s was the center of Korky Vann’s universe, along with the French Social Club. She remembers speaking French as a girl. Though she’s mostly lost that skill to atrophy, the sound of a French Canadian accent still sends her off on a nostalgic wave.
When she was in the fourth grade, Vann’s family moved west to Washington Street, near Ward, and she attended Immaculate Conception School. After school she would go to the Mitchell House on Lawrence, a popular neighborhood center that was part of a social settlement movement that began in Hartford in the 1870s.
Back then, women like Elizabeth Colt, Samuel Colt’s widow, made it their business to provide for what were often called the street urchins of the city. Though school attendance was mandatory, movers and shakers worried that some immigrant families weren’t as keen on education as they were on putting their children to work to help supplement the family income. The idea was to provide activities, from English to cooking classes, to help students assimilate. For Vann, the center offered after-school activities. It also offered adult education classes.
She remembers a vibrant Frog Hollow that was sufficient to any family’s needs: a grocery store, a movie theater (the Lyric), two five-and-dimes, and a robust library. As soon as she could write her name, Vann got a library card. “That was great motivation,” she said. “You didn’t need to travel far outside for what you needed day to day.” Frog Hollow kids went ice-skating at Pope Park in the winter and watched fireworks there in the summer. The world ended at the end of her street.
For the Vanns, education was paramount. Both girls went to college. When her parents bought a small cottage on the Connecticut shore, they knew they were living the American Dream, Vann said.
Frog Hollow has been a laboratory, not just for manufacturers but for housing and urban policies as well. Not all of those policies worked to better the neighborhood. Attempts to socially engineer the place often fell far short of the ideal. From an odd plan to move residents out to a city created especially for them in eastern Connecticut to blatantly racist redlining, Frog Hollow has been the guinea pig for multiple attempts to improve the neighborhood—without the manufacturing base it was built around.
Housing has always been fundamental to the American Dream. Early factory owners knew that. Colonel Pope planned a workers’ village with two hundred graceful homes, all within walking distance of his twenty-four-hour factories. There would be townhouses and parks and roundabouts and, of course, paved roads for his bicycles and later for Pope automobiles. Pope eventually doubled the size of his planned settlement to four hundred homes, but when the city of Hartford could not come up with enough financial support, the development was scrapped.1
If that large a development was an overreach, scattered-site factory housing was common throughout Frog Hollow. Housing for midlevel managers was built on Columbia Street, off of Capitol Avenue, with a line of attached, three-story, single-family houses. The twelve homes on the west side were built in 1888, and the east side was built a year later. Like so many of Hartford’s more memorable structures, the homes were designed by Keller, and Columbia is considered one of the prettiest streets in the capital city. Pope’s motivation for creating factory housing wasn’t just for the convenience of his workers. He said: “Contented labor emigrates with hesitation…. When they get a man who looks for a garden at the start, that man is permanent … the little garden is a loadstone to the higher nature of him who works hard, and can only get a few minutes in the twilight or at early dawn to drink in what little Nature has set before him, but which is his own.”2 He also offered employees a hot lunch and a two-week vacation every year, though as was common, workers were not paid during the time they took for vacation.
Publications of the day insisted Pope’s factory complex was the standard by which all other manufacturers should be measured. In fact, Pope was simply following in the footsteps of other successful factory owners, such as Samuel Colt. Before he died of gout in 1862, Colt, according to David Radcliffe in Charter Oak Terrace: Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Public Housing Project, built the nation’s first war-related housing when he constructed thirty wooden homes in the city’s South Meadows area for his employees. Other employers, if they wanted to keep their workforce happy, had to follow suit. Even before Pope rode in on his bicycle, the neighborhood’s first company row houses were laid out, in 1873, along Babcock Street, named for the colonial family that ran the American Mercury.
A walk through the neighborhood is far more interesting when the stroller is armed with a little historical context. At the end of the 1700s, what later became Capitol Avenue was a dirt lane that emptied into pastures west of town.3 A petition granted by the General Assembly on May 29, 1784, set the city boundaries from the Connecticut River to what is now the corner of Washington and Jefferson streets, and then roughly to the corner of Lafayette and Park streets. The same charter called for a mayor, aldermen, and a common council to meet annually. They would be empowered to, among other activities, “lay out new highways, streets, and public walks, and to alter those already laid out, to exchange highways for highways, and to sell highways for the purpose of buying others.”4
Neighborhoods such as Frog Hollow tended to be fairly self-contained, but as the city expanded so did its public transportation system. A trolley system began to snake its way through Frog Hollow. By the turn of the last century, more than one hundred cars passed in front of downtown’s city hall every hour, and electric lines went from the city hall to Pope Park, up Zion Street, and over by New Park Avenue. A car went by every ten minutes and fares cost pennies.
In addition to rows of Perfect Sixes, pavement came to the neighborhood in 1916. The pavement’s arrival was long anticipated, but the process of installation tested business owners’ patience. Frog Hollow was known for a lot of things, but mostly it was known as the muddiest section of town. The ghost of Dolly Babcock’s well seemed ready to assert itself at any time with ground that would inexplicably give way to a bubbling underground stream. Residents sometimes woke up to small ponds in their yards, the result of overnight settling.
Street improvement came after much discussion as to how the “new-fangled pavement” would affect horses and their owners. One Courant letter writer in 1901 was opposed to the traditional macadam on city streets: “No calk [sic] yet invited will support a horse on this pavement when there is a thin coating of ice upon it,” and a smoother surface meant that pedestrians would have to summon even more courage when crossing the street, thus putting the onus on the horse driver to make sure not to run them down.5
Residents soon found out that pavement wasn’t the issue. The danger in the neighborhood was the addition of those trolleys. The Hartford police department added a twelve-person traffic squad after a traffic death downtown in July 1905. A woman had stepped off a trolley car directly into the line of another car. That death was particularly gruesome, but the newspapers were full of stories of serious injuries resulting from encounters with trolleys, including lost limbs