USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > New Haven > A modern history of New Haven and eastern New Haven County, Vol. I > Part 11
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Street lights, as we know them, distinctly belong to the modern New Haven. The streets were lighted by gas until about the middle of the nineteenth cen- tury ; the Green was first lighted by gas in 1855. When New Haven changed to electricity, the Green shared in the change. Of the "Great White Way" the Green got only the reflected light, though on not a few special occasions in the early part of the twentieth century the Green has been brilliantly and artistic- ally lighted, as on Fourths of July, and times of welcome to distinguished visitors. The lower Green, with the Liberty pole in the center, lends itself very favorably to that sort of decoration, and many times in recent years the Green at night has presented a scene of beauty long to be remembered.
Of course the orthodox green everywhere has to have a "Liberty pole." This does not happen so, but is the definite result of the activities of a society known as the "Sons of Liberty." which came into existence at the time of the Revolutionary war, and made it its business to see that every town had a Liberty pole. The Green got its pole in 1775 or 1776, but the British soldiers who visited the town three or four years later probably saw to its taking down,
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even if they did spare the town from burning. The pole was restored soon afterward.
Publie wells were an institution in the old New England town, and New Haven had its share, on the Green. There have been five wells on the Green in its time-all of blessed memory now. Two of these were fire wells, and did not amount to much. Another served for a considerable time. The fourth was the familiar old "town pump" of a century, at the corner of Church and Chapel.
The oldest well was dug nobody knows when in the vieinity of the old "gaol." Probably it slaked the thirst of many sufferers, some of them in the pillory or the stocks, perhaps. It was closed somewhere between 1840 and 1850. The two fire wells stood, the first about 1797, at the corner of Chapel and Temple streets, and the other in 1819 near the corner of Ehn and Temple streets. They were usually dry, we are told. Perhaps this was from the drain of fire use, but it is more likely that they did not strike those unfailing springs which fed the swamp of old at the lower corner of the Green. They disappeared long ago.
The well so many have known, for whose demise so many mourned, was dug in 1813 at the corner of Church and Chapel streets. Its familiar canopy and three-handled pump were ereeted in 1878, though the working parts of the pump must have had occasional renewal in the almost eonstant use it received for more than thirty years afterward. For the last two decades of the use of this well New Haven's size, and the increasing contamination of the soil and the spring sources, were such as to make its water decidedly dangerous to use, but the people, scorning typhoid or anything like it, elung to the dear old pump. Its water was cool in summer, and they liked it. Many pitchers came to its fountain in the years of its existence, even to the last. At length the city, despite protests, diseontinned it in 1913.
Meanwhile, the Bennett fountain's classic Greek temple, a gift of the late Philo S. Bennett, was erected at this eorner in 1908. It never enjoyed the popularity of the well, for its stream is reservoir water. A "bubbler," fed from the same source, now stands near where the old pump was.
Not so many people knew of the fifth well, and many of these have forgotten it. In his last term as mayor, about 1907, it seemed good to the Hon. John P. Studley to sink an artesian well at this corner, not many feet from the old pump. At a considerable expense, he drove a pipe down about 100 feet, and got a good flow of water. No pump was ever attached to it, for it was demonstrated that water from so large a spring would be worse contaminated than water from the old one, and the well was some time ago eovered up.
III
In more senses than is commonly realized the Green has from the first been the heart and center of the life of New Haven. It was so in 1640, when the 300 or thereabout of Davenport's little company gathered from their nine squares with their 144 acres to worship on Sunday at the Meeting House on the Market Place. It is so in 1917, when a eity of perhaps 175.000 people, living spread
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over 12,000 acres, comprising some fifty nationalities, sends all sorts of its people on Sunday either to worship in the churches on the Green, to rest on the park seats in the shade of its trees, or to streteh with their wives and children on its grass.
