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Chapter One The Early Auto Age

In 1895, Connecticut created it first Highway Commission, which was to become the third state highway agency in the nation after those of New Jersey and Massachusetts. Over the next forty years, the one-man office of the Connecticut Highway Commission evolved into the bureaucracy of the Connecticut Highway Department (CHD) using public funds to transform a network of nineteenth-century earthen turnpikes into a trunk line system of modern paved highways to satisfy the demands of the automobile, truck, and motor bus. In the process, the CHD became the most powerful agency of state government. Between 1916 and 1921, the national government in Washington likewise began to use public tax dollars to build the nation’s first network of two-lane interstate highways. This was accomplished by creating a megagovernment partnership with state highway departments around the country. The partnership relied on such state departments to construct the federal system, thereby adding to the power and influence of these agencies. Meanwhile, Connecticut’s existing system of steamboats, railroads, and electric street railways, consolidated and operated under the corporate structure of the New Haven Railroad, floundered under the burdens of heavy debt incurred by Morgan and Mellen during their attempt to create a New England transportation monopoly in the 1910s, and under antitrust regulation by the Interstate Commerce Commission. By 1935, as the early auto age ended, Connecticut had completed a three-tiered system of modern highways—federal, state, and town—that used public money to promote automobility at the expense of privately owned mass transportation, and as a result transformed the relationship between Connecticut cities and the rural towns that surrounded them. That same year, with revenues declining heavily and unable to cover the interest on its long-term debt, the New Haven Railroad filed for bankruptcy.

Paving the Way

In the first decades of the twentieth century, state and federal governments created a highway network based on a hierarchy of road types and funding responsibilities that continues to this day.

TOWARD A STATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM

Ever since Connecticut’s earliest days as an English colony, the construction and maintenance of all highways had been the responsibility of individual towns. In the English tradition, the task was accomplished through the use of statute labor, whereby men of a certain age were required by law to work a specified number of days each year on building and repairing the roads in their town. As might be expected, improvements were at best uneven, and at worse nonexistent. Following the Revolution, the responsibility for improving and maintaining major highways in Connecticut was given to privately owned turnpike companies, chartered by the state, who for their efforts were allowed to collect tolls from passing travelers. While this method fostered travel by stagecoach, which helped to stitch the newly independent colonies into an economic whole, it too proved problematic. Such was the ongoing cost of maintenance that some 90 percent of Connecticut turnpike corporations failed to earn enough income to provide their investors with any significant return on their investment. Therefore, as the nineteenth century wore on, companies found ways to abandon their unprofitable routes, after which responsibility for the roadway reverted back to the local community. The last privately owned turnpike in Connecticut, the Derby Turnpike into New Haven, returned to public use on February 9, 1897, after nearly one hundred years in private hands, precisely because it had been one of the few profitable toll roads in Connecticut.¹

With all highways in the state back in public hands, the legislature went about formulating a statewide program to improve Connecticut roads. To gauge the scope of the work to be done, the legislature appointed a committee of nine men—one state senator together with one representative from each of the state’s eight counties—to hold public hearings and collect information from selectmen around the state as to the number of miles of road that needed rebuilding in each town. The committee’s report, published two years later, noted that there were 2,300 miles of road in the state in need of improvement, half to be improved by a macadam surface of crushed stone, compacted in layers and held together by a sprinkling of oil or tar, and half to be improved as simple gravel roads. The total cost of such a program was estimated at six million dollars. To finance the program, the committee recommended that in wealthier towns with grand lists in excess of one million dollars, the cost be paid two-thirds by the state and one third by the town; in smaller towns with grand lists less than one million dollars, the state would pay three-quarters of the cost and the town one quarter. The choice of which roads to improve, and the advertising of bids for construction, were to be handled by the towns, with the state commissioner having the power to inspect the results and force additional repairs if necessary. After each highway was improved, it was to be kept in good repair by town authorities. The committee recommended a funding level of $250,000 per year, which meant that the six million dollars of recommended improvements would not be completed for twenty-four years.²

As proposed by the legislative committee of 1897, the state’s first highway program had one disturbing characteristic. Instead of investing control of the program in James MacDonald as the state’s first highway commissioner, the program looked backward to the long-held tradition of town responsibility with regard to highway improvements. Which routes were to be modernized, what surface would be used on the roadway, and maintenance of the improved roads were all left to the towns, historically the source of poor road conditions.

It should also be noted that the slow pace of the program, which at recommended funding levels would take more than two decades to complete, suggested that the program was undertaken in response to the demands of the bicycle and the good roads movement, and not the automobile. Neither the state’s first good roads law in 1895 that established the Connecticut Highway Commission, nor the legislature’s first road program as conceived in 1899, took much heed of the horseless carriage, which in all fairness had yet to appear in sufficient numbers to reveal its full significance.

Connecticut’s town-oriented highway program continued under the supervision of Commissioner MacDonald for more than a decade, by which time the difficulties inherent in the program from the beginning had become apparent. The issue came to a head in March 1907, when MacDonald testified before the legislature’s Committee on Appropriations and Roads, Bridges and Rivers responsible for the road program. In his address, MacDonald made several points. First, he complained that the roads that had been improved during the previous twelve years were not being maintained by the towns and were “fast passing into a bad state of repair.” Why continue in the same manner, MacDonald asked, “if the roads upon which we have been expending our money are neglected?” Rather than continue to spend good money to no good end, MacDonald asked that the legislature make highway maintenance the responsibility of the state highway commissioner.³

Also by 1907, the automobile had become a phenomenon to be reckoned with in Connecticut. In that year, the state established a Department of Motor Vehicles to regulate the sale and ownership of the nearly three thousand automobiles now owned and operated by Connecticut residents. Higher-speed automotive travel was wreaking havoc with roadway surfaces, so that even well-made improvements were not lasting as long as they might have otherwise under horse-and-buggy travel. Clearly, the durability of improvements had to match the changing traffic conditions, which ultimately meant asphalt paving for all roadways in the state to accommodate the high speeds and gross weight of automobiles and trucks.

Equally important, town selection of projects had produced, rather than a network of contiguous highway improvements, a patchwork of disjointed improvements around the state, many segments chosen specifically to appease local interests. To rectify that situation, MacDonald formulated a trunk line system comprised of 1,070 miles of the state’s most important thoroughfares, whose improvement from this point forward would become the program’s top priority. Designation of a trunk line network redirected the focus of the highway program to routes that not only provided for longer-distance travel across and through Connecticut, but also included among their number the most heavily traveled thoroughfares in the state.

MacDonald’s attempt to redirect the focus of his program toward a statewide trunk line system was also prompted by a proposal from businessmen in Connecticut and Massachusetts looking to solve the problem of long-distance travel by harking back to the days of the privately owned toll road. In January 1907, two months before MacDonald’s speech to the road committee, two groups of investors, one in Boston, the other in Hartford, submitted petitions to their respective state legislatures to incorporate the “New York & Boston Automobile Boulevard,” a privately owned toll highway that was to run from Mount Vernon, New York, through Greenwich, New Haven, and Middletown in Connecticut, and on to Boston in a line that approximated a direct airline route between the two terminal cities. The plan was to build a mostly limited access highway consisting of “two broad roadways, one for cars going east and the other for cars going west … [with] entrances every few miles for its entire length.”⁴

On July 18, 1907, the charter bill received an unfavorable report from the legislative committee that reviewed it—no doubt influenced by the change in policy advocated by MacDonald the previous March—and within a week was withdrawn from both the House and the Senate.⁵ Of course, rejection of the toll road charter in Connecticut doomed the entire enterprise, but the effort remains significant as one of the earliest attempts to address the issue of long-distance interstate travel by constructing an unprecedented new kind of roadway, the controlled-access highway, something that would not come to fruition in Connecticut until the construction of the Merritt Parkway in the 1930s.

