of Hartford could not come up with enough financial support, the development was scrapped.1
If that large a development was an overreach, scattered-site factory housing was common throughout Frog Hollow. Housing for midlevel managers was built on Columbia Street, off of Capitol Avenue, with a line of attached, three-story, single-family houses. The twelve homes on the west side were built in 1888, and the east side was built a year later. Like so many of Hartford’s more memorable structures, the homes were designed by Keller, and Columbia is considered one of the prettiest streets in the capital city. Pope’s motivation for creating factory housing wasn’t just for the convenience of his workers. He said: “Contented labor emigrates with hesitation…. When they get a man who looks for a garden at the start, that man is permanent … the little garden is a loadstone to the higher nature of him who works hard, and can only get a few minutes in the twilight or at early dawn to drink in what little Nature has set before him, but which is his own.”2 He also offered employees a hot lunch and a two-week vacation every year, though as was common, workers were not paid during the time they took for vacation.
Publications of the day insisted Pope’s factory complex was the standard by which all other manufacturers should be measured. In fact, Pope was simply following in the footsteps of other successful factory owners, such as Samuel Colt. Before he died of gout in 1862, Colt, according to David Radcliffe in Charter Oak Terrace: Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Public Housing Project, built the nation’s first war-related housing when he constructed thirty wooden homes in the city’s South Meadows area for his employees. Other employers, if they wanted to keep their workforce happy, had to follow suit. Even before Pope rode in on his bicycle, the neighborhood’s first company row houses were laid out, in 1873, along Babcock Street, named for the colonial family that ran the American Mercury.
A walk through the neighborhood is far more interesting when the stroller is armed with a little historical context. At the end of the 1700s, what later became Capitol Avenue was a dirt lane that emptied into pastures west of town.3 A petition granted by the General Assembly on May 29, 1784, set the city boundaries from the Connecticut River to what is now the corner of Washington and Jefferson streets, and then roughly to the corner of Lafayette and Park streets. The same charter called for a mayor, aldermen, and a common council to meet annually. They would be empowered to, among other activities, “lay out new highways, streets, and public walks, and to alter those already laid out, to exchange highways for highways, and to sell highways for the purpose of buying others.”4
Neighborhoods such as Frog Hollow tended to be fairly self-contained, but as the city expanded so did its public transportation system. A trolley system began to snake its way through Frog Hollow. By the turn of the last century, more than one hundred cars passed in front of downtown’s city hall every hour, and electric lines went from the city hall to Pope Park, up Zion Street, and over by New Park Avenue. A car went by every ten minutes and fares cost pennies.
In addition to rows of Perfect Sixes, pavement came to the neighborhood in 1916. The pavement’s arrival was long anticipated, but the process of installation tested business owners’ patience. Frog Hollow was known for a lot of things, but mostly it was known as the muddiest section of town. The ghost of Dolly Babcock’s well seemed ready to assert itself at any time with ground that would inexplicably give way to a bubbling underground stream. Residents sometimes woke up to small ponds in their yards, the result of overnight settling.
Street improvement came after much discussion as to how the “new-fangled pavement” would affect horses and their owners. One Courant letter writer in 1901 was opposed to the traditional macadam on city streets: “No calk [sic] yet invited will support a horse on this pavement when there is a thin coating of ice upon it,” and a smoother surface meant that pedestrians would have to summon even more courage when crossing the street, thus putting the onus on the horse driver to make sure not to run them down.5
Residents soon found out that pavement wasn’t the issue. The danger in the neighborhood was the addition of those trolleys. The Hartford police department added a twelve-person traffic squad after a traffic death downtown in July 1905. A woman had stepped off a trolley car directly into the line of another car. That death was particularly gruesome, but the newspapers were full of stories of serious injuries resulting from encounters with trolleys, including lost limbs and life-altering head injuries, and each report of a trolley incident was followed by letters decrying the too-fast pace of modernity. Members of the new traffic squad ushered in a small sense of security to a neighborhood that was increasingly becoming a tangle of trolley lines and overhead wires.
“In a sense, traffic officers are born, they are not made,” said a 1915 Courant feature story on the group. “The men must have qualities not possessed by the average member of the force,” including confidence and steely nerves.6
Those skills would serve officers well in a neighborhood that sometimes bristled with racial tension. African Americans who moved north to work in the tobacco fields also looked for work in the hollow’s factories. But while the police force was watching over a neighborhood that was relatively racially diverse, that would change as factories grew and housing for (overwhelmingly white) blue-collar workers went for a premium. Over time, black residents began to leave the hollow for houses in the north end of Hartford, which remains roughly 64 percent African American and 31 percent Hispanic. They did not necessarily move by choice. Public policy, unspoken and otherwise, pushed them out.
The creation of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in 1934—lauded for making home ownership accessible—helped dig deep moats around certain neighborhoods, including Frog Hollow.7 This was the birth of redlining, the use of discriminatory banking, insurance, and lending practices that keep certain people from climbing up the ladder and out. In Frog Hollow those people included African Americans, some of whom had been in the area since colonial times, and recent immigrants. The federal government would not insure mortgages in neighborhoods like Frog Hollow.8
The housing bubble of the 1920s and then the Great Depression had turned bankers into conservative lenders. Something was needed to loosen the purse strings after home ownership sunk to 44 percent nationwide—and substantially less in urban areas such as Hartford.9 Mortgage rates hovered around 7 percent. Would-be buyers were expected to put down half the cost of the home, and generally mortgage loans were due within five years.10 Created by the National Housing Act of 1934, the Federal Housing Administration was meant to bolster the stagnant housing market of the early ’30s.11 It did that, but mostly only for white people.
As rural southern African Americans headed north to the factories and immigrants settled in Frog Hollow, a federal organization called the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation published a map that ranked Hartford’s neighborhoods on a scale of A to D. Neighborhoods that examiners believed would be peopled with residents likely to repay a mortgage were marked “A.” Neighborhoods that were considered riskier for mortgage defaults were rated “D” (and colored red on the map). The HOLC was trying to judge the desirability of neighborhoods in more than two hundred cities around the country so that the Federal Home Loan Bank could make decisions on which mortgages could be viable.12
Residential Security Map of Hartford Area 1937, Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. Retrieved from “On the Line: How Schooling, Housing, and Civil Rights Shaped Hartford and Its Suburbs,” https://ontheline.trincoll.edu/book/
The effect on neighborhoods was instantaneous, and it didn’t stop after the Depression. In fact, old redlining maps served as a harbinger of the devastation to come. Neighborhoods where mortgages were not backed were—and are—neighborhoods that
