Requests for Personal Involvement with History

Middletown historian Liz Warner is seeking people who were alive and involved at certain important times in local, regional and national history. Here's her request:

I am hoping to find some Middletown residents who were here during the Hurricane of 1938 or who were involved in activities related to the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s. I have current 8th-grade students doing research on these topics and I'd love them to gain some data via first-hand accounts. Other students might need some information and guidance on Metro Square, the town's early movie theaters, the Negro baseball league in town.... There are more but let's see what response these get. Please let me know if you have info to share. The kids would love it.

Contact Liz at:ew06457@aol.com

Correction on St. Sebastian School Building

In my article on the Finance and Government Committee meeting of Wednesday evening, I reported that the city had decided against purchasing the St. Sebastian School building. I gave a little bit of the history of the building, which I based on a history of Middletown available at the Planning and Zoning website, written by B.A. Cleary in 1979. Unfortunately, I got the history of the building wrong, and reported an inaccurate comment about how St. Sebastian acquired the school building.

The Cleary history of Middletown is extremely informative and I highly recommend it for an overview of our city's past, but in this case the information was out of date. Another outstanding history of Middletown was written by Elizabeth Warner (A Pictorial History of Middletown, published by Great Middletown Preservation in 1990). Liz clarified for me the history of the school building on Durant Terrace, which is now occupied by St. Sebastian. The Johnson School, which I said was the Durant Terrace building, is actually on Green Street (where it now houses the eponymous Arts Center), and was an earlier home to St. Sebastian.

Eckersley Hall was built as an elementary school in 1870, to serve the children of the Durant neighborhood, which was the concentration of houses around what is now South Main Street. St. Sebastian school moved into the Eckersley Hall building in the 1980s. Thus, it is the Eckersley Hall School Building, which is on the Middletown Historic Properties List, that the F&G declined to purchase (for $1.3 million) at their meeting on Wednesday evening.

Also in my article on the F&G meeting, I reported the speculation by Councilman Daley that St. Sebastian had bought their current building from the city for $1. Mayor Giuliano addressed this speculation, as well as the history of St. Sebastian School in a comment on a March 27th article in the Middletown Press about the closing of St. Sebastian. Here is all of his comment related to the school building:

No, it is not true that the City sold St. Sebastian School to the Parish for $1.00. St. Sebastian bought the former Johnson School on Green Street in the 1950s for $25,000 (back when this amount of money was actually worth something). In the 1980s, when it became obvious that the Green Street/Ferry Street neighborhood where I attended school during the 1950s and 1960s was declining, the Parish made a trade with the City. We gave them the Green Street property in exchange for the former Eckersley Hall School on Durant Terrace. Since then, the parish has made extensive improvements to the physical plant, including adding a computer lab, air conditioning, a separate annex to house the middle school, playground equipment and audio-visual amenities, among other things. This is value put into the property via the contributions of St. Sebastian's parishioners, not to mention the staggering subsidies they have contributed annually to sustain the school's operations. As I stated, once this year is over, if there is not going to be a combined regional school, the property should be marketed and the sale proceeds put in St. Sebastian's treasury. This way, the parish can repay its debts to the cemetery trust fund (from which it borrowed heavily to sustain the school) and to the Diocese, which underwrote the school's insurance obligations.

Comment: Remembering 'Urban Renewal' in a Time of 'Change'

Longtime residents of Middletown will remember the old City Hall on Main Street, pictured here in 1910 (this image is from ebay via Wikipedia, but the original photograph from 1910 can be seen at CT History Online; search 'Middletown' and 'Municipal'). This grand structure, along with many others around the downtown, was torn down to make way for 'urban renewal' in the 1950s. In fact, the 'urban renewal' mentality of 'out with the old, in with the new' continued right through to the 1980s and beyond, and even persists into the present albeit in a muted form. This is one of the many lessons learned from a briefing document recently authored by Michiel Wackers of the city's Planning, Conservation, and Development office, 'Redevelopment in Middletown, Connecticut' (December 2008, revised January 2009), available on the city website.

Wackers' retrospective report should be required reading for all Middletown residents, especially those taking part in the 'community conversations' tomorrow. It's not long -- only thirteen pages. But it packs quite a punch. The list of historic structures demolished in the name of 'slum clearing' and 'revitalization' is chastening. What made it possible? The availability of a massive cash infusion from the federal government was a big part of the equation. But so were misguided policy assumptions. And, of course, our ever-increasing addiction to the automobile played a key role, aided and abetted by another, greater mountain of federal funding.

The lesson for those who are eager to get their hands on the public-works 'stimulus' money soon to be emanating from the Obama administration? Be careful what you wish for.

I should note that Wackers' report is agnostic on the quality of the various 'urban renewal' projects over the years. His conclusions pertain to lessons about the nature of the process rather than whether the results were good or bad. This is entirely appropriate. The balanced tone of the report allows, indeed encourages, members of the public to draw their own conclusions. As will be obvious to readers, my conclusions are largely negative, which is why I have labeled this post a 'comment'. But, again, I urge readers to study the document for themselves.

