Hartford, Connecticut

If Robert Moses had an asshole, it would look a lot like Hartford, Connecticut.

Once a thriving metropolis on the Connecticut River equidistant from Boston and New York, in the 1940s and 1950s Hartford's city fathers undertook an ambitious city- and regional-planning agenda designed to completely destroy Hartford and then, with an even-handed justice revisiting this impulse on its inventors, the resulting sprawl that surrounded it.

Hartford Before WWII
Hartford used to be sort of awesome. It was connected to Boston and NY by rail, and has some awesome examples of pre-war architecture. Mark Twain actually moved there from Brooklyn, so, you know, there you go.

There was light industry, there were mixed-use neigborhoods, there were trolleys and universities. It wasn't just this place where some roads met, it was a real, actual city, just up the road from Yale and located smack on one of the most important rivers in the northeast.

Robert Moses and Hartford
So you know what people hate? Traffic, and being in cities -- mostly because, like Moses, they're all racists.

With this in mind, I-84 was built to allow people to get out of Hartford to the east and west, and I-91 was built to allow people to escape to the north and south. Of course, 84 cut the residential north end off from downtown, rendering it unwalkable. And 91 cut the entire city off from the Connecticut River, but I mean, it's not like cities benefit from being near waterways, right?

So boom, to serve the creation of suburban bedroom communities, Hartford was eviscerated.

Le Corbusier and Hartford
In the immortal words of Sticky Fingaz, bu bu bu wait it gets worse!

Residences were moved out of Hartford by the interstates that cut it into pieces, making it a daytime city at best.

But THEN, one of the first office parks in America was built just up 91 in Bloomfield -- Connecticut General ! it was beautiful and awesome, a self-contained city in the middle of an empty field that's really and honestly a striking, well-appointed structure. It was a garden city in the purest sense, with ample underground parking, huge, beautiful grounds, and its own everything -- up to and including a duckpin bowling alley.

Of course, what it meant was, now you didn't even need to leave your bedroom suburb to go to work -- work had come to you! And so, Hartford, which the suburbanites had already ruined by making it unsuitable for living in, was now no longer even necessary as a place to work.

The Really Funny Part
The funny part is, Connecticut murdered Hartford and really spearheaded what would subsequently become known as 'sprawl', but because it was first, places like the CG office park were actually not as shitty as their subsequent imitators would be. Herman Miller furniture, landscaping and sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, moving architecture -- it was a stupid idea, but it was well-executed, possibly better than any office park subsequently built!!! It was true arche-tecture, inasmuch as it was the first, and it was in its way the ideal.

Which is to say, the CG office park was the silver lining around the murder of Hartford that it precipiated.

So what did Connecticut do with this awesome place?

They tore a lot of it down and built a golf course on top of the rest!!!!!!!! No shit! They ruined their city so they could avoid going there, then ruined what was left so they could avoid working there, and they built the best possible arch-office park to replace it and then they ruined that, too!!!

In Summary
Jane Jacobs was once quoted as having said, "Fuck Hartford. Those fucking people...Jesus, are you kidding me?" Hartford was on the ass end of every stupid, wrong urban planning impulse of the 20th century, and now everyone around it is screwed until, I mean, when? Forever? Suburbs without a city are completely untenable economically, practically, socially, and culturally.

Hartford is cursed. It is doomed. It will never recover. Go there. Look at the amazing architecture, much of it in horrible disrepair, and see what cars and suburbs and racist city planning can do to a place. I don't hate Hartford. I hate everyone complicit in ruining it, which includes most everyone who lived near it over the course of the last 80 years.

The only comfort Hartford can reap from this abuse is that it's come full-circle -- the suburbs around it are a parade of chain stores and restaurants, cheap post-war track housing, and ignored speed limits as people race from Starbucks to Pottery Barn in their air-conditioned Navigators. Hartford is ruined, but to the extent that it can summon enough strength to raise its head and look around it at the soulless, dysfunctional communities that abandoned it, at least it has something to laugh at, however cruelly and spitefully.