History of the Grand Avenue Neighborhood

State Street to East Street, 1830–1970

Aerial maps illustrating impact of urban renewal and I-91 construction

For the purposes of this tour, we refer to the area centered around Grand Avenue between State and East Streets as “Inner Grand Avenue” to emphasize its proximity to downtown and to distinguish it from other segments of the same road in Fair Haven and Fair Haven Heights. While other names are possible for this distinctive sub-neighborhood, we felt it was important to use a term that asserts the centrality of Grand Avenue as a defining feature of the corridor, while making clear that the area is historically and culturally different from other parts of Grand Avenue because of its closeness to downtown and the geographical barrier of the Mill River.

What became Grand Avenue was a thoroughfare as early as the 1600s. It evolved into a significant road in the 1800s with the completion of the Barnesville bridge (1819) over the Mill River and the development of Fair Haven as a suburb of New Haven (later annexed to the city in the 1870s). After New Haven’s incorporation in 1784, this portion of Grand Avenue closest to downtown was part of a mixed residential-commercial area called “New Township” that lay east of the original Nine Squares and included the area around Wooster Square.

The southern part of the New Township began to develop in the 1810s and 1820s; the northern part, around Grand Avenue, in the 1830s and 1840s. New Haven’s first railroad, the New Haven & Hartford, was completed along the neighborhood’s eastern edge, just past East Street, in 1839. The line ended at New Haven’s Belle Dock, where a steamship line transported passengers to South Street in Manhattan in a five-and-a-half-hour trip.

1938 Grand Avenue Business Men’s Association newspaper

Two early communities of free Blacks developed in the area. One, in the triangular notch created by the intersection of Grand Avenue and State Street (part of which was colloquially known as “Negro Lane”), was displaced in the 1840s by the building of the New Haven & New London Railroad. The other community, to the south and east along the banks of the Mill River, was known as “New Liberia,” a reference to both the West African settlement created by the American Colonization Society for emancipated slaves, and to the Liberian Hotel owned by local African-American entrepreneur William Lanson, who lived in the neighborhood himself until financial troubles and legal persecution landed him in the almshouse.

Early industry included rope-making facilities (known as “rope walks”) and warehouses that served the maritime economy around New Haven Harbor. Also located in the area were slaughterhouses, stables, and a bell foundry. (An 1824 map by well-known cartographer and silversmith Amos Doolittle actually refers to Grand Avenue as “Bell Lane.”) In the late 1800s Grand Avenue became an important streetcar route, with the maintenance facilities and power plant for the Connecticut Trolley Company located at the midpoint of the avenue. Manufacturing and heavy industry developed in the area because of its proximity to both Long Wharf and the steamboat wharf (in an era when coal and other raw materials were typically brought in by ship), easy access to trolley lines and to downtown. The 1865 city directory noted: “Today no thoroughfare into the city is more thronged than Grand.” The inner part of Grand Avenue has had long ties to the Jewish community, including some of the earliest Jewish settlers in New Haven. Of Sephardic descent, Jacob Pinto was one of New Haven’s first recorded Jews, immigrating around 1758 with his brother Solomon. Jacob prospered and built one of New Haven’s first brick houses at the prominent intersection of Grand and State. A half century later, German Jewish immigrants settled the blocks of Grand Avenue closest to downtown. The Heller and Mandelbaum Dry Goods Store was established by German Jews at 5 Grand Street (changed to Grand Avenue after the Civil War). It established a precedent for Jewish retail business on the avenue, though its primary significance was as one of the earliest meeting places for Congregation Mishkan Israel, Connecticut’s oldest synagogue community.

Grand and Franklin with Dreamland Theatre, 1927

The Inner Grand Avenue corridor developed as a working-class and immigrant community centered around the presence of major industrial employers (including hardware, carriage, clock, rubber, corset, and paper box factories) and the avenue’s bustling commercial strip, which offered goods and services of all kinds—from groceries, candy stores, and specialty butcher shops to shoe, clothing, and hat stores. In the twentieth century, Grand Avenue west of Jefferson Street became a destination sought out by shoppers for its furniture and home goods retailers, many of them Jewish-owned, such as Kruger’s, Unger’s, and Marcus’. Some of New Haven’s best-known and longest- running family businesses occupied storefronts along the Grand Avenue strip (Lucibello’s, Horowitz Brothers, DelMonico), before moving away as they became more successful and expanded, or as the avenue’s fortunes declined. Few local businesses survived the impacts of urban renewal; Lucibello’s was a rare exception that remained and thrived.

