Urban Societies Ethnography

Abandonment, Resentment, and Nostalgia:
The Story of Middletown’s “Long Tidal River”

It is visible from the uppermost layer of windows overlooking Middletown, CT. It peaks out from behind strip malls and highways signs. It hovers as a shimmering strip punctuating the cityscape at the base of Middletown’s characteristic slope. It is framed in the triangular trusses of the Arrigoni Bridge like a stretched out flipbook.


I had lived in Middletown for just under three weeks when I first ventured down the hill, towards that mythical and evasive body of water I was told lied at the base of the slope. I had crew practice—the one consistent use to which Middletown’s river is put. The veterans on the team tried to explain the route but eventually shrugged their shoulders at our incomprehension and said to just keep going down, that we’d find it. I set out down hill. Tree-lined greens and academic buildings gave way to houses gave way to high-rise apartment buildings, old folks’ homes and hotels, gave way to a strip mall and the YMCA, which in turn gave way to an auto-parts garage and Middletown plate glass, and finally, the drab, empty railroad tracks. By this time, staring at the bustling highway overpass, I was wondering if we were on the right track. But, a few steps past the tracks, as we stood beneath the cars on Route 9 and in front of the cars whipping around its onramp, I got my first glimpse of the river.


As I waited for a break in the stream of cars and later as we pulled our shell from the water after a shaky first row, I found myself asking why such an impressive and stunningly beautiful natural resource is obscured, suffocated, and negated by the built environment?


As the season went on we ventured further both on water and on land and I became increasingly aware of the River’s context. We routinely ran along the road that peels off the highway on-ramp revealing that a municipal sewage treatment plant now serves as a sort of twisted, perverted gateway to the river—a tell-tale mark that this river-front land carries no discernable value (for where else would one put such an quintessentially undesirable and unattractive service). Nearby housing is now uninhabitable due to its isolation among bleak, boarded-up warehouses. A partially destroyed meatpacking plant, still in operation marks the beginning of a residential area with beautiful views. These deserted, dilapidated spaces radiate out from and lead back to the river suggesting that the origin of the cultural collapse that produced these ruins can be found in the historical narrative of Middletown’s relationship to the Connecticut River.


Layers of History and History of Layers
That narrative picks up with Middletown’s founding in 1650. Located at a big bend in the river, Middletown was the furthest upriver port and therefore a crucial link in early transportation of goods and people. “Trade promoted population growth and the incorporation of the city of Middletown in 1784. By 1790, Middletown was the largest city in Connecticut and the United States Customs port for the Connecticut River.” But the river served not only as a source of economic strength—it was also a source of cultural strength. An excerpt from The Boston Transcript of 1817 gives me my first glimpse of the role of the River in Middletown’s identity—a man who identifies himself as “the Nomad” gives a romantic account of the Connecticut’s personality:

There is one river that lives its life as it ought to, laughing and sporting in its infancy, applying itself to manly toil in its early manhood, achieving great things and meeting people in its strong middle life, but retiring to placid contemplation and simple bucolic joys in its old age, and fading away into the higher light in perfect serenity at last. That river is the Connecticut. For this reason the Connecticut is doubtless the most human river in the world.

This personal, intimate connection to the river is rare breed today, but that fondness and pride was echoed over and over in earlier accounts of the river. In 1771 John Adams proclaimed, in reference to both Main street and the river, “Middletown, I think is the most beautiful Town of all….” Later, in 1921, Frank K Hallock recounted “the river is seldom absent for any length of time from my waking consciousness, even in distant lands the recurring memory of home always includes the river. I live where I can constantly see it and it has become part of my being.” Hallock describes swimming in and rowing on the river throughout his boyhood and claimed to know every detail of the depths and banks of the river. These statements all speak to a powerful and pervasive sense of place that was closely tied to the river and its myriad uses.


The river was home port to ships of war, a key stop for steamboat ferries connecting to Hartford, New Haven, and New York, a shipbuilding center, a customs port, and a center of trade—the river was the hustle and bustle, the in and out, the life of the town. The river was defined by its perpetual activity and Middletown was, in turn, defined by its river. However, by 1830, with the rise of the railroad, Middletown’s port ceased to wield as much power—it was no longer the fastest way to get goods from Hartford to New York and much of trade and travel had begun to move inland. This loss of economic power was the first in a series of events that undermined Middletown’s connection to the river. Middletown fought tooth and nail to regain their prominence in industry, business, trade and transit but the geography that had made the river so well-suited to deep-hulled ships only undermined attempts to build an express railroad. Middletown built one nonetheless spending $897,000 on the venture and opening the “Air Line” in 1872. However, despite initial success, the line was gradually eclipsed by express shoreline routes that “avoided the bad curves and steep grades common to the Air Line route…. When the line failed [after WWI], it was a devastating blow to the city’s economy.” Middletown was left in debt, disconnected from local economic powerhouses, and with industrial tracks separating the river from Downtown. The first of a series of barriers had been built and Middletown’s maritime identity was slipping away.


