A modern history of New Haven and eastern New Haven County, Vol. I, Part 10

Author: Hill, Everett Gleason, 1867- [from old catalog]
Publication date: 1918
Publisher: New York, Chicago, The S. J. Clarke publishing company
Number of Pages: 620


USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > New Haven > A modern history of New Haven and eastern New Haven County, Vol. I > Part 10


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Something is said about the desirability, in sections where buildings must he crowded, of crowding them to some purpose; that is, of so grouping them as to give a common court, and it is suggested that this might be a plan for some unbuilt portions of the city. In closing this part of the subject. there is this touching reference to the "playgrounds" of some of New Haven's sehools :


"Provision for this in New Haven up to the present time has apparently, been almost wholly ignored, as indicated by the table on the next page, which shows that the children, instead of having a provision of thirty or forty square feet of space in which to play, are in some cases crowded beyond all reason, merely dumped out and herded between classes or seattered after school."


The city was complimented for its wisdom in having seenred so much land in East and West Rock parks, Edgewood and Beaver Pond parks, but was respect- fully reminded that it ought to get more without delay. It was hinted in this eon- nection that the New Haven Water Company is more aequisitive and exclusive in its monopoly of land and scenery than the adequate protection of the water- sheds demands. The authors were keen on the need of the public for parks. It appears that they did not know the New Haven Water Company, the demands on its system and the success it has had in providing a satisfactory water sup- ply. as well as do some of their fellow citizens.


So the report did. in its specifie suggestions, advocate not only the getting


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hold, in some way, of Lake Saltonstall watershed, Lake Whitney shores and reservation, Lake Wintergreen watershed and Maltby Ridge Parkway, but of Allingtown Ridge and Allingtown Hill, Greist's Pond and Cherry Hill, Monto- wese and Foxon parkways and Peter's Roek Reservation. These are in the outer circle of park additions.


There was in the main praise for the system of inner parks which we now have, and suggestions of the sort which the park commissioners have been car- rying out as fast as they could get the money. There were recommendations for further acquisitions, such as Springside Valley, Pine Rock, Highwood, Win- chester lakes and Winchester Parkway, and the advice, already adopted, to get the Mill River marshes. It was suggested that considerably more area be secured in the vicinity of the Quinnipiac basin, in the direction of East llaven and Branford, at Morris Cove and at Savin Rock, in cheerful disregard of the fact that many of these suggestions-and in faet others all the way back-refer to lands entirely out of the New Haven jurisdiction.


Some of the specific suggestions for improvement "in the heart of the city" must suffice for completing this digest of a highly important report. A beginning is made at the Green. "The churches should be restored to their original appear- ance." (Center has already taken the hint.) There should be a publie comfort station ; an effort has been made to seeure this, but in vain. The band stand should be rebuilt; we gather that the present one isn't dignified. There is a suggestion out of which has been evolved the present "mall" at the lower end of the Green. There should be some control of the height of the publie build- ings around the Green.


Some space was given to plans for a plaza at the new railroad station, and to the elaboration of the approach to it. Then there was talk of a widened Commerce Street, of a new armory, of a Temple Street subway, of a "bee line" avenue from the station to College and Temple. A wave of economy has since swept away most of these thoughts.


The remainder of the principal suggestions may be thus summarized :


Widen Orange Street from Crown to George, passing it through the Second Regiment Armory.


Extend Union Street at each end.


Widen and extend Kimberly Avenne, with considerable reference to West Haven.


Raise and widen Edgewood Avenue and extend it through Westville. (This has in part already been done.)


Widen Water Street to at least double its present proportions.


Eliminate the Belle Dock grade erossing and widen or replace with a new one Tomlinson bridge.


