Seeing Hartford

by Leigh Graham

categories: Cities, Race Ethnicity Class & Gender

Published October 29, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT

I arrived in Hartford, CT last Wednesday for a Friday night wedding at a 19th century-bank-turned-banquet-hall venue.  In high spirits but absolutely rushing around in Boston earlier last week to get ready for the wedding extravanganza, I joked on Wed evening that my future mother-in-law was solving the great bridal nail crisis 2009, i.e., finding me a place in Hartford to get a manicure.  In a city of 125k people, how hard could it be?

Very, it turned out, if you're from out-of-town and relying on local boosters to recommend services to you.  Boosters are what we planners and political scientists call the folks who sell cities to us - the media, local politicians, business owners, real estate developers - so that we will want to come and live there, do business there, spend money there.  A family friend, the banquet manager and the hotel concierge all recommended a single nail salon in the entire city, which didn't have enough staff to see me on Thursday.  I finally settled on the concierge's third recommendation, which came with numerous caveats, and turned out to be as run down and rough as warned - but my manicure was only $10!

Connecticut's urban model is one of very wealthy suburbs surrounding deeply poor towns: just check out the differences in poverty between neighboring West Hartford (4.5%) and Hartford (31.5%). For everything we needed for the wedding we were directed to the suburbs - no grocery store downtown, no market, no spare salon that people in the service industry want to send a white, middle-class client to, for fear of my fear and reprisal. What was more amazing was that there was actually a market two doors down from my venue, though it did not sell milk, but looked an awful lot like a deli/bodega/convenience store otherwise.

The thing is, I know there must be multiple nail salons and bodegas outside the downtown, where the poverty rates and crime rates are high and the white face is rare.  But for Hartford's boosters, these sites don't even exist.  Sure, it may not be a wise business strategy to send the adventurous gal from Boston traipsing around an unfamiliar city, but our L.A. wedding guests walked to our dinner site in Frog Hollow after dark without incident, and more critically - how can we encourage exploration of and investment in cities if we live in fear of our poorer, rougher, darker neighbors?  How can I get to know Hartford if I have to get on the highway to get anything I need?  (Representing the worst of urban renewal, Hartford is split into pieces by not one but two highways slicing through it, taking people anywhere but there.)

What Hartford did offer was tremendous value and a surprisingly captivating urban world.  Repeatedly over the weekend I heard from locals and those traveling from nearby Boston and NYC, I've never *seen* this city before, never realized all the interesting sites it offered, all the history built into it.  But you planners need to do more here.  Don't abandon it now that you're wedding is over.  We start, in part because of our wedding, with Hartford as a dissertation site for my husband.  It is hardly much, but the city is on our radar, and should be on yours as well.

(I've used this photo before; it's a blighted building that greets you as you get off 84-W into Hartford.  Photo "Hartford Blight" by Pixonomy)