If you read German, the article can be found on the Aufbau website. The original in English is below.
The
story of New London, Connecticut, has always been one of destruction. If you
live here long enough, you will start telling tales of destruction too.
You will
speak of Benedict Arnold, the talented but arrogant American officer who
switched sides during the Revolutionary War and in 1781 burned swaths of New
London to the ground. You will point out where streets and buildings used to be
before the “urban renewal” of the 1960s and ‘70s obliterated them. When a storm
comes, and the Thames River roars up over the piers, you will reminisce as if
you’d been there about the great hurricane of 1938, when the city was cut off,
strewn with elm trees and splintered ships, simultaneously drowning and aflame.
And yet,
New London has always come back. Built around a deep, open harbor, one of the best
in New England, it has usually drawn its resilience from the sea. The city
turned from shipbuilding in the 17th century to privateering in the
18th century to whaling in the 19th century. It has been
an exclusive seaside resort and a home for the Navy and Coast Guard.
Today
New London could be a model of the declining American urban center, a tiny
Detroit. It could also be an example of a city reborn from ashes, as it has
been - literally and figuratively - many times before. Yet currently it
is neither. Since I first moved here in 2007, lured by a gently curving
coastline and a rich history crammed into six square miles of city, New London
has seemed to hang precariously between success and failure.
“It is
really sad how long it takes,” says Sandra Kersten Chalk, Executive Director of
preservation organization New London Landmarks. Chalk used to work for the
Garde Arts Center, a restored 1920s theatre and early participant in the slow, arts-fueled revitalization that began in
New London over 20 years ago.
It was
supposed to happen earlier. When historic Starr Street was restored in 1980,
creating a block-long vision of tourist-brochure perfection complete with
brick sidewalks, lamp-posts and
pastel-painted homes, it was thought
that further sprucing up would follow. It didn’t.
When
Chalk came to New London in 1990, she says, “It was terrible. The city was
still suffering from the ravages of urban renewal. So there were great empty
lots, great empty spaces.” State Street, one of the city’s major thoroughfares,
had been turned into a pedestrian mall which no one used. All the street’s
businesses had closed, or moved -
like many residents - to the
suburbs. Low-income housing had been
built behind the demolished blocks, trapping people, many of whom did not have
cars, in neighborhoods where they couldn’t even buy groceries. A working-class downtown that had thrived since
1900 had died off.
The
decline extended beyond downtown. The Hodges Square neighborhood, which
includes Connecticut College and the US Coast Guard Academy, was split from the
rest of New London in stages. In 1943, the first bridge across the Thames was
built, replacing the ferries that had traveled between New London and Groton
for centuries. In the 1970s, a twin bridge was added to keep up with increasing
traffic, leaving massive concrete footprints on what remained of the community.
“It’s
not that far” from downtown, Chalk says of Hodges Square, “it just seems far
because it’s so ugly.” Current proposals for Hodges Square include walking and
biking paths to re-connect the area to
downtown, as well as improvements to the once-fashionable Riverside Park, which later became so neglected that
its riverfront access point was
deemed unsafe and closed.
If the
“creative placemaking” Chalk describes can remedy this decline, it will also
take money, and, perhaps more importantly, marketing. New London is ideally situated
between New York and Boston; easily reached by road, rail, or water; and has land
available for development. But, Chalk laments, “We don’t sell the city very
well.” Outsiders have negative views of New London, she says, or no views at
all. “Hopefully that’s beginning to change.”
Annah
Perch shares that hope. She is the new Executive Director of New London Main
Street, the local branch of a national program dedicated to reviving downtowns
plagued by the lingering effects of decades-old
policies. (Ironically New London has no physical Main Street; it too was a
victim of urban renewal, torn down and replaced with a pedestrian-unfriendly one-way street called Eugene O’Neill Drive, after the playwright, who
grew up in the city and set his Long
Day’s Journey Into Night here.)
I am
expecting Perch to speak of the challenges New London faces, but she is all
optimism. The quality of life here is high, she tells me, with arts, culture,
and entertainment that “rivals that of New York City in some cases.”
Her only
frustration is that “New London is perhaps too well kept of a secret.” In
addition to the historic lack of marketing, Perch says that in promoting New
London, she is up against an “old-fashioned perception that urban centers are
more dangerous, more gritty, than any other place.” She notes that the suburban
town of East Lyme, where she lives, is not without crime. Yet “Nobody’s
planning on leaving East Lyme because it’s becoming dangerous.”
This is
echoed by Dirk Langeveld, former editor of New London Patch, part of a network
of hyper-local news and community
websites now owned by AOL. Langeveld points out that the city’s bad reputation is
perpetuated on the Internet, where commenters who “will put New London down at
every turn” can skew Google results with their pessimism.
When he
moved here in 2010 to take the editor job, Langeveld found the city full of
dining and entertainment options. But he noticed that many business owners he
spoke to had only opened a few years before that. He wondered, “What were we
like before 2005?”
2005, as
it turns out, was a dark moment in New London’s history. That year, the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled in Kelo v. City of New
London that the city’s power of eminent domain allowed it to seize and tear
down private houses in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood and use the land not for
a road or military installation, but for economic development.
The story
of Fort Trumbull is complex, involving a corrupt Republican governor angling
for traditionally Democratic urban votes, a quasi-public development agency looking to re-brand as “hip” a city content with its blue-collar roots, and a pharmaceutical company happy to make or break
promises if it thought profits would follow. The result is simple; the assured economic
development never materialized. The plot of land made famous by Kelo is now a field of overgrown
vegetation across the street from a serene State Park.
A few
months ago, a plan to build condominiums on a former Navy property near the
site - in itself a controversial
idea - was stalled just ahead of the
scheduled closing when the developer failed to provide adequate financing plans
to the city.
Such
disappointments have made New Londoners cautious, Langeveld says. Yet he too
sees optimism in the city. And, he reasons, even New London’s setbacks have always
provided opportunities to boast. “We fought Benedict Arnold!” he says smiling. There
is pride in having rebuilt, again and again.
Langeveld
has seen “some net progress” during his time in new London. He cites the Monte
Cristo Bookshop, which opened last year with funding from Kickstarter donations,
indicating the public is willing to support New London businesses. There are
also plans for a Coast Guard Museum, which, if successful, could be a boon to
the city. Recent gay pride events have drawn large crowds, and positive
articles have popped up in the travel sections of newspapers.
If
accelerated change comes to New London, I will have to watch it from afar. I’m moving
to Hartford, Connecticut’s capital city. Yet though I’m looking forward to it, I
can already feel New London, with its train whistles and foghorns and potential,
calling me back even before I go.
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