CHAPTER XI


NEW HAVEN GREEN


ITS ORIGIN, OWNERSILIP AND PRESERVATION INTACT -- ITS HISTORY AND ITS DEVELOP- MENT-ITS RELIGIOUS, EDUCATIONAL, CIVIC AND OTHER USES


I


Probably all parts of the woods looked alike to that group of settiers who landed from the boats of the Hector on the banks of the West ereek. If they could have looked forward a few years, or even a few months, they would have gone through the forest for a half mile or so to the northeast of where they eante ashore, to find a spot for their first Sunday worship. In short, they would have located the center of what was afterward to be the Green, and holding their first public worship there, have made the succession unbroken. But it was getting late on Saturday when they got their goods ashore, and the shadows of the Sabbath were upon them. So they were fain to gather around their pastor and teacher the next day, as it turned out, under a fine old oak that was not far from the bank of the creek. It may be that they worshipped there on several Sundays of the summer that was just opening. They had no better place for some time.


It may not have been so many months after that first worship that the Green was laid out. Ilenry T. Blake confidently says that it was in June or July of the same year that John Broekett laid out the city. We have already seen how he surveyed his nine equal squares, and made the Market Place their eenter. That, of course, was a mere survey, for all the tract was untouched wilderness, but work was begun in clearing and building at onee. As one of the first needs was a place of worship, and as it had been decided that this was to be on the Market Place, we may assume that its lines were early defined on something more than paper.


The Green as we know it now is an almost exactly square plot sixteen and five-hundredths acres in area, about 840 feet to a side, and little more than two-thirds of a mile around. It may be that John Brockett's survey was wholly accurate, but it was easy, in the 132 years before the Green was actually fenced in. for the lines to become displaced. At any rate, we know by measurement that the College Street side is twenty feet shorter than the Chapel Street, and ten feet shorter than the Elm Street.


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It is hard in our time to get the point of view of the Davenport colonists in laying out this square, and reserving it to the purposes they did. They called it the Market Place, and we know so little of their meaning that this does not convey an adequate idea. It was not to be a park, for the modern conception of a park had not dawned. It was not to be a "common" after the manner of Boston's, though they had lately come from there. Probably the clearest idea of what they had in mind is given in the quotation which Mr. Blake makes in his "Chronicles " from Rev. Dr. Francis Bacon's civic oration on May 30, 1879: "A place for public buildings, for military parades and exercises, for the meeting of buyers and sellers, for the concourse of the people, for all such public uses as were served of old by the Forum at Rome and the 'Agora' (called in our English Bible 'the market') at Athens, and in more recent times by the great square of St. Mark in Venice ; or by the 'market place' in many a city of those low countries, with which some of our founders had been familiar before their coming to this New World."


All these ideals and more the "Market Place," the Green, the public square, the common, if you will, has served in its three hundred years. And more, for these founders of New Haven were of a very independent sort, who proposed to found a church-state-university-undreamed of trinity-such as the Old World had not known and the New World had not conceived. A study of the ends which the Green has served, more particularly in its first two centuries, but hardly less in recent times, will convince that one could hardly find in all this land sixteen acres condensing more of unfolding life and tradition and history and destiny than here is held.


Ilere, as Mr. Blake eloquently says. "six generations educated their children and buried their dead." Here, as the heart and soul of the community that was to be, the first edifice for the worship of God was builded, and here it was to remain through the centuries for the worship of God and the service of man. Here was to be the political and eivie forum of the people, and here it has been until now. Here was to be the New World field of Mars, and here have, as a matter of fact, from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, gathered the soldiers of this community for their training, for their reviews, for their start for the duty of "making the world safe for democracy." Here was to be the education eampus, and here in very truth it has remained, though the great university has established its own hard by. Here was to be the site of temples of justice and of legislation, and for two centuries and a half the Green was not without a court house or state house; while their visible form is gone, their memory still remains. Here was to be a market place, and for that the Green literally was used for a considerable part of its early history. The Market Place meant more, however, than a mere place of barter. It was a social center. a field where the people should gather for fairs and gala days, a rallying ground for the children, and these the Green has been. Here, finally, was to be the place of burial, and here, indeed, for almost two centuries after its estab- lishment, "the rude forefathers of the hamlet slept." In a word, it can safely Vol. 1 -- 6


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be elaimed as the institution which, more than anything else, makes New Haven unique among the communities.


