Gang, I’ve got a new piece out for n+1 today about my old home, Hartford, Connecticut. It’s a subject of great personal and emotional commitment for me. You should read it. It’s really good.
Gang, I’ve got a new piece out for n+1 today about my old home, Hartford, Connecticut. It’s a subject of great personal and emotional commitment for me. You should read it. It’s really good.
Nice piece. I grew up in Springfield, Mass., which is always giving Hartford a run for its money in the race for most depressed post-industrial Northeastern small city. There’s a great few pages in William Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces on the plight of the small city in the post-war era, and why it’s been so much harder for them to thrive as compared to the bigger cities.
Don’t remember the whole argument, but one big piece of it was that their downtowns, which expanded during a period before suburbanization, are far too big for the pedestrian traffic they now generate, and that mismatch causes a whole spiral of problems.
Anyway, I thought the piece was fantastic, but did want to quibble on one point. There is evidence, in the culture of Hartford, of the enormous amounts of money that are generated there. For its size it has a lot of nice restaurants and a surprising amount of very good theater. It’s not compressed into downtown in a way that contradicts your description of the feeling, but the people with money do in fact come back into Hartford for the food and culture, just not in a way that gives the city a sense of vitality.
Springfield, by comparison, just doesn’t have that relationship to capital. There’s no money nearby, and so there’s not really much good food or high culture in the city limits.
Dude, you totally ripped off the “so far from God” line from Porfiro Diaz.
Dude, that’s totally an intentional reference that I presumed my audience would get. And it’s Porfirio.
As a kid, I’d commute in once a week from Manchester (and later, Norwich) for piano lessons from Patricia Bellingham at the Hartford Camerata Conservatory on Asylum Ave. Thanks for bringing back memories!
What a wonderful, elegiac piece– you captured the essence of Hartford so perfectly, it actually made me what to return (I grew up in Avon). Thank you!
*want
Just found your Hartford piece from a Facebook link. Sensitive and right on! Riveting, actually. Found I couldn’t break away even to find its author until it’s final line. Add me to your list of followers. Best of luck in your academic pursuits. Press on!
I just read your piece and looked you up. I’ve never been to Hartford but feel as though I know a bit of it now. Great work.
I just came to this piece, oddly as I see it was written some time ago. Thought it was very good and captured the ambivalence a lot of lifetime residents feel. Oddly, it’s currently stirring up a lot of anger amongst the new urbanist crowd here in Hartford, many of whom ironically moved here after you wrote it. But any true Hartfordite has hated being here and wanted to live at some point, no matter how much they love it in the end.