Venues for recreation and entertainment created spaces where diverse ethnic and religious communities could inter-mingle. When the Boys Club (founded in the 1870s) moved to Jefferson Street in the early 1900s, its basketball court and swimming pool helped to create lifelong memories for youth of all backgrounds. Local theaters like the Dreamland and the San Carlino were cosmopolitan spaces where different ethnic groups encountered one another in the enjoyment of vaudeville, cinema, and other entertainment. Lillian’s Paradise was a popular restaurant and jazz club founded by an Alabama- born female entrepreneur who sought opportunity in New Haven as part of the Great Migration of African-Americans from south to north in the early twentieth century; hailed for both the quality of its food and its musical offerings, the club was patronized by African-Americans and whites alike. Famed Italian-American opera diva Rosa Ponselle got her start performing on Grand Avenue, as did Jewish clarinetist and jazz legend Artie Shaw (né Arshawsky), whose uncle owned a local butcher shop. Like so many other immigrant neighborhoods, Inner Grand Avenue was a musical place that captured the city’s broad cultural mosaic.

Religious institutions were a social and cultural, as well as spiritual, anchor for many local immigrants. For six decades Congregation Mogen David capably served the “Grand Avenue Jews” — even non-members would go there to help make a minyan. St. Patrick’s Church was founded in the 1850s by Irish Catholics and became a fixture in the neighborhood for religious services and education. Among those who settled in the area and worshiped there were John Madigan, an 18-year-old who emigrated as soon as his apprenticeship as a harness maker was completed; James Reynolds, activist for Irish independence, who opened a foundry in the neighborhood; and Thomas Cahill, son of Irish immigrants, mason and ornamental plasterer, and colonel of the 9th Regiment Connecticut Volunteers (the state’s “Irish Regiment”) in the American Civil War. St. Patrick’s Church continuously served the local Catholic community for more than a century until closing in the 1960s.

Just as St. Patrick’s was a spiritual anchor, the dominant economic anchor for the Inner Grand Avenue neighborhood throughout much of the 1800s and 1900s was the New Haven Clock Company. In the period 1850-1920 it became one of the largest clockmakers in the world — occupying 28 buildings — and the neighborhood’s largest employer, with as many as 2000 workers turning out close to 500,000 timepieces every year. Its presence in the neighborhood drew immigrants from all over the world and supported a wide range of local businesses centered around the commercial strip of Grand Avenue.

In the heyday of the clock factory, workers and their families lived in tenement- style housing on the avenue as well as small one- and two-family houses on side streets. As the area’s nineteenth century housing stock deteriorated and economic privation increased during the Great Depression, the Farnam Courts public housing project was developed by the City’s new Housing Authority at a location along Grand Avenue near Hamilton Street. Opening to great fanfare in 1942, the racially mixed Farnam complex offered 240 units of new housing for working families and was the third public housing development in New Haven, after Elm Haven in Dixwell and Quinnipiac Terrace in Fair Haven. The neighborhood was thriving as both public and private sectors successfully functioned to meet the community’s social and economic needs.

In the 1950s and 1960s, two cataclysmic events led to the decline of Inner Grand Avenue as a vibrant zone of mixed residential and commercial use: the demise of the clock company in 1956, presaging a decades-long wave of de-industrialization and disinvestment; and the construction of Interstate 91, beginning in the early 1960s, which separated Farnam Courts and St. Patrick’s Church from downtown and the bustling commercial section of Grand Avenue. The interstate required substantial use of eminent domain and directly or indirectly led to the bulldozing of anchor institutions like Congregation Mogen David and St. Patrick’s Church. Meanwhile the New Haven Redevelopment Agency’s Wooster Square Project called for “clearance” (demolition) of “slums,” substituting in boxy modern buildings made of concrete, and surface parking lots. Although urban renewal unfolded differently in Wooster Square than in other parts of the city, and the southern part of the neighborhood around Wooster Square Park was spared large-scale disruption in favor of “rehabilitation,” the northern half of the neighborhood, around Grand Avenue, was less fortunate and lost the majority of its historic buildings, its walkability, and human scale.

With de-industrialization and urban renewal, many residents and businesses moved to the suburbs. Population began a long decline. The area west of the highway remained largely residential, while much of its retail commerce shifted to the suburban malls and shopping centers. The area east of the highway became dominated by industrial and wholesale commercial uses, with a smattering of retail businesses like Ferraro’s Meat Market and Grocer. The old clock factory buildings were subdivided and, thanks to cheap rents and easy access to the highway, enjoyed a raucous second life as a venue for nightlife and adult entertainment of all kinds.

The first decades of the twenty-first century have brought more changes, including signs of rebirth. Beginning in 2012, the Farnam Courts project was demolished and rebuilt as Mill River Crossing. In 2013 the City of New Haven released a new development plan for the “Mill River District” (between I-91 and the river, on both sides of Grand) in an effort to bring precision manufacturing, light industry, and other job growth to the area. Then in 2018, the City approved a plan to remediate the polluted clock factory complex and redevelop it as artist lofts. As it has for centuries, the area continues to evolve in complex and unexpected ways.

Project Historian Aaron Goode gives an overview of the history of the area at the May 9, 2022 Ribbon Cutting for the tour.

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