These are the obvious nses. It has in its time served many purposes, and serves them now. Its utility and sentiment and historical and community im- portance do not in the least diminish with the years. It was from the first, as we have seen, a religious center. The original church has had three edifices there. The third, the noble Center Church which we see today, was erected in 1813. Trinity Church's handsome edifice, the second in its history, was built in 1814. The present North, or United Church building, standing near the site of the Fair Haven Church, also was erected in 1814.
There was another church on the Green-two of them, in fact. It is familiar history, of course, that the original building of the First Methodist Church stood on the Green. There was more or less of an unpleasant looking askance, as late as 1821. of the old Congregational churches toward the Methodists, but there seems to have been no opposition to the erection of a church of this denomination there. It was probably because there was more room there-the old town house and prison and the other marks of crude penal practices, had long since dis- appeared-that the northwest corner of the Green was chosen. There the Methodists ereeted their first building.
No doubt it was an old story, familiar to an earlier generation, which Mr. Blake delightfully revived in his "Chronieles," about what happened to this ehureh when it was first ereeted. The sinful pretense of the building they had planned seems to have filled the souls of the Methodist brethren with many misgivings. As we see it in the pictures, it was a square, bare building, without anything like a spire, looking for all the world like a barn except for its liberal supply of windows. Yet the brethren feared it would be too decorative. And the officiating elder prayed, we are told, that if it was not in accordance with Divine will the four winds of heaven might level it with the ground. The brethren might have been wiser in their generation. for they seem not to have completely finished the braces. And the very next day the wind arrived from heaven in the shape of the celebrated gale of September, 1821, and it was entirely sufficient. It laid the bricks of the edifice as flat as before they had even seen mortar.
The brethren appear not to have accepted this exactly as an answer to the prayer. or even as a warning against sinful display. Perhaps they compared it with the ornate churches in the center of the Green, and did some thinking. At any rate, they at onee began to relay their bricks in the same spot. and finished the rebuilding a year later. There was another dedicatory prayer, but it is said to have been more eautions. This building stood until 1848, when the people changed to their present building and site. It is noticeable that no compunction existed then against choosing a good type of architecture.
The Green has always been, as it was intended to be, a political and civie forum for the community. It never served, as the faithful of the Davenport
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party are said to have expected it to serve, as a gathering place for the people on Christ's second coming, but many a gathering in which his patriotic soul delighted has it seen in its three hundred years. Whenever the people would gather, there they have found room. Independence days have found mighty multitudes there of those who, though of many lands and tongues, became one on its free soil. The Green has always been the arena of free speech-too free speech, it has seemed at times. All political parties have been permitted to present their arguments there. Though New Haven and New England were against him, and though the young men of Yale hovered around and more or less positively voieed their disapproval, Mr. Bryan repeatedly spoke on the Green in his tours preliminary to his defeats. Hiram Johnson presented there in 1912 the claims of Mr. Roosevelt. It has seen many stirring seenes, heard much fervid eloquence, and still remains to serve as a gathering place for such of the people as would hear any message of citizenship.
In a distinet and conspicuous sense, the Green has been an educational campus. John Davenport, it may be, would have erected his college on the Market Place, if he had achieved it in his time. It was not to be then, and when it did come, it was for sufficient reasons to be elsewhere. Even Daven- port's more primary educational system did not long flourish on the Green. The common meeting ground of all the people was to serve the community's educational ends more broadly. It had, to be sure, the first schoolhouse in New Haven, built very soon after the first Meeting House. Hopkins Grammar School was there, too, and served through fifteen decades of the colony's struggling educational beginnings. We find, moreover, that the first town library, about- 1661, was housed in this first school building. The building remained for some time after that, and the Green apparently was regarded as the place of eduea- tion, at least until some time after the appearance of Yale in New Haven.