The character of the Green, its integrity and even its existence, have not been maintained without a struggle. But to this end its peculiar ownership has materially contributed. Mention is frequently made of the "Proprietors Committee," and its origin is of interest. The wealth that was in the Daven- port-Eaton party, when it landed, was not evenly distributed. Some few were the capitalists of that £30.000 or thereabout. and they became the landholders. "The Free Planters," as they were called. The original nine squares which John Brockett laid out, the tract later puchased from Momanguin, the sachem, and the much larger purchase made still later from Montowese-all these were held by the same "Free Planters." The Market Place, of course, was included in these. The other lands were dispersed, in time, to private ownership. The Market Place alone remained in their holding.


Later they were called "the proprietors." or more formally. "The Proprie- tors of Common and Undivided Lands, " of which, naturally, there were for many years other tracts than the Market Place. In 1810, by authority of the General Assembly, a "Proprietors Committee" of five. independent and self- perpetuating, was created to hold the Green and such other property as might properly be classed with it. That body still exists, and is the proprietor of the Green. It is, as New Haven has more than once had occasion to know, the bulwark of its liberties as far as the Green is concerned.


It is worth recalling that when New Haven became a city in 1784, its first charter contained a surprising provision giving the eity power to exchange the upper part of the Green "for other lands, for highways or another Green, and to sell and dispose thereof for that purpose." It goes without saving that this power was never exercised, but the provision is interesting. It may be an indi- eation that in that early day there was a tendency on the part of the people to take the Green and do with it as they pleased. New Haven has not wholly got over that tendency yet, but there is hope that it will. Mr. Blake, who is a good lawyer. concisely remarks that the provision in the old charter "was eer- tainly extraordinary, and of course totally invalid." It never reappeared after the first revision.


The growth of New Haven and the creation of conditions never conceived of when one-ninth of the original city was devoted to the Market Place, has made a tremendous pressure on the Green. Here is a piece of eentral real estate whose monetary value is set at $3.500.000. The traffic which passes one corner of it was at one time, before New Haven took steps to divert some of it, as heavy as that at any street corner in America. New Haven has outgrown the old width of the streets which surround the Green, which were not, considering that their projectors expected this to become a commercial metropolis of the New World, measured with a prophetic eye. Not once nor twice have the "prae- ticalists" of modern New Haven east envious eyes on the Green as a traditional and useless adornment occupying space some of which might well be used for purposes of necessary traffie. But against every such suggestion or effort the


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proprietors of the Green, undoubtedly supported by the majority public senti- ment of the city, have firmly stood. The most they would concede-and that, in the opinion of many, was too much-was the removal of the fence at the busy Church and Chapel street corner, and the paving of that part of the Green as a sort of concourse, which relieves the pressure and affords more easy crossing for those who pass from one trolley line to another. Thus a sort of "nibbling" process has begun at that corner, which may become serious if it goes too far.


New Haven will have reason to remember the experience of 1917 as a result of the effort to encroach on the Green in another way. The multiplying motor car had brought about a use of the Green of which the makers of the Market Place little dreamed. That part of Temple Street which passes through it had become a popular parking place for automobiles. At times there would be a solid line of them all through the Green, on each side of Temple Street. The result was some congestion, and authoritative opinion said that there was need for more room. In front of the North Church and for a little distance to the south of it, the street had some time previously, and for some reason ( without authority, it appears) been widened several feet. The motorists and their friends now proposed to extend that widening all the way to Chapel Street, and also to add a slice on the east side of the street. The result, as it appeared, would have heen, not so much to widen the street, as to make possible the continued parking of cars there without interfering with traffic. The people would have objected to any encroachment on the Green for any purpose but they more than objected to an eneroachment to serve the convenience of a few of the citizens, and they said so so strongly that the board of aldermen, after the mayor had once vetoed their act widening the street, receded from their position and forbade the further parking of cars on the Green. It was said by as good a lawyer as former Judge and Governor Simeon E. Baldwin that no action widening the street through the Green would in any case have stood in the courts.