Last of all, MacDonald addressed the matter of funding, which he requested be doubled to $500,000 per year. In addition, he suggested that legislative appropriations be made in multiyear intervals, so that his office together with the towns could plan for future improvements. To help pay for the additional funding, MacDonald suggested that the income generated by the registration and licensing fees collected by the Department of Motor Vehicles be used exclusively for the highway program. It was an early example of a user tax applied to the age of automobility. Much the way those who crossed a bridge might pay a toll to help repair the bridge, it was considered only fair that those who owned the cars that ran on and damaged the state’s highways should pay for the repair of those highways. As had been the case since the program’s inception, the remainder of the funds for Connecticut’s good roads program would continue to come from the general funds of the state.⁶

With these important modifications agreed to by the legislature in 1907—state responsibility for project selection and ongoing maintenance, the designation of a high-priority trunk line system for cross-state traffic, and the funds collected by the Department of Motor Vehicles to be used only for highway improvements—MacDonald released the state’s good roads program from the shackles of history and created the state’s first truly modern highway program, one with a forward-looking agenda.

The legislature confirmed this new approach by adopting the commissioner’s designated trunk line system into law as the state’s official highway network. Over the years, this network of state highways would continue to expand, reaching 1,340 highway miles by 1913 and 1,566 miles by 1923. However, at the core of the state system from the start were fourteen major cross-state routes. These included three east-west corridors: Route 1 from Greenwich to Rhode Island; Route 6 from Danbury across the central portion of Connecticut to Killingly; and in the northern portion of the state, Route 44 from Salisbury to Putnam. And there were three north-south corridors: Route 7 from Norwalk to North Canaan; Routes 5 and 10 in the center of the state from New Haven to Suffield and Granby, respectively; and in eastern Connecticut, Routes 2 and 32 from New London to Stafford and Thompson, respectively.⁷

Trunk line system, 1923. Highways function best when part of a system of local feeder roads, secondary highways, and main through routes.

Connecticut Highway Department

In addition, various secondary roads that functioned as collectors of traffic headed to or from trunk line routes were also added to the system. A combination of state and local funds was used to improve these secondary highways, which in the early years of the program were designated as “state-aid” roads. Those roads that were left at the bottom of the highway hierarchy were considered town roads, and they remained the responsibility of the local community.⁸

From the beginnings of the state-controlled program in 1907 to about 1923, MacDonald’s objective was simple: to pave over as many miles of dirt highways in the state as possible, with routes included in the trunk line system being given the highest priority. The objective in these early years of the new program was simply to keep pace with the growth of traffic created by the increasing number of automobiles and trucks registered in the state, which grew from 2,700 autos and 60 trucks in 1907 to 153,000 autos and 30,000 trucks by 1923—with no letup in sight. And that did not include traffic created by out-of-state vehicles entering Connecticut from New York and Massachusetts, an important element of travel in the region since the earliest days of the Connecticut colony.

BRIDGES AND FERRIES IN THE EARLY AUTO AGE

Preparing the state’s major river crossings to accommodate automobility presented its own set of difficulties. First, there was the matter of seven toll bridges around the state, some of which were still in private hands as of 1887. These seven toll bridges included three over the Housatonic River: the Washington Bridge at Stratford, the Zoar Bridge at Oxford, and Bennett’s Bridge at Southbury. Since the first two toll bridges were already town owned, and Bennett’s crossing abandoned by its private owner, the General Assembly in 1889 was able to enact a simple bill that allowed for the transfer of these bridges into the hands of Fairfield and New Haven counties, who were to maintain the crossings from that point forward, sharing the costs equally.⁹

More problematic were the three privately owned bridges across the Connecticut River in Hartford County: the Dixon Bridge at Suffield, an old timber crossing last rebuilt in 1832; a new suspension bridge at Warehouse Point that had only been completed in 1886 by the Windsor Locks & Warehouse Point Bridge and Ferry Company; and Hartford Bridge at Hartford, a covered wooden bridge last rebuilt in 1818. The seventh toll crossing, Rope Ferry Bridge, spanned the Niantic River in East Lyme.

Unlike turnpike roads, most of these toll bridges were profitable enterprises that paid dividends to their stockholders. To free such a bridge, a dollar value would have to be determined for the assets of the corporation—bridge, toll house, perhaps some adjacent lands—that was satisfactory to all concerned, and the assets purchased by a public agent of the state, often the town(s) involved. And then there was the matter of maintenance, which in the case of a bridge meant not only small ongoing repairs but also the eventual rebuilding of the structure, a much more expensive undertaking.

The most important of these Connecticut River toll bridges was the one at Hartford. As an important crossing on the upper Post Road to Boston, Hartford Bridge was well used throughout the nineteenth century. But as commerce and traffic increased following the Civil War, so did the public’s weariness at having to stop and pay a toll as they crossed the river. As one newspaper suggested, “The public … are sick of groping for pennies in their pockets and chafe in these days of easy communication at the idea of barriers across the highways.”¹⁰

In 1887, a petition containing ten thousand signatures was submitted to the legislature asking that the Hartford Bridge be freed at once. As a result, and consistent with the tradition of town responsibility for highways, a law was passed that session appointing three commissioners to estimate the cost of purchasing the existing bridge, decide which towns benefited most from the bridge, and assess the cost of the purchase against those towns “in such proportion as said commissioners shall find to be equitable.” Though existing law would have assessed the bridge purchase against Hartford and East Hartford, the towns on either shore, the legislature was apparently looking for a way to spread the burden among any and all towns that benefited from the bridge, leaving it to the commission and the Superior Court to decide which towns those might be. Once the corporation had been bought out and the bridge freed, the act authorized the creation of a “Board for the Care of Highways and Bridges across the Connecticut River,” composed of representatives of the chosen towns, to maintain the structure.¹¹

The Hartford covered bridge as it appeared in the 1890s.

Crossing the Connecticut, by George E. Wright, 1908

After holding several public hearings on the matter, the commissioners filed their report with the superior court on August 14, 1888. The report set damages to the bridge company at $210,000, and assessed the damages against the five towns of Hartford, East Hartford, Glastonbury, South Windsor, and Manchester in the amounts of $95,000, $66,000, $25,000, $12,000, and $12,000, respectively. However, when the five towns objected to the arbitrariness of the assessments, which had been determined without regard to any particular formula using, say, population or grand list, the court postponed any further action.¹²

To ease the burden on the five towns, the following spring the legislature enacted a law requiring the state to contribute 40 percent (or $84,000) toward the total cost of the bridge purchase. With the assessments of each of the five towns reduced accordingly, the new scheme was approved by the courts, and when the last town assessment was received by the state treasurer on September 11, 1889, Hartford Bridge became a free crossing.¹³

“Quite a crowd had gathered by this time, and a line of sprinters had been formed, from those who were eager for the distinction of being first over the free bridge. Patrick Turley was the Mercury of this band and he easily won the contested honor … a curiosity gatherer, purchased the last silver dollar, paid to the bridge man for toll, for $1.50. There was plenty of fun-making by the spectators … everyone was evidently in the best of spirits.” Except perhaps for the bridge company shareholders, who were sorry to see their investment come to an end.¹⁴

Once Hartford Bridge became a free crossing, however, problems began to appear. The five-town Board for the Care of Highways and Bridges across the Connecticut River soon entered into a contract with the Hartford & Wethersfield Horse Railway Company to build and operate a horse railroad across the bridge from Hartford to East Hartford. The horse railway company was to install its tracks on new planking and afterwards maintain the bridge deck for two feet on either side of its tracks, thereby easing the cost of maintenance for the five bridge towns. However, two years later, when the railway company decided to electrify the line, an inspection of the bridge indicated that the wooden structure, by then more than seventy years old, was “in rather poor shape” and in places was beginning to move away from its brick foundation piers, likely a result of vibrations caused by the operation of the horse railroad.¹⁵