In the wake of the railroad tracks’ failure, Middletown’s industry continued but without the same momentum. The river now was the receptacle of industrial wastes of all sorts and could no longer sustain the romantic, idyllic portraits of it in the maritime era—this was a dirty industrial river deprived of its beauty and majesty. This disgust was compounded by resentment when a series of natural disasters crippled Middletown’s riverside—the 1927 and 1936 floods and the 1938 hurricaine.

[In the floods], homes were swept off their foundations, and thousands were forced to evacuate as the waters invaded…. trees throughout Middletown were uprooted during the hurricane, causing most of the town’s damage. “Historic old trees that shaded the walks of every street in what was last Wednesday a veritable forest city,” were leveled in a matter of minutes, changing the appearance of Middletown for several decades.

Not only had the river ceased to offer any tangible economic support in a time of economic distress, it further damaged an already deteriorating infrastructure and an already weakened sense of place. It is in this context that Route 9, Middletown’s major riverside highway, was proposed along with a series of redevelopment schemes.


In the 1950s, the US the growth consensus Logon and Moloch speak of in their seminal book, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, was strong and focused on cleaning things up and catering to the automotive revolution. Middletown’s desire to clean up the “crowded residential neighborhoods east of Main Street” was backed by the powerful lobby that came together in 1943 under the name American Road Builders Association—as Jackson notes in his book The Drive-in Culture of Contemporary America, “by the mid-1950s, it had become one of the most broad-based of all pressure groups.” With the momentum provided by this lobby, everything along Middletown’s strip of river was razed in preparation for the laying of Route 9. While this choice was in part motivated by aspirations to regain Middletown’s economic dominance through a better connection to New York and New Haven, it also had strong socio-economic discrimination and fear underlying it as demonstrated by the Mayor’s 1971 address to the Chamber of Commerce:

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 over-crowding. I had cruised the area at 2:00am 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.

The Mayor’s justification of razing through the citation of derelicts, drunks, urban pathology and the cancerous nature of slums exposes the biases of the growth consensus.


Theories of Space and Place: The Growth Consensus and its Alternatives
The all-systems-go, full-force redevelopment of the 50s and 60s is perhaps the most overt and emphatic illustration of Logan & Moloch’s Growth Consensus. The one-sided brutality and biggoted tone of Middletown’s redevelopment plans makes clear that there is a need for what Paul Davidoff describes as advocacy and pluralism in planning—there is a need for lawyer-like representation of interest groups who are disenfranchised in the planning process. Most urgently, there is a need for the representation of low-income groups without the economic or political means to resist the growth consensus. Davidoff’s model provides a format in which use value can counter exchange value, where sense of place can overrule financial incentives, where cultural capital can dismiss financial capital. Davidoff explains that, “advocate planning, by making more apparent the values underlying plans, and by making definitions of social costs and benefits more explicit, [would make clear] that there are no neutral grounds for evaluating a plan: there are as many evaluative systems as there are value systems.”


Most of Middletown’s major redevelopments proceeded without conflict. However, when the South Green, the city’s only remaining nineteenth-century park, was slated to be razed in the name of a straighter, wider road, resistance built. The systematic supplanting of the city’s physical history and cultural landscape came into focus.

In 1972, the Greater Middletown Preservation Trust was formed, a non-profit advocacy group devoted to preserving the historical and architectural resources of the region. The Trust filed lawsuits against the Redevelopment Agency and the city of Middletown and halted the destruction of the green. With the support of the community and, ultimately, through cooperation between the Redevelopment agency and the Greater Middletown Preservation Trust, rehabilitation replaced removal on Middletown’s streets.

As Zukin explains in Whose Culture? Whose City? “the look and feel of cities reflect decisions about what—and who—should be visible and what should not, on concepts of order and disorder, and on uses of aesthetic power” she continues on to remind us that, “those who create images stamp a collective identity.” The formation of this advocacy group seemed to assert that the physical environment broadcasts a cultural environment and that both are worthy of grassroots action. Hayden echoes Zukin’s acknowledgement of the cultural power of the physical environment saying, “historical analysis of different layers of…neighborhood development can contribute to preservation by defining the distinctive qualities of different places.” Manuel Castells further affirms this thread of cultural analysis in his work The City and the Grassroots explaining that from Manuel Castells The City and the Grassroots “’the new tendential urban meaning is the spatial and cultural separation of people from their product and from their history.’ While suggesting that what ‘tends to disappear is the meaning of places for people,’ he finds may social movements mobilized against this loss of meaning in places.” It is this “distinctive quality” of Middletown, this meaning of place that had begun to slip away and it is the preservation and reconstruction of that distinctive quality and meaning which is the goal of the Greater Middletown Preservation Trust.