In all respects New Haven has stood against encroachment on the Green. Much as the city has needed a waiting room and shelter for the thousands who daily transfer at the Green corner between the various lines of street railway cars, the proposal to build it above the surface on the Green has been resisted from the first. It may be that eventually, observing more closely the largeness of the plan which its original makers had for the Green, there will be a yielding in this respect.


II


The settlers took New Haven as they found it. The sheltering harbor, and perhaps the natural location between the sentinel roeks, had attracted them. They were not terrified, if they knew, by the fact that a considerable portion of the point between the two ereeks that emptied into the harbor west of the Quinnipiac was ordinary swamp. Neither did it prevent John Broekett from making the Market Place the center of his symmetrical nine squares that it was largely a swamp. The place where the pilgrims put their first church would


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not, by our standards, be considered a favorable church site. So we have to picture the Market Place of 1640 as a sandy, grassless tract to the northwest of the Meeting House, with rough stumps of trees between the forest survivors on its partly cleared area. But more dismal was the prospect from the front of the Meeting House. There, where the trees had been cleared off, their stumps stood out of just a plain, unromantic swamp, where the "peepers" peeped to herald the spring, where the frogs croaked later and where the mosquitoes grew at every favorable opportunity. Out of that swamp, at the southeast corner of the Market Place, a sluggish brook started on its way, necessitating a foot bridge over it to pass along what was later Church Street, but was then "The Mill Ilighway" as it started northward. There were two causeways aeross the marsh of the lower Green, one coming from "Mr. Davenport's Walk, " the private way from the rear of the pastor's house on lower Elm Street, and the other coming just where Governor Eaton woukl be likely to enter the Green in coming from his fine residence across the way. There was a stockade, if we may believe the most careful authorities, around the outside of the nine squares, and each of the other squares had its paling, but the Green enjoyed the doubtful distinction of having not even a railing to mark its boundary lines. Where the Green ended and Church or Chapel or College or Elm Street began was a matter for guessing. It was, in one sense, much of a "common."


It had its common and constant uses. On Sunday, the great day of the week, the roll of the first and the second drum, calling the people to worship, sounded from the turret of that great, square, cheerless first Meeting House in the exact center of the Market Place. There the people gathered, earlier in the morning than the present luxurious church hour of eleven o'clock, we may well believe, since they had to sit through a two-hour prayer and a two-hour sermon in addition to long expositions of the Scriptures, and deliberately "lined" hymns, and get through by noon. After an hour for some refreshment and warmth, which most of them got in their houses, it seems probable-this was before the days of long journeys to the church-they reassembled for a service very like unto the first. The children, ranged on the pulpit stairs or along the sides of the room, must have yearned to look out on the pleasant scenery of the Market Place, a wicked- ness for which they were sternly reproved, no doubt. In the short winter days, the closing numbers of the afternoon service must often have been in the dusk. or worse, and the people picked their way homeward in the dark, having very decidedly "made a day of it." Yes, the people did use their Green on Sundays, and in a way materially different from its use now on a summer day, when the multitudes rest on the park benches or on the grass, largely unheeding the call of the churches.


There were other sojourns on the Green in those days even more unpleasant, however. Governor Eaton meted out stern justice to the offenders brought before him, and ruled the people with as stern a hand on the other six days as Pastor Davenport did on the seventh. The stocks and the pillory were familiar features of the landscape of the upper Green, nearly opposite where Farnam Hall now stands. They were seldom without an occupant, following Governor Eaton's


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court sessions. The "Gaol" stood nearly east of them, close by where now runs the walk which emerges from the Green at the corner of College and Ehn. It had its frequent sojourners, too. There was a Watch house hard by it, for with the Gaol and the pillory and the stocks and an occasionally used whipping post, that part of the Market Place was a busy spot a good deal of the week. We may suppose that this was as attractive a spot for the more or less idle youth of the town, and for all the youth and some of the elders who could get a spare moment to see the show, as some of the "movie" theaters further down town now are.