Once it became apparent that the crossing would have to be replaced sooner rather than later, the board hired a law firm to lobby the legislature on behalf of a bill that would transfer ownership of Hartford Bridge to the state for the sole purpose of reconstruction. In June 1893, the General Assembly acquiesced to the board’s wishes, and a new law declared that Hartford Bridge and its approaches “hereafter be maintained by the state of Connecticut at its expense.” That July, the legislature appointed three commissioners to oversee the rebuilding of the bridge, and they in turn contracted with the Berlin Iron Bridge Company to construct a new steel span.¹⁶

With the bridge replacement project underway, a scandal erupted when it was discovered that the commissioners had used $35,000 in public bridge funds to lobby for the bill transferring ownership to the state, an action contrary to their status as agents of the state. In addition, it was discovered that the contract for a new bridge had been entered into without the commissioners keeping proper records of their actions. As a result, Morgan G. Buckeley, former governor of Connecticut and a well-respected Republican political boss, took legislative charge of the matter and—once again consistent with the Connecticut tradition of town responsibility for highways—introduced a bill to repeal the act of 1893 and return the bridge to town ownership for reconstruction and future maintenance. Hearings were held and arguments were made, pro and con, for weeks. In the end, the Buckeley bill passed the Senate and was to be taken up by the House “Wednesday next.”¹⁷

No sooner had news of the pending action appeared when an early evening fire (accidental or otherwise) destroyed the old wooden bridge. “Thousands of men and women watched it for four or five hours, from both river banks and from boats.” One witness to the grand sight was a teenaged girl from East Hartford named Mabel Goodwin, who rode down to the river on her bicycle to witness the conflagration with her sister: “The old bridge over the Connecticut River caught fire and was completely burned all excepting a little piece on the west side of the river. Jennie and I rode down to see it burn and nearly everybody that possibly could went. It was a glorious sight and the wind blew up the river so that the sparks were all carried that way and so there was not much danger to the buildings near by. Nobody was killed but two fire horses were burned to death.”¹⁸

Two steam-powered ferryboats were soon brought in to carry people back and forth across the river in place of the burned bridge. Despite the disruption of streetcar service, Ms. Goodwin made the trip into Hartford twice during the following week: “We miss the old bridge very much for now one has to transfer from the [street] cars to the boats which now run across the river and then one has to take a car on the other side and it is very inconvenient for they only let so many passengers get on the boats and when there is a crowd one sometimes has to wait for the other boat.”¹⁹

While the destruction of the Hartford Bridge by flames added a sense of urgency to the matter of a new crossing, it did not alter the legislative outcome proposed by Buckeley, as some might have hoped. Buckeley’s bill, making the five towns responsible for construction of the new bridge, was enacted soon after the fire. To aid the towns in financing the new span, the bill diverted 50 percent of all taxes paid to the state by any railway company using the new bridge to the towns instead for a period of five years, and 10 percent thereafter. In addition, a second bridge bill was enacted, creating the Connecticut River Bridge & Highway District, to be comprised of the same five towns, which was charged with building a new span up to a maximum cost of $500,000 and with maintaining it once it was completed. Buckeley was appointed as a Hartford representative to the new district and subsequently chosen as its president. Meanwhile, following a recommendation by a superior court judge, the percentages of the cost to be paid by the towns east of the river were lowered considerably, with Hartford now having to bear 79 percent of the total cost, East Hartford 12 percent, and the remaining three towns 3 percent each.²⁰

Even so, the towns east of the river thought the idea unjust that they, and not the state, should be held responsible for the new bridge. In 1895, the town of Glastonbury, in protest, refused to pay even its small 3 percent portion of a five-hundred-dollar assessment for normal bridge repairs, on the grounds that the Bridge & Highway District, whose members were not elected by the town, could not force Glastonbury to maintain a bridge that was not even located within its town boundaries. A month later, the Bridge & Highway District sued Mr. Williams, the treasurer of Glastonbury, in superior court to obtain the fifteen dollars in unpaid funds.

When the superior court upheld the right of the bridge district to tax its member towns, Glastonbury appealed the decision to the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors, where in Morgan G. Buckeley et.al. v. Samuel H. Williams, Treasurer (68Conn131) the action of the lower court was upheld by a vote of three to two. As part of the decision, the court restated in no uncertain terms the legal relationship between the state and its member towns. Contrary to popular belief that the town was the ultimate source of governmental authority in Connecticut, the court confirmed the long-standing legal position that Connecticut towns “have no inherent rights. They have always been the mere creatures of the Colony or the State, with such functions and such only as were conceded or recognized by law.”²¹ In effect, the state of Connecticut could make any town do its bidding, regardless of existing law, so long as the action had been duly taken by the legislature—to which the town had elected its own representatives. In the most extreme example, the legislature, which had created each town in the first place, could abolish a town’s very existence if it saw fit. With regard to transportation, the decision can be seen as consistent with the tradition of town responsibility for highway improvements, a full decade before MacDonald broke with that tradition by asking for state authority over highway construction.

Following the court decision on the powers of the Bridge & Highway District—and with a temporary wooden bridge now in place across the river, complete with an electric streetcar line—it took eight more years before construction began on a new permanent crossing. The delay was caused first by the need for federal approval of the new span. Because the Connecticut River was considered a navigable waterway as far north as the rapids at Enfield, construction of a new Hartford Bridge required an act of Congress. Congress took up the matter in 1893 and authorized the district to build a drawbridge whose design was to be approved by the secretary of war. However, after much grumbling by those who thought a draw unnecessary since navigation above the bridge was unlikely at best, the law was amended two years later to remove the draw requirement—provided the district agreed to put one in at a later date if so ordered by the secretary of war.²² As a result, the new bridge was built without a draw span.

Adding to the delay, the bridge district and the city of Hartford studied, debated, and studied some more just what kind of bridge to build. Three alternatives were considered: a simple steel girder structure estimated to cost $782,000, a more complicated steel arch design expected to cost $878,000, and a stone arch bridge at a cost of $1,600,000. In conjunction with the bridge, Hartford also decided to build a new approach road along the west side of the river that was estimated to cost an additional $708,000. Finally, in a referendum held on April 2, 1902, the voters of Hartford approved the appropriation of funds necessary to build the more expensive but low maintenance and longer-lasting stone arch bridge across the Connecticut River, together with the proposed approach road, with the city of Hartford to pay all expenses above the $500,000 limit set in the bridge legislation. In keeping with the Supreme Court decision that each town had only the taxing power given it by the state, the following year the legislature approved bills allowing the Bridge & Highway District and the city of Hartford to issue bonds in the amounts necessary to cover their portions of the cost of the new bridge and approach road.²³

The new Hartford stone arch bridge, completed in 1908 and later named for Morgan Buckeley.

Crossing the Connecticut, by George E. Wright, 1908

Construction of the new crossing began in the summer of 1903 and lasted five years. Perhaps the most difficult part of the job was the construction of the underwater foundations for each of the six regular and two double piers that would support the span as it crossed the river. Under the guidance of chief engineer Edwin D. Graves, the foundations were constructed using large watertight caissons that were sunk around each pier site to provide a workspace—once the water had been pumped out—for the men known as “sand hogs,” who removed the dirt and rock from beneath the water’s surface. It was filthy, backbreaking labor.

