silk manufacturing company bought the first major accident policy in May 1864.94 A 1909 book extolled the work of the hypothetical “Mr. Engineer” and said that “wood-working machines, with the saws and knives revolving thousands of times a minute, seek in vain to mangle the hands and fingers of the workman, while cunningly devised guards permit the workman’s hands to push the work along or to glide harmlessly over knives or cutters; at the same time, there being no interference with the speed or limitation of the output.” All hail “safety elevators, emergency brakes, rail joints, automatic gate crossings and signals, life buoys and collapsible lifeboats, safety hatches, life guns, safety clothes lines; and methods for safeguarding the milk and food supply.”95 For a while the offices of Travelers Insurance included what they called a “Chamber of Industrial Horrors” for visitors to study photographs of explosions, open elevator shafts, and machinery before protective devices had been installed. Defective chains, broken cogs, snapped tubes and rivets—it was all on display.96
For all the exhibit’s trumpeting of a safer work environment, workers were still routinely injured and sent home to Frog Hollow to exist on the kindness of neighbors or local churches. By some estimates, industrial accidents occurred two million times a year, and that number was far and away higher than any other statistic in any part of the world, according to a 1911 Courant article.97 In 1910 the Aetna Life Insurance Company published Safeguards for the Prevention of Industrial Accidents, because according to that book’s first chapter, “The toll of human life and limb being exacted by modern industry has reached such startling proportions as to be a serious menace to our national welfare.”98
This was evident both in the number of deaths and dismemberments, and in the laws that were being passed to prevent such events. The machinery heated up, and in February 1912 E. Sidney Berry, counsel of the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection & Insurance Company, spoke to a gathering of insurance agents: “This is a great country for liberty, but we lay more emphasis on liberty of property than we do on liberty of life.”99 Owners had not taken proper steps because, according to Berry, accidents didn’t cost them enough. After all, when railroads found it expensive to pay recompense to injured passengers, they began to observe stricter safety measures.100
Boiled down, prevention was the responsibility of the employee.101 If an injury occurred on the job, the company rarely if ever took steps to make things right. If one worker was injured to the point of incapacity, there was always someone else to step in. But that began to change as labor unions grew in Frog Hollow’s factories and legislators passed worker-friendly protections, since “the workingman is the one least able to bear the burden of liability.”102
For decades Travelers owned the market on accident insurance, and by 1885 the company announced it had sold one million policies, an astonishingly high number, considering the fairly restrictive rules that dictated who could be covered. Only men between the ages of eighteen and seventy (who were considered employable) could be insured. Women were uninsurable, as were people without jobs, because their time was considered statistically worthless.103 Policies were written to provide compensation in the event of the death of the policyholder, or the loss of two limbs, the loss of eyesight, or the loss of one limb and one eye, or any combination thereof.104
The rules changed as more women entered the factories. By 1900 as many as 50 percent of all U.S. workers—male and female—were covered by some kind of policy that protected against financial ruin in the case of illness.105 But this industry wasn’t based in Frog Hollow. Much of the insurance business was downtown or just to the north of the neighborhood, in graceful Asylum Hill. The insurance industry would carry Hartford through financially lean times, but by the 1960s all that remained of Frog Hollow’s manufacturing powerhouse was shells of factories surrounded by sturdy Perfect Six apartments. In those dwellings the doors shut tight, the walls were thick, and the stairwells held the smell of garlic, potatoes, and meat from two generations of families. If the factories were gone, the housing remained.
3. A Dream of Social Order
THE GOVERNMENT SEGREGATES A NEIGHBORHOOD
In the 1940s and ’50s, the apartment at 530 Park Street was, like so many dwellings in the neighborhood at the time, a cold-water flat. The Vanns, a family that included Anthony, an Italian American, and Anita, whose family was French Canadian, moved in when Tony returned from duty in World War II.
Living without hot water meant that bath times revolved around a routine. Anita Vann would run water in the tub, while Tony, who ran a luncheonette in downtown Hartford and worked as a superintendent for their building, heated kettles of water on the kitchen stove for their two daughters.
One of those daughters, Korky, would be a longtime Hartford Courant writer, and her Hartford bona fides are securely in place. Korky’s mother had gone to the neighborhood’s St. Anne’s School, where French was spoken as much as English. Korky Vann attended school there herself. Her grandfather worked at Royal Typewriter, and her grandmother was a furrier in downtown Hartford.
St. Anne’s was the center of Korky Vann’s universe, along with the French Social Club. She remembers speaking French as a girl. Though she’s mostly lost that skill to atrophy, the sound of a French Canadian accent still sends her off on a nostalgic wave.
When she was in the fourth grade, Vann’s family moved west to Washington Street, near Ward, and she attended Immaculate Conception School. After school she would go to the Mitchell House on Lawrence, a popular neighborhood center that was part of a social settlement movement that began in Hartford in the 1870s.
Back then, women like Elizabeth Colt, Samuel Colt’s widow, made it their business to provide for what were often called the street urchins of the city. Though school attendance was mandatory, movers and shakers worried that some immigrant families weren’t as keen on education as they were on putting their children to work to help supplement the family income. The idea was to provide activities, from English to cooking classes, to help students assimilate. For Vann, the center offered after-school activities. It also offered adult education classes.
She remembers a vibrant Frog Hollow that was sufficient to any family’s needs: a grocery store, a movie theater (the Lyric), two five-and-dimes, and a robust library. As soon as she could write her name, Vann got a library card. “That was great motivation,” she said. “You didn’t need to travel far outside for what you needed day to day.” Frog Hollow kids went ice-skating at Pope Park in the winter and watched fireworks there in the summer. The world ended at the end of her street.
For the Vanns, education was paramount. Both girls went to college. When her parents bought a small cottage on the Connecticut shore, they knew they were living the American Dream, Vann said.
Frog Hollow has been a laboratory, not just for manufacturers but for housing and urban policies as well. Not all of those policies worked to better the neighborhood. Attempts to socially engineer the place often fell far short of the ideal. From an odd plan to move residents out to a city created especially for them in eastern Connecticut to blatantly racist redlining, Frog Hollow has been the guinea pig for multiple attempts to improve the neighborhood—without the manufacturing base it was built around.
Housing has always been fundamental to the American Dream. Early factory owners knew that. Colonel Pope planned a workers’ village with two hundred graceful homes, all within walking distance of his twenty-four-hour factories. There would be townhouses and parks and roundabouts and, of course, paved roads for his bicycles and later for Pope automobiles. Pope eventually