In appearance the old Market Place changed hut slowly. The old stumps wore away with the years, the swamp gradually filled. But we may imagine that up to the end of the seventeenth century there was little definite improve- ment. The Market Place was for use, not for ornament. New Haven was having sufficient difficulty in maintaining its existence. When the colony legislative body met in New Haven, it used the old square Meeting House in the center of the Green. It was in 1719 that the first state house was built, on the northwest corner, nearly opposite the present Battell Chapel. It was not until 1769 that the Fair Haven Society built the predecessor of the present North Church, and still later that the first Trinity Church was built. Long before this, soon after the original Meeting House was built, in fact, there was a cabin schoolhouse near where the North Church now stands-that was where Ezekiel Cheever had his brief educational career in New Haven. It seems to have been John Davenport's plan to keep the school as a feature of the Market Place, but that use of the square deelined much earlier than the others. This first state house, later used for a county house, was still later used for a town house for several years, being taken down about 1785 or 1790.


It seems to have been about 1759 that the first positive attempt was made to beautify the Green. A row of trees planted all around the square flourished so well that they were making a good showing twenty years later. The effect of the thus beautified Green was sneh that it is said to have been largely instru- mental in inducing the remark of General Garth, who led the British invasion of New Haven in 1779, that the eity was "too pretty to burn." It sounds like a fairy tale, but if there is any truth in it, the New Haven of that time had reason to appreciate its Green.


This planting of the Green with shade trees was a definite part of the begin- ning of the work of James Hillhouse the elder, and of the Rev. David Austin (later known as the founder of Austin, Texas) to make New Haven the "City of Elms." We hear of other inner rows of trees on the east and west sides of the Green which they planted in 1796. More trees were planted in 1808. just which seems not wholly clear. But it is probable that about this time was started that Temple Street archway which was the pride of the "City of Ehs" in the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1839 the common eonneil ordered 150 elms and maples planted on the Green.


There seems to have been at least one definite attempt to make the Green a market place in the literal sense. In 1785 a Market House was built on Chapel


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Street at the southeast corner. The boundary lines were indistinct as late as that, and there is reason to suppose that this occupied a part of the Green's surface. But there were other markets more conveniently situated, and there is no evidence that this one had a prosperous existence. Apparently it was discon- tinued after a few years, and soon disappeared altogether.


The Green was first fenced in 1800. That fence was of a type which came, perhaps in imitation of New Haven, to be characteristic of the village green in all New England towns. Squared and pointed posts supported a double row of those square rails, set with the edges upward, the whole painted white. That, it appears, was the orthodox green fence. Wooster Square had one like it, as we shall see. This fence stood until 1846, when it was replaced by the present stone posts and iron rails.


The fence did not keep out the foraging horses and eattle, which continued to be pastured on the Green until August, 1821, after which the custom was discouraged. But the Common Council thought it necessary in 1827 to direet the committee in charge of the public square to prevent horses and cattle from feeding on the Green. The swamp did not disappear all at once, and as late as 1799 there was too much water there, evidently, for permission-or perhaps it was an order-was then given to make water courses for carrying off the water. "It was more or less boggy until after 1820," Mr. Blake briefly remarks.


From the time the first member of the Davenport-Eaton party passed away until 1797 the original Meeting House churchyard was in the Green baek of Center Church. In the course of that 160 years the city of the dead easily became a large one. It was plain enough that unless the Green was to be devoted wholly to that purpose, some other burial ground must be found. Grove Street Cemetery was opened in 1797, and there probably were few burials on the Green after that. There surely were none after 1812. In 1821, or thereabout, most of the monuments were removed to Grove Street Cemetery. In 1849, the Dixwell monument was erected in the rear of Center Church.




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