My 'favorite' quote is the one by former mayor Stephen K. Bailey, justifying the demolition of old City Hall: 'large chunks of plaster [were falling] down on the heads of the just and unjust alike' (p. 3). (This and several other choice observations come from Liz Warner's excellent Pictorial History of Middletown, but Wackers also sprinkles in copious quotations -- sometimes deliciously ironic -- from The Hartford Courant, as well as numerous dollar figures from the city's Redevelopment Agency files).

What is it about crumbling plaster that scares people? Bailey apparently associated it with the view from his office window: 'The Mayor’s office in the Old City Hall … was on the fourth floor overlooking the dilapidation between Main Street and the River. The scene was a daily depressant … I had made fire inspections with Frank Dunn, and had seen and smelled the dismal overcrowding. I had cruised the area at 2:00 a.m. with Johnny Pomfret [Middletown’s Chief of Police] … and had seen and had picked up derelicts and drunks … I knew that the concentration of our urban pathology was within the four blocks that I could see from my office window. I knew that slums were cancerous.'

It is hard to read this quote without cringing. Bailey looked out the window. The view depressed him. He had toured those buildings, and they and the people in them smelled bad. He 'knew' that slums were cancerous. So he tore them down, along with the building with the crumbling plaster that afforded him the view. Then he left Middletown (see below).

What Bailey didn't know was that he was the tip of a public-policy wedge that would lead to another and perhaps more entrenched kind of metastasizing cancer, much more expensive to correct: suburban sprawl.

Bailey's quote is from his 1971 address to the Chamber of Commerce, also to be found in Warner's Pictorial History (I think the earlier quote about plaster is too, but I can't find Warner's book in my clutter). Bailey was mayor in 1952-54 before going on to greater things. Is it possible that Bailey was seeking in his 1971 address to explain to his audience -- and perhaps to himself -- how he and others could have chosen to destroy such a noble structure? (Liz, if you're out there, would you care to comment? Or Michiel?) In any case, that many in town soon came to regret the demolition of the old City Hall is evident from the fact that the current police station on Main Street, built in the late 1990s, incorporates several design features from the old building.

Parenthetically: Stephen Bailey was on the Government Department faculty at Wesleyan from 1946 to '54. His last two years at Wesleyan University, 1952-54, coincided with his term as mayor. He then went on to direct the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. Bailey's career puts me in mind of the question asked by John Milardo, 'what has Wesleyan done for Middletown?', about which I wrote last week. Clearly one thing Wesleyan has done, or rather one prominent member of the faculty has done, is take a leading part in the destruction of the historic urban fabric of the city. Of course, the symbiosis between Wesleyan and Middletown over nearly two centuries cannot be reduced to one individual, or even a few decades of misguided policy. Truth be told, just about everyone in town (save John Reynolds and the good folks at the Greater Middletown Historic Preservation Trust) was drinking the 'urban renewal' cool-aid, and that cool-aid had a lasting effect. How else to explain the fact that, as Wackers notes in his report, Wesleyan was a willing institutional partner in 'urban renewal' projects as late as the 1970s, including the one that created the 'High Rise' apartment-cum-dormitory on William Street.

Tom Condon's recent op-ed in The Hartford Courant began with a question: 'Does it not feel as if the first half of the 21st century will be spent correcting the mistakes of the last half of the 20th?' I hope he's right: that we will be correcting the mistakes, that we won't simply be compounding them. In any case, it's possible that a lot of federal cash is going to be heading toward Connecticut's decaying urban infrastructure. Middletown has proven adept at getting its municipal fingers on a fair portion of that kind of cash in the past, the most recent example being the federal Department of Transportation money to improve the city's downtown parking. Given the sordid tale of redevelopment in Wackers' report, it's not clear that we are nearly as good at spending those dollars with any degree of common sense.

[Full disclosure: I'm married to a member of the current, much defanged, Redevelopment Commission (the Common Council wrested authority away from the Agency in 1984 and turned it into an 'advisory' commission -- see p. 7).]

A campaign idea from the Taft era

Catherine Johnson, Architect, and current member of Middletown's Planning and Zoning Board, is running for the state legislature.

While most candidates are satisfied with printing up hundreds of yard signs and distributing them to supporters on high traffic thoroughfares, Johnson was inspired by a photo she spotted in the excellent, A Pictorial History of Middletown by Liz Warner. In it, the Thomas McDonough Russell House on High Street (now Wesleyan's Center for African-American studies) is festooned with patriotic bunting for a visit, in 1909, from President William Howard Taft.

This is not the only photo in Warner's book which demonstrates the art of abundant bunting, but it was the one which inspired Johnson.

She recruited her mother, who is an experienced seamstress, to help fashion similar bunting to decorate the beautifully restored Victorian home of Marilyn and Oran Mills on Broad Street, just across from the Russell Library. The bunting is fashioned from surplus spandex (which hasn't been much in demand since David Lee Roth left Van Halen), and Johnson mounted the display of patriotic stretch fabric at some danger to her own life and limb, often dangling from a step ladder on the second floor porch.

The results were worth it (though the real value will be judged after the election), as the Victorian has been transformed into a campaign display from another era.