Yale has from the beginning had direct relations with the Green. It was in the old Meeting House on the Market Place that the General Assembly of 1701 confirmed the charter prepared by James Pierpont and his associates. It was on that same Market Place, in the Meeting House or in one or another of the succeeding state houses, that the General Assembly passed most of the other acts vitally affecting the progress of the college. It was in Center Church that the college, up to the time when Woolsey Hall was completed soon after 1900, held its annual commencement exercises. There still the scholastie procession forms which annually proceeds to Woolsey Hall. There the students of the college attended church until well on in the nineteenth century. New Yale's first impression of old Yale is generally gained from the Green, and many a student dweller on the east side of the old quadrangle found inspiration during his four years, from the view his windows afforded of the fine old square. There the students have been wont to gather when they would "gambol on the Green," and there have been gatherings of them there, as we have seen, that did them less than credit. But Yale continues to have a more or less sentimental interest in the Green, and feels, without challenge from the people. a sort of joint pro- prietorship.
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For two centuries the Green was the seat of judicial tribunals, and still is, in a sense. Such judicial standing as the old gaol, stoeks, pillory and watch house, had, was there maintained at the very first, though Governor Eaton, it seems, had his seat of office in his imposing house on Ehn Street. The Meeting House, being the only adequate publie building for almost all of the first een- tury, served as the state house as well, when the legislature met in New Haven, np to 1719, when the first state house was built near the corner of College and Elm streets. It served until 1763, when the second, as we have seen, was erected on Temple Street, between the first Trinity Church and Center Church's predecessor. It disappeared in 1828, to give place to the last state house which the Green saw, built in 1831. It stood, as many of the residents of New Haven well recall, on the slope to the westward of Center Church. Its use as a state house was discontinued, of course, when New Haven ceased to be the joint- capital, but the sentiment of New Haven and the architectural dignity of the building preserved it until 1889. There are many who wish it had been pre- served longer. The not generally regretted tendency, however, has been to keep the modern Green clear of buildings. All of New Haven's chief judicial and legislative buildings have always overlooked, and still overlook, the Green.
The Green has served as the "general training ground" of the colony days, the military field of later times. There were gathered and drilled such forces as New Haven furnished for the help of its neighbors in the Indian trouble days before the Revolution. There the "minute men" rallied. There, on an occasion which New Haven is not permitted to forget. the Foot Guards were drawn up after their victorious encounter with the selectmen and the receipt of their supply of powder, and received pastoral admonition and spiritual speeding on their mission from the Rev. Jonathan Edwards.
It was on the Green, that is, in Center Church, that the citizens met in 1779 to devise ways and means to defend the town against the British invasion that was on the way. It was there, probably, that the British invaders issued their futile proclamation of their king's sovereignty over everything in sight. It was there, certainly, that they received their impression that New Haven was "too pretty to burn." It was on the Green, ten years later, that the exultant people gathered to welcome the nation's hero of the war, and its first president, General Washington.
In was on the Green, when three-quarters of a century later the clouds of the Civil war lowered, that the defenders of the Union met when making ready to go to the battle front. It was there, in the half century following, that New IIaven held all its military reviews and demonstrations. It was never a field more seeming martial than in the thrilling months following the American recognition of war in 1917. when college men and townsmen alike drilled there daily in preparation for the service of their country on a foreign field.
The Green has often afforded a meeting place for the children, in jubilees, Sunday school gatherings, meetings of school children, folk dances and the like, in this respeet fulfilling the mission of the Old World market place. Two notable occasions of the sort were the Children's Jubilee, on July 23, 1851, when
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fourteen Sunday schools assembled on the Green after a short parade; and again on October 8, 1916, when the Green was the objective point of the great Sunday school parade which was a part of the advertising convention of the New Haven Publicity Club. At that time fifty Sunday schools of New Haven and vicinity, with over 5,000 in line, paraded the principal streets of the city with floats and banners, and afterward gathered on the Green to sing, listen to addresses and receive banners of award.
For several years the children of Lowell House and the playgrounds gave an annual exhibition of drills and faney and folk dances on the Green, and few American cities have seen finer sights than these groups of children, presenting on this New World field of democracy some of the scenes familiar to the market places of the Old World.