For a day of eight hours, including a half-hour at the surface for coffee and rest, they were paid $2.50 till a depth of 55 feet had been reached, and then, on account of high air pressure, their day would be decreased to six hours and their wages increased to $2.75. Another raise of 25 cents was given while the concrete filling was being done inside the caisson, as the slaking lime made the temperature high, accompanied by an irritating odor. Burly negroes were generally employed in this exhausting work.²⁴

Once the eight piers and the abutments at either end of the bridge were completed, the wooden falsework needed to support the stone arches was constructed within each span, and the exterior and binding stones, some weighing up to forty tons, were hand cut to exacting tolerances and lowered into place. Last of all, the stone understructure of the bridge was filled with concrete to the level of the roadway. The finished roadway was sixty feet wide, with double trolley tracks down the center, and with a ten-foot sidewalk for pedestrians on either side, for a total width of eighty feet.²⁵

The new Hartford Bridge was dedicated on October 6–8, 1908, with three days of parades, concerts, and celebrations on both sides of the river, beginning with a reenactment of the arrival of Thomas Hooker and his party of English settlers, who could be watched crossing the river on a raft to meet the “Native Americans” waiting for them in Hartford. The celebrations were attended by some 200,000 residents and out-of-town visitors and concluded with a stunning fireworks display and a nighttime illumination of the bridge and river area.²⁶

As the Hartford Bridge neared completion, the General Assembly enacted a law (1907) that freed the remaining toll bridges in the state that were still privately owned, as well as two new toll crossings that had been erected across the Connecticut River since the Hartford Bridge was first freed in 1889, one in Thompsonville in 1893, the other in Middletown in 1896. With this act, the long and torturous journey to free the last privately owned toll bridges in Connecticut came to an end.²⁷

Sand hogs at work, excavating the piers for the stone arch bridge below the water of the Connecticut River. Spanning a Century: The Buckeley Bridge 1908–2008.

Courtesy of ConnDOT

Stone arch bridges are built around a wood-framed falsework, which is removed once the arch is completed. Spanning a Century: The Buckeley Bridge 1908–2008.

Courtesy of ConnDOT

With all private bridge crossings back under public control, the legislature turned its attention to the problem of replacing the state’s remaining ferry crossings with bridges especially along major trunk line routes, such as the lower post road to Boston. That ferry crossings could be problematic in the early days of the automobile can be seen in the experience of one driver and his companion who were on an auto tour of Southern New England in the summer of 1901. In his memoir of the adventure, Two Thousand Miles on an Automobile, the driver recorded their rather quaint experience crossing the Connecticut River on their way from Providence, Rhode Island, to New Haven:

At Lyme there is a very steep descent to the Connecticut River, which is a broad estuary at that point. The ferry is a primitive side-wheeler, which might carry two automobiles, but hardly more. It happened to be on the far shore. A small boy pointed out a long tinhorn hanging on a post, the hoarse blast of which summons the sleepy boat. There is no landing, and it seems impossible for our vehicle to get aboard; but the boat has a long, shovel-like nose projecting from the bow, which ran upon the shore, making a perfect gangplank. Carefully balancing the automobile in the center so as not to list the primitive craft, we made our way deliberately to the other side, the entire crew of two men—engineer and captain—coming out to talk with us.²⁸

Such antiquated ferry service became more troublesome as time went on and the volume of traffic on the lower post road increased. In 1909, the legislature created the Saybrook & Lyme Connecticut River Commission, specifically to build a new bridge across the mouth of the river between Old Saybrook and Lyme. An existing steam-powered ferry had been handling traffic across the river for more than a decade, but with the volume of traffic crossing the river approaching fourteen thousand vehicles each year, a more modern, more permanent crossing was needed. The commission was authorized to build a low-level drawbridge across the river, to a maximum cost of $500,000, to be paid for with the general funds of the state. It was the first bridge to be built by and paid for by the state of Connecticut.²⁹

The Saybrook Bridge was opened on August 24, 1911, by “a monster automobile parade” of five hundred cars. The design of the bridge was a Warren steel truss, 1,800 feet long, with a bascule-type draw near the western side of the span. Since there was some doubt at first as to where to position the draw section, the bridge’s chief engineer used the opportunity to conduct a unique experiment. “Two rowboats with red and white flags during the day and white lights at night were anchored at the edge of the proposed channel and all tug boat and steamboat captains using the river were asked to observe this channel and suggest to the engineer any changes desired by them in its location. The rowboats were shifted from time to time until the shipping interests using the river were satisfied with the location.” That way the final location of the draw span was determined.³⁰

About this time, a new commissioner, Charles J. Bennett, replaced MacDonald as head of the state’s highway agency. At his urging—and with automobility now clearly here to stay—the one-man highway commission was reorganized into the Connecticut Highway Department (CHD), a bureaucratic agency more commensurate with the demands of the auto age. A deputy commissioner was hired to oversee all planning and construction, and the state was divided into seven construction districts, each with its own chief engineer. In addition, a superintendent of repairs was put in charge of maintenance, with each district assigned its own supervisor, foreman, and laborers. Meanwhile, a chief clerk was hired to oversee all financial accounts and record-keeping for the department.³¹

Between 1915 and 1918, as part of its expanding duties, the CHD was made responsible for the construction and maintenance of all highway bridges on the trunk line system. With this authority, the CHD began replacing all remaining ferries along the lower post road with new bridges designed and built by state engineers: in Westport in 1917, in Stratford in 1921, in Groton also in 1921 (by converting an existing railroad bridge to auto use), and in Mystic in 1922.³² By the mid-1920s, with the trunk line system still expanding to include more miles of primary and secondary highways, all major river crossings on the system had been bridged to accommodate automobile and truck traffic. In 1923, bridge tolls were removed from all public crossings still charging them, making Connecticut, for the first time since its founding, a toll-free state—the only exceptions being those tolls charged by the last three ferries remaining in the state: the Windsor to South Windsor ferry, the Rocky Hill to Glastonbury ferry, and the Chester to Hadlyme ferry, all low-volume crossings on the Connecticut River, and all now under the auspices of the Connecticut Highway Department.³³

A FEDERAL-STATE PARTNERSHIP IS FORMED

Of course, the coming of the automobile and the need for better highways was hardly a phenomenon unique to Connecticut; it was happening nationwide. Perhaps the best measure of the speed with which automobility took hold of the nation—and the pressure for improved roads that increasing auto traffic placed on highwaymen in every state—were the sales of Henry Ford’s Model T, the first car manufactured at an affordable price with the common man in mind. Introduced in 1907 at a price of $850 (when most other automobiles cost several thousands of dollars), by 1915 the sales price dropped to half that amount. By that time, Ford had already sold more than one million Model T automobiles, which he joked, mocking the efficiency of his own mass production techniques, could be had in any color, “so long as it was black.” Over the next decade, Ford’s assembly line methods lowered the unit price of the nation’s most popular automobile even further, until one could be had in 1924 for a mere $290. By that time, ten million Model T Fords had already been sold, and production was approaching two million vehicles a year.³⁴ With thanks to Henry Ford and his Model T, the automobile went from being a luxury plaything for the rich in the 1910s to a necessity for the everyman in the 1920s. When a woman from Muncie, Indiana, was asked by a Department of Agriculture interviewer in the 1920s, “Why do you own a Model T but you don’t own a bathtub?” she replied with a surprised look, “You can’t go to town in a bathtub.”³⁵

As automobility became increasingly common, many other states formed highway departments and initiated statewide road improvement programs. As their number increased, they gathered at annual “road conventions,” like the one hosted by Commissioner MacDonald in Hartford in 1904, to share their knowledge and experiences. Some seven hundred highwaymen from twenty-eight states attended the Hartford convention, along with a federal representative from the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Road Inquiry.³⁶ Such gatherings established a social bond among highwaymen and a national consensus on certain policy issues, in particular the need for federal funding of good roads. By 1914, as Congress studied the possibility of a national highway program, state highwaymen created a nationwide organization of their own called the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO), which worked closely with federal officials and Congress to sort through the legal, legislative, and engineering details of a national highway effort.