As Hayden reminds us in her article Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and the Politics of Space, there is a cultural cost to the late-capitalist “creation of many identical units” such as the highway, strip mall, parking lot. The cost can be seen in the loss of identity, history and meaning. Furthermore, Hayden wagers that “the elaboration of place-bound identities has become more rather than less important in a world of diminishing spatial barriers to exchange, movement and communication.” It is this very sense of an identity bound to place that was repeatedly eroded. Layer upon layer of decisions were made that produced layer upon layer of separation between Middletown and its river. One Wesleyan student described it aptly saying “I think the railroad tracks is almost like a line—town here, river here…it’s kind of out of the eye of the city.” The river’s presence in the life of Middletown is ambiguous at best—it is a mixed experience for those who make it to the fragmented park that now lines a section of the shore and a troubled myth to those who don’t make it. One student explained, “I remember noticing a ferry street. That made me think of the river which is funny because I think honestly, in my mind, the river doesn’t exist anymore and I think ferry street is a remnant of there being a dried up river there. That’s how I imagine it even though I know there still is a river.” Another described a futile attempt to get to the river, “I think it was three months after school started. I know I went fall of freshman year or attempted to go, really. I crossed the highway—I walked across the highway…. I died. And then I crossed the next highway but then there was just this steep slope and nothing.” Yet another admitted that, “Most of the time, even though I know that there’s a river within 10 minutes of here, it’s not even on my consciousness and I think most people on this campus don’t think of it regularly.” Clichéd though it may be, there is a tangible reality to the phrase “out of sight, out of mind.” The river is not a part of the aesthetic experience of Main Street despite the views that could be afforded by the steady slope down to the shores of the Connecticut. Where it is visible it is eclipsed or overpowered by industrial and infrastructural masses. It is this visual distancing and fragmenting that perpetuates Middletown’s ambivalent relationship to the river.


Visions of the Future: Piecing together Place
As Middletown has emerged from the frenzy of the redevelopment era, there have begun to be strong voices in the community calling for a re-integration of the river as both an economic and a cultural resource. Bill Warner, the town planner, explained that,

As the river was cleaned up people learned it was a mistake to cut the river off from the downtown. Since the 1970s the city has discussed plans [to create] a downtown directly and conveniently connected to the waterfront—[it] would be a huge benefit to the downtown. The downtown is our largest taxpayer and employer and is well suited for additional higher density development. It would also increase quality of life for our residents, sense of pride in the downtown and create a destination in New England.

Self-proclaimed local historian Jeffery Fine echoes Warner’s aspirations saying,

I’d love to see the harbor fixed up. Route 9 did a lot to kill it…They forgot about the ecology of it, they forgot about what the river could do for the community. They’re trying to recapture it, and it will take time but it will be done….

Despite this recent affirmation of the importance of a sense of place in Middletown, the obstacles to the recovery of that sense of place are substantial. Since the 1980s, federal policy has begun to provide financial support for adaptive re-use over the raze & rebuild approach of the 50s-70s through programs such as the Community Development Block Grant Program and the Local Public Works Program. But, in the case of the river, it is not an isolated problem—it is not merely that Harbor Park needs revitalization. It is a structural problem that results from a layered history of neglect and resentment towards the river. It is the structure of an obsolete port town, the structure of an industrial economy spreading formlessly, the structure of a discontinued railway, the structure of a car-centric culture, the structure of a consumerist culture that values new over old and exchange value over use value. It is this layered structure that must be overturned before Middletown can regain the sense of place that was once so strong.

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CITATIONS:
In Order of Apperance

Color Panorama of Middletown in 1833, Olin Special Collections
Color Panorama of Middletown in 1933, Olin Special Collections
Warner, 33
Hallock, 15.
Middlesex County Historical Society Pamphlet
Hallock, 6.
Warner, 37 & 52-54.
Warner, 52-54.
Warner, 155
Warner, 162
Jackson, 61
Warner, 162-3
Davidoff, 404
Warner, 164
Zukin, 138.
Zukin, 138
Hayden, Older Suburbs, 235
Hayden, Urban Landscape, 42
Hayden, Urban Landscape, 43.
Warner, 165.