The Green in New Haven has been the model for many of the daughter towns . of the New Haven district. Guilford has a green almost as large, and as much of an institution in the town. Madison's green is its civie eenter, for generations the pride of the town. East Haven, West Haven, Branford, have their dis- tinetive if less imposing central squares. It would be interesting to know how many towns there are in New England, particularly in Connectieut, which got their inspiration from the Green at New Haven. For this is a peculiarly New Haven institution, almost as peeuliar to the town as are East and West Rocks and Yale University. It is with reason that the town regards it with peenliar pride, and jealously guards it from eneroachment.
CHAPTER XII NEW HAVEN'S PARK SYSTEM
ITS MODERN DEVELOPMENT FROM EAST AND WEST ROCKS-TIIE INTERESTING SYSTEM OF CITY SQUARES
I
New Haven had the Green, strange as it may seem, for almost two centuries and a half before it had a publie park. It had Wooster Square, a smaller imita- tion of the Green, for more than fifty years, but it never thought of it as we in these days think of a park. Perhaps the existence of these and other public squares, creating the impression that the city was well supplied with breathing spaces, delayed rather than helped the beginning of an adequate park system. The New Haven of 1880 had only sixty-three thousand people. It was a com- modions city, for that number, and they seemed to have plenty of room. The conception of the twentieth century publie park had not dawned, at least not upon New Haven.
Nor is it less surprising that when New Haven went into parks, it went in with a rush. The two notable landmarks, East and West Roek, which had dis- tingnished New Haven for three centuries and more, were the inspiration. Per- haps the idea of making them publie parks did not dawn all at once. The good work was started in 1880, when the city received the gift of eighty-seven aeres ad- joining East Roek. Gifts of money to the extent of twelve thousand dollars were received from publie spirited eitizens, and with that money East Rock was purchased from the then owner, the late Milton J. Stewart. It is a popular tradi- tion that he found the money just sufficient for the erection of the twelve identical and unlovely tenement houses, which for thirty-five years thereafter desperately clung to the edge of State Street next to the meadows near Mill River, and were commonly known as "Stewart's Folly." Anyway, he built them, and the story is that they did him little good. They passed from hand to hand, and from one stage of dissolution to another, until in the course of human events and park progress East Rock itself extended to them in 1915. A short time afterward, the city erased the last of them, and poetie justice was complete.
Several hundred aeres were ineluded in the first purchase, but it lay prae- tically idle in the hands of the city for several years. East Rock's summit was accessible to the good climber, and he was well repaid. But the attention of the
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JUDGES' CAVE, ON WEST ROCK, NEW HAVEN, WHERE SOME OF THE REGICIDES WERE HIDDEN
CELLAR AT GUILFORD IN WHICH GOVERNOR WILLIAM LEETE CONCEALED THE REGICIDES GOFFE AND WHALLEY IN 1661
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eity in general was little attracted. The park project, however, had good friends. Henry T. Blake, who has made the Green historie by his "Chronicles," had the vision, and earnestly advocated-the development of East Rock Park. lle was ably seconded by others, chief among them Henry F. English of the present park commission. They kept the matter before the public until they secured funds for the laying out of a drive to the summit of East Roek. Next eame the decision of the city to erect its soldiers' monument at the summit. There it was completed in 1887, at a total cost of $50,000, and stands as a landmark that accents the notable eminence, verily-
"First glimpse of home to the sailor, as he makes the harbor round,
And last slow, lingering vision, dear to the outward bound."
It memorializes, with its bronze tablets bearing their names, the soldiers and sailors of New Haven who died in the great wars between 1766 and 1865. East Rock rises sheer 363 feet above the New Haven plain at its foot, and this shaft of granite tops it for 112 feet more.
By gradual additions the extent of East Rock, as the first and now the largest of New Haven's parks, has grown to 423.05 acres, and it embraces not only the whole of East Rock and Indian Head adjoining, but reaches over a broad strip of wood and meadow on each side of Mill River, extending from Whitney Avenue and Lake Whitney on one side to Orange and State streets on the others. It is approached by drives from Whitney, Orange and State streets and the Ridge road. There are now within it six miles of footpaths and nearly seven and one-half miles of drives, three of which wind from different entrances easily toward the summit.
