Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven

1. “The Ghosts of Oak Street’s Paved Ravines”: The Oak Street Project, the Construction of Public Consensus, and the Birth of a Slumless City

1 “The Ghosts of Oak Street’s Paved Ravines” The Oak Street Project, the Construction of Public Consensus, and the Birth of a Slumless City And that pair of One Way signs Whose directions collide In the middle of Columbus Avenue: Is it to keep August traffic from turning Onto Cedar Street some Saturday night? Detour, and fear not the ghosts Of Oak Street’s paved ravines. —Elizabeth Rose, excerpt from untitled poem, AIM Newsletter, Special Riot Edition, August 31, 1967 T he model you see before you will be a model for all America,” explained Mayor Richard C. Lee’s disembodied voice through a state-of-the-art speaker mounted above a detailed threedimensional model of the Dixwell Urban Renewal and Redevelopment Plan. This exhibit was one of the most popular at New Haven’s Progress Pavilion, a temporary structure erected by volunteer labor in the heart of downtown in 1960 to house rotating exhibits about the city’s many redevelopment projects. The pavilion educated New Haven’s citizens and visitors on the notion of the “model” and its many meanings more than six years before the introduction of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Model Cities program. In a squat structure—a collection of beveled concrete rectangles overlooking the town green that seemed to sprout from the dirt almost instantaneously—the mayor and the Redevelopment Agency (RA) tested their notion of the model city, and their means of achieving it, on the throngs of locals and visitors who walked through the pavilion each day. From the time of its own “opening ceremony,” the city celebrated the fact that it would soon be torn down to make room for bigger and better things. But in the meantime, the mayor and his redevelopment “ staff took the opportunity to teach the masses a new way of looking at these “project areas”—to school them in seeing what would, should, or could be there. Visitors were educated on how to translate a three-dimensional model, like the Dixwell project model, into real-life scale, and to focus on these new hypothetical views of the modern city, rather than the realities—the problems , but also the communities, the homes, and the people—a few blocks away. One such person was Victoria Thomas, and nearly a decade before the Progress Pavilion rose up out of the ground, her life—and her home— collided with Mayor Lee’s particular model. For twelve years, Victoria Thomas had lived in a modest apartment at 115 York Street, which is now a jumble of dentists’ and doctors’ offices near Yale–New Haven Hospital. She worked downtown as a buyer at Hamilton and Co., Inc., and adored her “lovely” three-room apartment. She took great pride in the fact that her neighbors were all “businesspeople. Very respectable .” So it was unsettling to Miss Thomas when she heard rumblings about the city’s plan to put a highway connector through her kitchen. She “The Ghosts of Oak Street’s Paved Ravines” / 29 Figure 1.1 Visitors to the Progress Pavilion look at a three-dimensional scale model of the city. The real Chapel Street is visible outside the pavilion’s narrow window. (New Haven Museum and Historical Society Redevelopment Agency photograph collection.) immediately went to put her name on a relocation list, but this didn’t seem to put her at ease. “There are thousands of names ahead of mine,” she wrote in her letter to the mayor, on Hamilton and Co. letterhead. She wrote at the suggestion of the mayor’s wife, Ellen, who happened to come into the store one November afternoon. Miss Thomas considered herself a friend of the mayor’s wife, and thought perhaps this connection might facilitate some resolution to her problem. “What are people like me going to do, or what are we to expect?” she asked, disquieted by the thought of highway traffic replacing not just her home, but also her neighborhood. “I’m hoping that the city is making plans for us—and that I can hope for a comparable apartment and not with mixed races.” She sealed the envelope and wrote the word “personal” across the outside (perhaps at Mrs. Lee’s suggestion), then dropped it the mail on November 2, 1955.1 The letter was, in fact, personal, as Miss Thomas had indicated. She was a working single woman in a walking city, emboldened by her...