Carriages and Clocks, Corsets and Locks: The Rise and Fall of an Industrial City--New Haven, Connecticut (review)

Pondering New Haven, one thinks of Yale University and perhaps its highway exits off I-95 as one drives between Boston and New York. Looking deeper, through the dense Connecticut landscape of foliage and old industry, one is not too surprised to find a rich mix of light and heavy manufacturing built on European immigration typical of Northeastern port cities. The moldering wharves, the rows of vacant brick factories, the former worker housing, the new gentrification—all the stuff of a rich tale of old prosperity and new direction.

Urban histories have long abounded, but during the 1970s books such as Mary Proctor and Bill Matuszeski's Gritty Cities began illuminating the appeal of presumably blighted rust-belt cities. The meaning and importance of the old industrial landscape became a new calling among urban planners, city activists, and groups such as the Society for Industrial Archeology (SIA). For over thirty years, the SIA has published annual guides to historic industrial cities across North America. But given the rich endowment of academic talent in the New Haven area, something much more intense than these guidebooks occurs when the historic industry under scrutiny is in Yale's own backyard. Carriages and Clocks, Corsets and Locks is a detailed and reasoned exhortation on behalf of the built industrial past. It walks the streets of New Haven neighborhoods, opening old doors, poring through old records, examining old photos, surveying old street maps and factory blueprints to offer explanations for how such districts grew, how they faltered, and why their remnants matter. The authors take a scholarly but activist stand, advocating for the preservation, understanding, and reuse of industrial structures, both as architectural specimens and as emblems of community.

There are six essays and sixteen beautifully illustrated pocket histories by Marjorie Noyes. In the first of the essays, and with an industrial archaeologist's eye, Robert Gordon uncovers the richness of New Haven's Harborside manufacturing heritage. He cites the importance of material evidence: "mills and factory buildings, the tools artisans used in them, and examples of the products they made" (p. 20). One hungers for more analysis of such evidence as Gordon walks us from workplace to workplace. Company history is still most readily presented with dates, names, and documents. Still, Gordon's survey is a cavalcade of industrial process, from boiler-making to wire-working to foundry-casting to arms-making to energy generation and human transport.

Carolyn Cooper's essay on C. Cowles & Co. reveals New Haven as the Detroit of the carriage-manufacturing industry during the nineteenth century. Dozens of carriage-makers occupied a distinct district, drawn by supplies of wood, labor, and ready transport to the carriage-heavy capitals to the north and south. Cooper details carriage fabrication and assembly, profiling Cowles not only as the chief exponent of the trade, but as sole survivor, today making control systems for automobiles.

Doug Rae's treatment of New Haven's industrial population argues for an economic centering/decentering model of growth and contraction in the downtown. Using employment data and demographic records, he seeks to explain how neighborhoods rise and fall on the strength of their supporting infrastructures, chiefly transport and energy. As communities reduce dependence on the old centering systems of workplace, nearby sources of energy, and regional isolation, decay occurs at the core as businesses and their workforces shift to more independent, flexible sites on the periphery.

Diana Balmori looks to New Haven's river ports as an inducement to industrialization and postindustrial salvation. Although still water offered none of the power potential found in the waterfalls of the uplands, the rivers furnished ready access to destinations for New Haven's output. The riverbound city now has the potential for an "emerald necklace" going way beyond the mere river walks that have beautified central parts of...