The Right People by Stephen Birmingham

Author:Stephen Birmingham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504026277
Publisher: Open Road Media

13

The Company Town: West Hartford, Conn. 06107

Hard by every major United States city it is possible to encounter at least one suburban stretch containing the styles and attitudes which have come to a kind of climax on the Main Line. There are the celebrated North Shores of both Chicago and Boston; Cleveland’s Shaker Heights; Pittsburgh’s Sewickley; the Clayton-Ladue towns west of St. Louis; San Francisco’s Peninsula; and the Pasadena-San Marino complex outside Los Angeles. But the suburbs of smaller cities have somewhat special sets of problems.

Hartford, Connecticut, unlike most New England cities which have a tendency to sprawl smokily at river mouths, has a skyline of a certain drama. From whatever direction one approaches the city, the skyline signals with a single exclamation point: the tower of the Travelers Insurance Company, a pinnacle that has served as the city’s symbol of success since 1918. Around the Travelers Tower cluster a number of much more modern structures, glittery with glass, including several other insurance companies. At night the Travelers’s pale beacon floats above the city lights, and can be seen by airplane pilots from as far away as Providence. When the Prudential building was completed in Boston, the Travelers Tower became New England’s second tallest building—a bitter pill for Hartford to swallow, but Hartford swallowed it with traditional dignity. An insurance city knows how to take disaster in stride.

The city sits beside a gentle curve in the Connecticut River with an air of complacency, ignoring its reflection in the water. The river means less to Hartford than it once did—much less than when the city’s founders, led by Thomas Hooker, came down from what is now Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1635 and settled on this western bank. Since then, the river has seen many changes. Steamers no longer ply between Hartford and New York. The river no longer freezes solidly from shore to shore, allowing skaters to waltz to Glastonbury and back again, as they did fifty years ago. Its waters, sullied by towns that have sprung up along its length from Long Island Sound to its headwaters in Canada, no longer lure great races of salmon as they once did. From the western slope of the city, there was once a Currier & Ives eye view of a New England river port. On these slopes, in the late eighteenth century, a group of intellectual artists known as “the Hartford wits” gathered in drawing rooms of Federalist houses. Here, in the nineteenth century, Charles Sigourney built a mansion where his wife, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, the most prolific lady author of her day (over two thousand articles, more than fifty books) held literary salons.

Today, the view of the river from these rises is blocked by banks of buildings, and the atmosphere in Hartford is somewhat less cerebral, somewhat more statistical. Hartford, since Mrs. Sigourney’s day, has been largely based upon the law of averages which the fifty-odd insurance companies with home offices in the city have used to build businesses with total assets close to twenty billion dollars.

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