There were several overriding concerns, first and foremost the legality of such a program. After efforts in the early 1800s to create a national highway program were vetoed by three different presidents on the grounds that the national government had no authority to build roads within individual states, the issue was resolved in 1907 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Wilson v. Shaw, which stated directly the government’s right under the Constitution to build interstate highways: “This power in former times was exerted to a very limited extent … and many of our statesmen entertained doubts as to the existence of the power to establish ways of communication by land … [but] land transportation has so vastly increased [and] a sounder consideration of the subject has prevailed and led to the conclusion that Congress has plenary power over the whole subject. Congress, therefore, has … the power … to authorize the construction of a public highway connecting several states.”³⁷

But what roads should the federal government build? What should the purpose of such a program be? As in many states, the debate centered on whether a highway program should focus on short sections of roadway whose improvement was intended to aid rural farmers in reaching the nearest railroad or market town, or on longer stretches of improvements that would facilitate long-distance interstate travel for everyone. By 1916, when Congress passed the first Federal Aid Highway Act, appropriating $75 million over five years to states with functioning highway departments (on a fifty-fifty matching basis), a decision was made to use federal funds for “such projects as will expedite the completion of an adequate and connected system of highways, interstate in character.” In an effort to placate rural citizens, funds were apportioned according to a formula weighted one third on the area of the state, one third on its population, and one third on its rural road mileage. Once the improved highways were built, they were to be maintained by their respective states.³⁸

It was a momentous decision. For the first time in the nation’s history, the federal government agreed to direct funding of highway improvements. The program itself, however, was much less momentous, mainly because the diversion of manpower and resources to the war in Europe delayed improvements under the new federal program. By the time the five-year program ended in 1921, less than five hundred miles of highway had been improved nationwide, barely a drop in the proverbial bucket.³⁹

Yet the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1916 established an important precedent, and when the program came up for renewal—just in time to meet the postwar boom in automobile ownership—it was thoroughly revised to create a more aggressive road-building program. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921 created a historic partnership between federal and state governments, with the states building in effect a trunk line system of federal-aid highways, to a maximum of 7 percent of a given state’s total road mileage. In addition, three-sevenths of the federal system was to be comprised of roads “interstate in character,” on which the state was free to spend up to 60 percent of its federal appropriation. Once again, states were held responsible for ongoing maintenance of the federal highways (at their own expense) as they were for the matching state money required by the program.⁴⁰

To help states define the federal system, the Department of Agriculture formed a Joint Board of Interstate Highways to select the final network from the 7 percent mileage submitted by each state. In 1925, the secretary of agriculture approved and numbered a system that included some 169,000 federal-aid highway miles nationwide.⁴¹ In Connecticut, this network consisted of three east-west routes: U.S. Route 1 along the shoreline from Greenwich to Stonington, U.S. Route 6 across the center of the state from Danbury to Killingly, and U.S. Route 44 in northern Connecticut from Salisbury to Putnam. These were supplemented by four north-south routes: in western Connecticut, U.S. Route 7 from Norwalk to North Canaan; U.S. Routes 5 and 5a in the center of the state from New Haven to Enfield and Suffield, respectively; and U.S. Route 202 from Danbury to Granby.

The designation of an ongoing federal highway program helped states like Connecticut in several ways. First, the influx of federal funds added to the budgetary power and prestige of the Connecticut Highway Department. Second, the highways assigned to the federal system, interstate in character, were by definition more heavily traveled, and therefore more costly than other routes to improve and maintain. Third, federal approval and funding of highway projects allowed the federal government to institute policy requirements, such as design standards, that improved safety and created uniformity from state to state. But most importantly, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921 established a megagovernmental model of joint federal-state cooperation and financing that through the years could be expanded to match the state’s expanding highway needs. It was also a model that would be adapted to federal funding for other transportation programs, such as aviation, and later to nontransportation social programs as well.

In the 1920s, with the federal-state partnership firmly established by the new highway act and much of the state’s trunk line system of roads and bridges now firmly in state hands, Connecticut’s highway program entered a new phase. As car engines became more powerful, highwaymen turned their attention from paving to other roadway characteristics, such as lane width, gradient, and sight line. Existing roadways were not just paved over but straightened; bridges were widened; hills were flattened to lower the steepness of a grade; and other dangerous situations, such as at-grade railroad crossings were modified or eliminated. At times, the need for such improvements resulted in a complete relocation of a roadway, moved to a new right-of-way and rebuilt to modern specifications. And of course, as trucks became larger, small bridges needed to be rebuilt to accommodate heavier loads.⁴²

To pay for this never-ending cycle of highway improvements, Connecticut, like many states, resorted to a tax on gasoline. Connecticut passed its first gas tax law in 1921, imposing a one-cent per gallon tax on all gasoline sold in the state. Two years later, in keeping with the idea that highway users should pay directly for the care of the roads they traveled, gas tax revenue in Connecticut was dedicated to a separate Highway Fund to be used for highway purposes only, at the discretion of the state highway commissioner. As a result, by 1927, the state highway program had three main sources of revenue: the state gas tax (by then 2¢ per gallon), fees charged to register motor vehicles and license drivers, and federal monies from the general fund of the United States dedicated to the construction and maintenance of the state’s federal highway system. Such was the increase in motor vehicle registrations and gasoline consumption that by 1928, despite the expanding responsibilities of the Connecticut Highway Department, the state’s highway program had become financially self-sufficient, able to fund projects from these three dedicated sources of revenue without the need for money from the state’s general fund.⁴³

The Connecticut Highway Department was the largest and fastest-growing agency of state government, with an annual budget that grew from $45,000 in 1896 to $16,000,000 in 1928. That year, the department was reorganized into five bureaus: engineering and construction, business administration, maintenance, roadside development, and boundaries and right-of-way. The offices of the newly reconstituted department were then relocated to a new State Office Building constructed on Capitol Avenue in Hartford, its very existence a sign that other areas of state government were growing too in their bureaucracy, albeit not as rapidly as the Connecticut Highway Department.⁴⁴

In 1931, the Connecticut Highway Department expanded its responsibilities yet again by creating a town-aid program through which it passed state funds to towns for use in local highway improvements, in much the way that the national government passed funds to the state for use on federal-aid highways. The town-aid program represented the final piece of an interlocking, three-tiered program of highway improvements (federal, state, and town) held together by a powerful megagovernment bureaucracy controlling interagency financing.⁴⁵

Though highway revenues declined during the Great Depression to a level of about twelve million dollars per year, the Connecticut Highway Department remained one of the most powerful state agencies, still able to fund highway improvements on a pay-as-you-go basis without the need for long-term borrowing by the state. In a span of just four decades, Connecticut highways had gone from a network of unkempt nineteenth-century earthen turnpikes to a modern system of primary, secondary, and local highways (and bridges) built for the auto age, maintained by a three-level megagovernment arrangement of highway agencies, and paid for one hundred percent with public tax dollars.

Only one blemish spoiled this nearly perfect picture. In the state’s larger cities, and most especially along the lower post road from Greenwich to New Haven, a new phenomenon appeared on Connecticut highways: bumper-to-bumper traffic. As travel speeds, traffic congestion, and the number of traffic accidents all increased, engineers were suddenly faced with new questions: was there a limit to the amount of traffic a normal highway could handle? If so, how were they to accommodate the seemingly endless desire for travel and commerce unleashed by the automobile, bus, and truck?

The answer they devised involved a new kind of highway, a highway so different from what had come before that it might even be considered a new mode of transportation, one uniquely adapted to the age of automobility. That new kind of highway—where a driver entered and exited a road only at designated interchanges, and in between was able to travel at high speed unaffected by roadside distractions—was in effect a concrete railroad for the automobile, truck, and bus. Highway engineers had a name for it: the controlled-access expressway. In the 1930s, one of the first of its kind in the nation was built across Connecticut as part of the state’s first high-speed highway link between New York and Boston. Reminiscent of the privately owned New York & Boston Automobile Boulevard toll road first proposed in 1907, the new controlled-access highway would be owned by the state and built with public funds, though in the end it too would become a toll highway—one known as the Merritt Parkway.

Highways and the Progressive Movement

In the half century from 1870 to 1920, a broad social movement known as progressivism touched many aspects of American life, including highway transportation.

As the twentieth century turned and immigration from Europe continued unabated, the population of Connecticut reached more than 900,000 persons, 56 percent of whom lived in sixteen industrialized cities around the state—on less than 10 percent of the state’s land area. Problems of overcrowding, sanitation, and traffic control became commonplace. Traditional politics and boss cronyism could no longer handle such concentrated and chaotic growth effectively. In an effort to create a different, more modern social order, government at all levels became more specialized, more bureaucratic, organized around bureaus or commissions headed by professional managers whose expertise was more technical than political.

The approach was not unlike that adopted by railroads and other big businesses in the decades following the Civil War, as private corporations of all kinds grew larger and more complex. In the world of commerce, this bureaucratic approach transformed traditional market capitalism into a new kind of business model referred to as managerial capitalism. In much the same way, as town, state, and national governments grew in size and complexity to regulate problems created by urban growth, they created a new kind of model for governing, one that might similarly be termed managerial government.

The establishment of an independent Highway Commission in 1895 and its reorganization into the powerful state agency known as the Connecticut Highway Department in the first decades of the new century provides a perfect example in transportation of the transition from a form of government where elected representatives of the people were responsible for important governmental activity—remember the legislators who traveled the state in 1897 to gather information for the state’s first highway improvement program—to a new kind of government, where most governmental duties were now executed by unelected, professional managers whose specialized expertise made them not only preferable but necessary. In the case of highways, the matter was even more entrenched. In much the way that managerial capitalism was further complicated by corporate mergers and interlocking directorates, the new model of managerial government for highway transportation was further complicated by the interlocking relationships of interdependent federal, state, and town highway agencies, in Connecticut and throughout the nation.

This transition to both managerial capitalism and managerial government was itself part of a broad social movement known as progressivism that touched on many aspects of American life in the half century from 1870 to 1920. The progressive agenda included such movements as the fight for healthier housing in the tenements of New York and Chicago; women’s suffrage and alcoholic temperance; labor struggles for an eight-hour day and a ban on the use of child workers in factories; an attempt to purify the population through the pseudoscience of eugenics, where persons considered unfit to have children were sterilized to prevent them from diluting the general population with unsuitable offspring; the City Beautiful movement that sought to build grand boulevards, plazas, and civic centers, and thereby improve the moral character of those surrounded by such man-made beauty; the creation of the nation’s first national park and forest lands as part of a larger effort to conserve America’s natural resources; and numerous other expressions of what was considered progressive thought.⁴⁶ However, it is important to note that the progressive movement was hardly a uniform phenomenon. Though heavily promoted by a rising urban middle class eager to replace small-town values with big-city ideals, the old ways continued to exist side by side with the new throughout the progressive era, especially in Connecticut where rural majorities continued to exert antiprogressive influence in the state legislature whenever they could.⁴⁷

In addition to the megagovernment bureaucracy of the state’s highway program, there were two additional aspects of progressive thinking that proved significant with regard to transportation. The first was the concept of scientific management developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911. The principles of scientific management were originally designed to promote efficiency in the workplace, but as Taylor was quick to point out, the technique could be applied to the management of any social activity, from business to home to government. At the heart of scientific management was the measurement, quantification, and tabulation of work processes in a well-thought-out scientific manner, along with an analysis of the data collected by a team of technical experts. Through his association with the progressive movement, Taylor’s ideas for the use of technological expertise wherever possible as a means to a better, more progressive society were spread nationwide, and Taylor himself became as popular as Henry Ford.⁴⁸

The application of scientific management to highway transportation in Connecticut was a natural fit. As early as 1926, the Connecticut Highway Department (in partnership with the federal Office of Road Inquiry, now known as the Bureau of Public Roads) completed its first comprehensive survey of the state’s existing highway system. Wherever possible state engineers applied the techniques of scientific management to the investigation. For instance, the survey included such items as a detailed organizational chart of the Highway Department and its several management bureaus; a year-by-year tally of the state’s increasing motor vehicle registrations in comparison to its total population; an inventory and classification of state highway mileage by type and existing condition; a tabulation of highway revenues and expenditures by town; traffic counts made by field workers at fifty-seven survey stations around the state; and an “O&D” questionnaire given to the traveling public to ascertain the origin and destination of their most frequent trips and the routes they took to get there.⁴⁹

A third way in which progressive thought impacted the development of the Connecticut highway system was in the area of planning. A logical extension of the principles of scientific management, when applied to highway transportation, was to analyze the years of data collected on various subjects (population, motor vehicle ownership, traffic volumes) so as to recognize trends and to project these trends into future needs. Then, by imposing the projected needs onto the existing highway system, engineers could estimate what if any improvements might be required and how much they might cost. As the survey itself stated, “The establishment of scientific plans of highway development … requires a careful analysis of highway traffic, the trend of its development, and its distribution over the highway system.” In the past, the study noted, highway engineers were handicapped by “the lack of precise knowledge of the character and amount of the traffic using the various roads.” No longer. The very purpose of the survey was “to provide a basis for the scientific planning of highway improvements in Connecticut.”⁵⁰

The Connecticut Road Survey of 1926 was the first progressive view of Connecticut’s future highway needs. Connecticut Highway Department

The scientific management of transportation improvements represented a major shift in the way highway engineers approached their job. No longer would engineers be lagging behind in their work, trying to solve yesterday’s problem only after congestion had become apparent. Using the tools of scientific management, they were now able to look ahead ten, twenty, or more years into the future, identify potential problem areas, and estimate the cost of the highway improvements needed to provide an acceptable level of service. The culmination of this application of scientific management to highway improvement was a turn away from solving today’s problems to providing for tomorrow’s needs, and from now on a kind of futurism would pervade the work of highway engineers—and not always in a sensible way. As we shall see, scientific management was hardly a foolproof methodology, especially when applied to a single-minded highways-only transportation policy.

The Impact of Automobility

The advent of automobility allowed families to move out of crowded urban centers into surrounding rural towns, created a profession of city and town planners looking for progressive ways to shape this emerging urban-suburban environment, and challenged the sustainability of the state’s existing railroad, steamboat, and trolley services.

TO THE SUBURBS: RESETTLING THE LAND

With the advent of automobility and the proliferation of good roads, residents who were overcrowded into urban centers around the state began to move outward into the open spaces that existed on the fringes of most cities, resettling the Connecticut landscape yet again.

It is important to recognize that the move to the suburbs typically associated with the postwar boom of the 1960s did not begin in the 1960s. It did not even begin with the construction of controlled-access highways into city centers in the 1940s. In fact, it began with the building of interurban trolley lines in the late nineteenth century, which provided the means for those who could afford it to leave Connecticut’s crowded cities for nearby rural areas. At the same time that the proliferation of tall buildings, elevators, the telephone, and the department store concentrated economic activity in an urban core, the trolley doubled, even tripled, the effective size of many urban areas by providing radial access to the core from ever greater distances, allowing the dense population of the walking city to spread out along the direction of each streetcar line. (Steam railroads provided a similar opportunity even earlier, but to a lesser degree; their station stops were farther apart.) Indeed, streetcar companies encouraged this first wave of suburbanization by constructing lines into open country and charging a fixed five-cent fare, which relied on volume, as opposed to a zone system, where fares increased with the distance traveled.⁵¹

Other factors, too, made the move out of the city to the suburbs feasible in the early auto age, including the development of lighter, timber-frame housing that replaced heavier post-and-beam construction. This modern, balloon-frame house was quicker and easier to build, which translated into lower home prices. In addition, towns and cities themselves stimulated the move to the suburbs by their willingness to extend urban services—paved streets, water and sewer lines, police and fire protection—into outlying areas at public expense, thereby subsidizing the increase in land values along streetcar lines and encouraging the subdivision of rural lands. It should be noted, however, that the movement of affluent and working-class citizens to the periphery of the city was not historically inevitable. It was the product of market forces, government policies, and new technologies, in particular a combination of affordable housing and cheap, convenient transportation. Suburbanization was a uniquely American phenomenon unlike, for example, the European experience.⁵²

Suburbanization in Connecticut began in earnest in the 1920s, the decade that automobility first became widespread. And the automobile, together with the extensive road network provided by megagovernment highway agencies, changed the pattern of resettlement significantly from what it had been in the streetcar era. The automobile made it possible for those exiting the city to go almost anywhere they wished with street access. No longer dependent on a linear trolley line for travel to the city, the move to the suburbs now became omnidirectional, the only restraint being the time it took to commute back and forth from a home in the suburbs to work and shopping opportunities in the city.

In Connecticut, the impact of automobility on the movement outward from city to suburb after 1920 can be seen in the increase in population of small towns around the state adjacent to larger cities. One of the largest transformations took place in the town of West Hartford, whose 1920 population of 9,000 grew to 34,000 by 1940. Similar if less dramatic growth occurred in numerous other communities around the state, where population growth over the decades previously measured in hundreds of persons now commonly numbered in the thousands. For example, from 1920 to 1940, the population of Waterford increased from 4,000 to 6,600; Farmington, from 3,800 to 5,300; Stratford, from 12,300 to 22,600; and Hamden, from 8,600 to 23,000.⁵³

The percentage of the state’s population living in Connecticut cities peaked in 1920 at 63 percent. Thereafter, the percentage declined at a slow but steady pace, as towns that had been rural and agricultural in character, continued to grow more quickly than the state’s urban core. The process of suburbanization that began in the 1920s would accelerate in the postwar decades, so that by the year 2000, with the state’s total population having increased (fourfold) to 3.4 million, only 37 percent of Connecticut residents would live in cities. By any measure, it was one of the most amazing transformations of the Connecticut landscape in history—and it was automobility (the automobile plus megagovernment-sponsored highway building) that made it possible.⁵⁴

There was recognition among engineers and city planners as early as the 1920s that the dispersal of population from Connecticut cities represented more than just a move to the suburbs. They began to see how the movement of people out of the cities created a new political entity on the landscape: the region, a multitown locality that reflected the economic interdependence of the newer suburb and the older city. It can be said that the idea of regional planning took hold in 1922 with the creation of the Committee on a Regional Plan for New York and Its Environs in New York City. Over the next decade, this group surveyed the growth needs of not only the city itself but adjacent portions of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut as well. Their work sparked early planning efforts in Fairfield County. It would take several decades for the concept of regional planning to spread to the whole of Connecticut, but in the end it is this process of regionalization, creating a new political entity out of city and suburb combined, and not suburbanization alone, that best describes the transformation of the Connecticut landscape in the twentieth century.⁵⁵

CONNECTICUT CITIES: ORGANIZING THE LAND

Even as the move to the suburbs was underway, Connecticut cities began to adopt progressive cures of their own to lessen the ills of urban living for those left behind. By beautifying public places and rebuilding urban centers in a neoclassical style, the progressive reformers believed they could inspire higher moral values among the populace. The first expression of the Beaux Arts style in America—named after the school in Paris where architects were trained in such designs—was at the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, and the concept of city planning in the Beaux Arts style was soon adopted by many American cities, including Chicago in 1896, Washington, D.C., in 1901, and San Francisco in 1906. With impetus from the City Beautiful movement, the city of Hartford created the nation’s first City Planning Commission in 1907, and other Connecticut cities soon organized similar commissions: New Haven in 1910, Bridgeport in 1913, and New Britain in 1915. By 1946, twenty-seven cities and towns in Connecticut had planning commissions.⁵⁶

While the planning process helped cities focus on the need for open spaces to provide relief from urban life, and wider streets to accommodate faster-moving automotive traffic, the long-lasting contribution of early city planning was in the concept of zoning, or dividing up the landscape according to how the land was to be utilized. Zoning typically restricted each parcel of land in a community to a specific type of use—residential, commercial, or industrial—while establishing building lines and height limits to control the size and location of structures on the building lot, and street lines to delineate the location of new roads. The first zoning laws in the Northeast were adopted in New York City in 1916.

With the Hartford City Plan of 1910, city planning began in Connecticut. Hartford Commission on the City Plan

There was, however, immediate concern that restricting the use of privately owned land through zoning might be unconstitutional. For example, were not the creation of building and street lines the equivalent of land taking, and should not a land owner be compensated by the town for that portion of his property that he could no longer build on? The Connecticut Supreme Court tackled the issue early on in Town of Windsor v. Henry D. Whitney, et al. In that case, the court determined that such zoning actions were “a legitimate exercise of the police power of the State, as distinguished from the power of eminent domain,” under which an owner must be compensated for land taken for public use. In what became a landmark decision on the matter, the court concluded that “the State may regulate any business, or the use of any property, in the interest of public health, safety or welfare, and without making compensation, provided this is done reasonably.”⁵⁷ The constitutionality of zoning was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Company in 1925, which made zoning a legal expression of a community’s policing powers as long as it was applied without prejudice to the entire community and not only to certain property owners.

The Connecticut legislature endorsed zoning for specific Connecticut cities beginning in 1921, and four years later passed general legislation that empowered all Connecticut cities, towns, and boroughs to create zoning agencies to control the bulk and use of structures in their communities, as well as the density of their population. The concept of zoning as an adjunct to progressive city planning proved particularly popular in Connecticut. By 1946, more than half the towns in Connecticut had zoning commissions, many of which were combined into a local planning and zoning commission. As one report noted, “There is no state in which zoning has proved more acceptable.”⁵⁸

While planning and zoning allowed cities and towns to organize the landscape according to progressive principles, neither resolved the most egregious problem of city life: unfair and undemocratic representation in state politics. According to the state constitution, Connecticut towns had either one or two representatives in the General Assembly, regardless of population. As a result of the urbanization of large cities after the Civil War, Connecticut’s system of representative government, a holdover from colonial times, abrogated the political rights of the majority of the state’s residents. For example, by 1889, the demographic changes that occurred during the nineteenth century allowed 11,851 voters living among sixty small towns to elect a total of seventy-six representatives to the state’s General Assembly, while the 17,827 voters then living in New Haven could elected only two. And the discrepancy became more disparate as urbanization progressed. In 1900, the town of Union with a population of 400 persons had two representatives in the state assembly, the same number as the city of New Haven with a population of 108,000. It is no wonder that Connecticut’s unbalanced system of representation became known in progressive circles as the “rotten borough” system.⁵⁹

In 1901, progressive reformers took up the cause of “rotten borough” politics by calling for a state constitutional convention to address the issue. However, when the convention was organized the following year, its composition reflected the very problem it was called upon to resolve: regardless of its size, each town could send only one delegate to the convention! To no one’s surprise, the convention achieved little. One delegate commented boldly on the heart of the problem, if not its legal ramifications: while it is agreed, he said, “that town representation is illogical … [and with] no legal justification … it is a sentiment which should be cherished and perpetuated.”⁶⁰ In the end, the convention penned a new draft constitution that increased urban representation slightly, but in a subsequent referendum the voters turned down even this modest improvement.

While Connecticut cities were quick to adopt progressive ideas such as town planning and zoning, the state had failed to redress what after centuries of abuse had become the most egregious problem of life in the city: the unfair representation of city dwellers in the assembly halls of the state capitol. The disparity of the “rotten borough” system of representation would continue well into the 1960s before Connecticut was forced to rectify the situation by a decree of the U.S. Supreme Court. In the meantime, the unearned political control exerted by rural towns under the “rotten borough” system would continue to cast a strong Republican influence over state politics, and in the 1930s would give rise to one of the most flagrant scandals in all of the state’s history: the Merritt Parkway land fraud.

MASS TRANSPORTATION CONFRONTS AUTOMOBILITY

The construction of an improved highway network in Connecticut, and the increase in car, truck, and motor bus travel that it made feasible, had a significant impact on the state’s existing system of railroad, steamboat, and trolley services operated by the New Haven Railroad. To begin with, there was the direct competition between the fixed route, fixed schedule mass transportation provided by the New Haven, and the more flexible door-to-door service associated with the automobile. The local nature of much of the New Haven’s passenger and freight traffic made its rail, steamboat, and trolley operations especially vulnerable to competition from the automobile and the truck. But what railroad managers complained about even more was the unfair nature of that competition. As one news cartoon put it, how was a privately owned railroad responsible for its own infrastructure—tracks, stations, bridges, signals, and switching yards—expected to compete with cars, trucks, and buses whose infrastructure, from local streets to secondary collector roads to trunk line highways, was provided for them by the government and paid for with public tax dollars? Yet that was exactly the situation created by the “highways only” policy of the state and federal megagovernment that supported highway construction to the detriment of private transportation corporations such as the New Haven.

Unfair competition. How was a private railroad, responsible for its own infrastructure, supposed to compete with a publicly built highway network?

Courtesy of the Hartford Courant

As a result of decisions made in 1903 by J. P. Morgan (banker to the New Haven) and Charles S. Mellen (president of the New Haven) to expand the company’s operations to other modes of transportation in an effort to create a monopoly over transportation services throughout New England, the debt burden of the New Haven increased dramatically. In the years from 1903 to 1913, Morgan and Mellen increased the capitalization of the New Haven from $93 million to $417 million. Of this increase, only $120 million was spent on rail-related properties and improvements; the remaining $204 million was invested in the acquisition of steamboat and trolley properties, often at prices well above their industry values. To make matters worse, many of the purchases were made in a financially questionable manner, using dozens of subsidiary companies to manipulate New Haven assets and create paper profits designed to deceive stock- and bondholders on the true financial condition of the company.

An investigation of the New Haven’s shady dealings by the Interstate Commerce Commission led to a federal court decree in 1914 intended to divest the transportation monopoly created under Morgan and Mellen of its more controversial assets, including its controlling interest in the Boston & Maine Railroad, as well as its steamboat and trolley properties. These assets were placed into the hands of court-appointed trustees and marked for sale. However, before divestiture could be accomplished, the federal government in 1920 reversed its long-held position against the consolidation of railroads as an instrument of monopoly. Instead, in the Transportation Act of 1920, Congress directed the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to devise a plan to deliberately consolidate the nation’s major railroads into a number of more efficient, more profitable regional systems. It was hoped that by judiciously combining stronger roads with weaker ones and eliminating duplicate services, financially troubled railroads such as the New Haven could be reorganized into a national network of sustainable, but still privately owned railroads. As a result of this change in policy, the New Haven succeeded in having the court decree of 1914 modified to regain control of most of its divested assets. As the New Haven’s annual report notified stockholders in 1925, the court decree “was so modified that all remaining properties taken away from your company in 1914 were returned to it.”⁶¹

Meanwhile, study after study was completed to determine how best to consolidate the New Haven and its various transportation services with other New England railroads and thereby increase its competitiveness with automotive highway services. Two main alternatives emerged: either to combine the New Haven and other New England roads with strong trunk line roads from outside the region, such as the Pennsylvania Railroad or the New York Central, whose systems provided access to cross-country rail service, or to combine all New England roads into one large regional system, thereby increasing the viability of what was essentially a terminal rail network, designed to collect and distribute freight throughout the region.⁶²

After more than a decade of shilly-shallying by the railroads, many of which simply refused to discuss the possibility of consolidation, and with the ICC unable by law to impose a consolidation plan on the railroads, the possibility of consolidation as a means to improved rail service disappeared in the 1930s amid the general economic uncertainty of the Great Depression. Which is not to say that the New Haven stood by and did nothing to improve its competitiveness against the onslaught of automobility.

To begin with, the New Haven in the 1920s converted the equipment it operated on many of its branch lines from steam locomotives to self-propelled, diesel-powered rail bus cars. With a top speed of forty-five miles per hour and needing only a two-man crew to transport up to forty-five passengers, these cars were able to provide passenger and freight service at a fraction of the cost of a traditional steam-driven train. By the 1930s, some branch lines were abandoned altogether while others were converted to larger, sixty-five-passenger gas-electric railcars capable of speeds of fifty-five miles per hour.⁶³

In 1925, the New Haven Railroad organized the New England Transportation Company, a wholly owned subsidiary created to transport passengers, freight, mail, and express packages throughout the region. The primary purpose of these automotive bus lines was “to provide a coordinated service with the rail company’s trains, reducing the number of station stops, and permitting the discontinuance of some uneconomical train service.” Within a few years, the company was operating more than 150 buses over more than one thousand route miles.⁶⁴

The gas-powered rail bus was an early attempt by the New Haven Railroad to compete with the automobile. New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad

Automobility also impacted the New Haven’s steamboat services. By 1916, as highway improvements spread through the region, trucks became a viable alternative to shipping freight by steamer for trips up to fifty miles in length. As a result, freight tonnage on the New Haven system, which had always been more important than the revenue from passenger service, dropped nearly 50 percent between 1917 and 1921 and continued to fall throughout the 1920s, though not as precipitously. In addition, in the period between the two World Wars, many manufacturers moved out of New England for points south and west, so that all modes were competing for a smaller amount of total freight tonnage. As a result, long-running steamboat service from New York City was abandoned piecemeal: to Bridgeport and New Haven in 1920, to Hartford the following year, and on the outer sound to New London and Norwich in 1934. A strike by steamboat workers in July 1937 finally put an end to all steamboat service on Long Island Sound.

As steamer service to New York City came to an end in the 1930s, the New England Transportation Company added a fleet of gasoline-powered trucks to its operations in an effort to compete for freight traffic. Two express freight trains with motor-truck feeders served many major cities in the New Haven’s territory, including New York and Boston, under the motto “Accept Today—Deliver Tomorrow.” To attract new long-distance rail passengers, the New Haven also introduced the Yankee Clipper in 1930, its fastest-ever train service from New York to Boston, which traveled the distance between the two cities in a speedy four hours and forty-five minutes.⁶⁵

In another attempt to compete with the internal combustion engine, the New Haven Railroad considered establishing its own airline, in partnership with Trans World Airlines, to be called TWA New England. However, ticket pricing proved too expensive, and the service was never begun. New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad

Last of all, the Connecticut Company, operator of the New Haven’s street railways in cities around Connecticut, announced in 1931 that it planned to substitute motor buses for trolley service on its interurban lines, where thanks to the automobile, large-capacity trolley cars were no longer required. Over the decade, as the popularity of the automobile continued to rise, some intracity trolley lines that had become unprofitable were abandoned, while others were replaced with gasoline-powered motor buses, as once well-used trolley tracks were paved over in city after city around the state. By 1941, those routes still remaining in the Connecticut Company’s Hartford Division were completely converted to motor bus service, though some electric trolleys continued to run on the streets of New Haven until 1948.⁶⁶

Yet despite all these attempts to adapt to the new world of automobility, the debt accumulated during the Morgan and Mellen expansion still encumbered the New Haven’s balance sheet. It was only through a combination of good management, belt tightening, and federal loans authorized by the Emergency Transportation Act of 1933 that the New Haven was able to remain afloat during the early years of the Great Depression, even as the corporation’s gross revenues declined from $142 million in 1929 to $71 million in 1935. Still, the inevitable could not be postponed forever. Unable to cover the interest on its bonded debt, and with no further outside loans forthcoming, the New Haven Railroad finally filed for bankruptcy on October 23, 1935.

What followed was a prolonged corporate reorganization that required twelve years, eleven ICC reports, fourteen circuit court decisions, and eight U.S. Supreme Court decisions to untangle the financial affairs of the New Haven and its subsidiaries. At the heart of the road’s financial rehabilitation was the elimination of $200 million in bonded debt, an amount not coincidently similar to that squandered by Morgan and Mellen on their steamboat and trolley purchases a generation earlier. As the ICC noted, “It is apparent that the losses resulting from the New Haven’s investment in other companies are more than sufficient to explain the profit-and-loss deficit existing as of October 23, 1935.”⁶⁷ Indeed, what was remarkable was that the New Haven managed to remain solvent for as long as it did following the financial mischief created by Morgan and Mellen. But in the end, even with a combination of competitive initiatives, good management, and outside financial assistance, the once mighty New Haven, try as it might, could not outrun its own history.