Thus easily reached-two electric railways take those who cannot walk the two miles from city hall to the entrance of the park-East Rock Park is a favorite publie resort at all but the hottest and the winter seasons of the year. Aside from the well kept drives and paths, and some lawns and a few flowers around the monument at the summit, nature has been mostly undisturbed, except over at that spot near the State Street entrance known as the "Zoo." There a miscellaneous and growing collection of animal and bird life is kept on exhibition, comprising a number of bears, some guinea pigs, hares, peacocks, pheasants, guinea hens and bronze turkeys. This collection proves very popular with the publie.
From the brow of the roek itself lies the eity spread out, a near view for all who care to see it. To the southward are the harbor and the Sound, with the white sand eliffs of Long Island looming up on a clear day. To the east and northeast are some glimpses of North Haven, with the "Sleeping Giant" always stretched in the distance. And the Hanging Hills of Meriden are visible beyond, at times. It is a view that well repays the climb, and never grows old for the real admirer of New Haven's distinctive scenery.
Next in size, next in age and doubtless next in importanee is the twin park of West Roek. New Haven was well committed to the park business, and had East Rock well in hand, when it acquired the greater part of West Rock. Here. with the additions that have since been made, are 281 acres of historie ground.
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For West Rock, in addition to its natural advantages of elevation and scenery, gets its interest from the fact that at one end of it is that split boulder known as "Judges' Cave." Whether or not there was in 1661 anything there that could properly be described as a cave nobody now living knows. But it is pretty certain that in those days West Rock was a fairly inaccessible spot, perhaps fortified by wild beasts as well as by bad climbing against any minions of the second Charles who may have come hunting the judges who condemned the first. Today, this cleft in the rocks might casually screen a man from sight, but hardly would effectually conceal him from a persistent hunter. It has, of course. been a constant subject of public curiosity. To stimulate some historical acenracy in the observation, the Connectieut Society of Colonial Wars recently ereeted a handsome bronze tablet on the face of the boukler, recording the faet that here in 1661 Goffe and Whalley, two of the regieide judges, were reputed to have found temporary refuge from the officers of King Charles. Some time before that, however, some protection from the vandals and relie hunters was found necessary, and a substantial and not easily surmounted iron fence now requires the eurious to observe the rock at a distance of at least six feet.
West Rock, at its summit, is 410 feet above the level of the Sound. The view it gives of New Haven and the surrounding country is different, more varied and by many considered more attractive than that from East Rock. There is that same view of the Sound and of Long Island, except that in the nearer distance the city and the harbor stretch out more in detail, and there is added the attractive part of modern New Haven known as Westville. There is also, to the north and northwest, the lordly sweep of the Woodbridge Hills. West Haven looms toward the southwest, and Lighthouse Point, with its white old shaft, tips the eastern edge of the harbor. It is easy, looking off over the city. to pick out the points of interest, with the Taft Hotel always as a range- finder. And to the east is the plain and hills of the west and northwest part of Hamden.
West Roek Park has three miles of romantie drives, besides a convenient. number of footpaths. by which it is approached from Whalley and Springside avenues. It is three miles from the center of the city, but electric cars help the weary. Here also nature has not been marred by attempts at art, and there are considerable areas of original woodland.
New Haven's "show park," as it may justly he called, is Edgewood. On either side of the West River, at a point where some years ago they straight- ened the river into the shape of a canal. the city has over 130 aeres of meadow and knoll. It is at the extreme western end of the city proper, and about two miles from city hall. Edgewood Avenne, on its way to Westville, runs through it. For the better part of half a mile, leading from toward the center of the city, is a broad parkway. or mall, shaded hy a double row of elm trees. It reaches entirely to the park, and is now a part of it. The entire street is built up with fine residenees.
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