Mapping Inequality

Nicknamed the "Hardware City of the World," New Britain was a vibrant manufacturing hub by the early twentieth century. Approximately nine miles southwest of Hartford, ample employment opportunities in New Britain's factories attracted waves of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. African Americans moving northward in the Great Migration settled in the city alongside Black immigrants from Cape Verde. Excluded from many manufacturing jobs until World War II—employers like the New Britain Machine Company and Stanley Works did not hire Black men until 1942—Black workers found jobs in nearby tobacco fields, munitions factories, brickyards, and domestic and service work. By 1930, the population of 68,128 was 30.4% foreign-born, with 359 non-white residents.

New Britain's late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century elite favored the exclusive Walnut Hill and neighborhoods in the city's southwest, near the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed Walnut Hill Park. In 1924, West End residents protested a building permit granted to an Italian immigrant family, accusing Anthony and Julia Naples of intending to turn land on Hart Street into a two-family duplex in violation of single-family zoning. Neighbors like industrialist Howard Stanley Hart raised concerns about the Naples' "tenements" depreciating surrounding home values. After years in court, the Naples' home was never built. The , with zero non-white households recorded in the 1940 census, received an A rating in the HOLC City Survey.

The 1940 census found the highest number of Black households in the densely populated section north of the rail line to Hartford, particularly along Hartford Avenue and adjoining streets. Also home to many recent European immigrants, it was the that HOLC deemed "hazardous." A 1936 survey of the Hartford Avenue area for a potential public housing project described the "low economic situation of the families," most of whom lived in "multiple dwelling houses, chiefly flats over or behind stores, with some two and three family houses."

After World War II, a gradual decline in manufacturing combined with concerns over outdated infrastructure, industrial facilities, and transportation networks. Furthermore, despite building 1,300 units across six wartime housing projects to house workers in the defense industry, New Britain faced a rental housing shortage. The city commissioned French urbanist Maurice Rotival, the famed planner behind New Haven's redevelopment, to design an urban renewal plan in the late 1950s. He observed large Polish and Italian immigrant communities living in "well-defined adjacent areas" and noted that many Black families lived in "blighted" areas targeted for urban renewal, like the "hazardous" section containing Hartford Avenue which became the East Main Street Urban Renewal Area. Relocating them would be difficult, especially as Rotival reported "considerable" local resistance to selling property to Black residents, but the city considered their displacement necessary and adopted Rotival's urban renewal plan in 1961.

The city began to clear the area for new development and federally funded expressway construction despite objections from the Black community. At a 1962 meeting with NAACP Chapter President James F. Morris and Arthur L. Green of the Connecticut Commission on Civil Rights, Reverend Arthur L. Hardge of New Britain's AME Zion Church declared the mass relocation of Black residents a "crisis situation," and maintained, "[we] want to live like anyone else." However, urban renewal plans continued, with 323 families, 202 individuals, and 305 businesses already relocated by 1966. Later construction on Connecticut Routes 9 and 72 split the city in three parts, running through formerly "declining" residential areas and today connecting at a three-level interchange built over the section once rated "hazardous."

Recommended Reading

• Jack Dougherty and colleagues, On the Line: How Schooling, Housing, and Civil Rights Shaped Hartford and Its Suburbs. (Hartford, CT: Trinity College).
• Katherine J. Harris, Stacey K. Close, William Frank Mitchell, and Olivia White, African American Connecticut Explored, ed. Elizabeth J. Normen. (Wesleyan University Press, 2014).
• M.E.H. Rotival and Associates, "New Britain, Connecticut: The Renewal of an Industrial City, 1958." Redevelopment Folder, Local History Room, New Britain Public Library.
• New Britain African American Oral History Project, Local History Room, New Britain Public Library.
• Thomason and Associates, Historic Preservation Action Plan (2010) for the New Britain Department of Municipal Development and Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation.