Hartford was doomed when the city lines were drawn. Hartford proper is too small and when people started fleeing for the suburbs it was left with blight. People couldn’t relocate to different parts of the city as their needs changed, it wasn’t big enough. They also couldn’t get away from the new interstate in their back yard. Ultimately, this resulted in segregation and the decline of the public school system. Corporate types moved to West Hartford and beyond. Once the Hartford public schools weren’t considered safe and of good quality to many people, it was lights out. It is still a problem. I have a friend that invested quite a bit in Hartford rental property and bought a nice house there. Once he got married he couldn’t see sending his kids to school there and they left
I-84 supposedly marked the beginning of the end and I suspect there is something to it in this case. Imagine what it is like to live in a beautiful city with unique neighborhoods, wealth, business, theater and food, by many accounts, one of America’s truly great cities (dead serious, Hartford was big time). Then imagine having somebody build a highway right through the middle of it. So many people would perceive it as ruined and permanently changed for the worse. It took away the feeling of a tight knit community and made it sterile, loud and fractured.
One thing I notice is that many people long for the way Hartford was in the 80’s and 90’s. It wasn’t good then either. There were different positive things going on, like Whaler games and the Civic Center wasn’t considered old and nasty, but still, the city was dead. There are more restaurants and stores now, with the exception of the mall back then, almost everything was closed or closing. G Fox closing really sucked the last bit of positivity out of the town. Hartford has been going downhill since the 60’s. Efforts to bring it back have been impressive but the inability to get people of all races and education levels to repopulate the city has been a killer. Without a smoother way to say it, you’ve got to make white people comfortable moving there. That’s a tough task. It doesn’t seem to want to happen organically and I’ve always felt some targeted effort would need to happen to start that trend. I’m not sure how you’d do it though.
I had an idea in the late 90’s that I proposed in a Courant letter to offer unique academic programs in Hartford and allow kids from outside the city to enroll. Now days, I’d suggest advanced coding, app building, maybe biomedical engineering. The state could fund it as an investment in the city that would keep talent home and help the region as a whole. My thought was that if a handful of brave suburban kids came in to take advantage of it, maybe more would come and then people would start looking at Hartford as viable living option again.
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