1986 I moved to Connecticut to work for the Hartford Courant, America’s oldest continuously published newspaper—a phrase that still forms itself as one word in my head, even seven years after leaving that job. At the time, Hartford’s better days were behind it, or so I was told. Drug and gang wars held the city by the throat. Schools were struggling. The go-go ’80s appeared to be passing the capital city by.
But Hartford was so much more than gangs and crime and troubled schools. I know because I was there, and when I was occasionally asked to give speeches in suburban libraries or small-town schools, invariably someone would raise a hand to ask if I went into the big, scary city every day.
“Only on days I want to be paid,” I would answer, thinking I was giving their tremulous concern just the right amount of disdain.
I see now how insufferable I was. The suburbanites whose main contact with Hartford was to drive in for a concert or play, or to commute to work and then rush home at 5 p.m., were only responding to what they thought they knew. Too often, stories of the schools doing incredible things with limited resources or of trailblazers making the capital city awesome got lost, along with history and context that might have helped explain Hartford.
I made my living and my reputation in Hartford, and so I feel obligated to at least try to explain the place. I am not a social scientist or a professional historian. I am, however, a keen observer and a trained interrogator. I do not know how to tell the story of an entire city, so I want to explore one of the neighborhoods I most like.
Toward the end of my decades-long career at the Courant, when I would get angry (and that was often), I would stomp out of the paper and head south. North was Asylum Hill, which had too many busy intersections for someone who didn’t want to stop for cars but just wanted to stomp off her mad.
South was Frog Hollow, which had a vibe I couldn’t define, other than to say the neighborhood gave off the feeling of being multilayered. Something had happened here, and even if I was walking strictly to enjoy a burrito at El Nuevo Sarape or heading to look at produce I didn’t recognize at Park Street’s El Mercado, I knew as I walked past apartment buildings and bodegas that what I was seeing was only the most recent layer of a thick historical onion.
There were the trash blowing in the street and the junked cars on the roads, but there was also a pregnant sense of … something. Something happened here. So here’s to peeling back the onion’s layers and admitting that we didn’t just arrive here. Here’s to getting to the story, the real one and not necessarily the one we tell ourselves. To people lost to history who shouldn’t be. To giving credit where it’s due: generations of people climbing the ladder.
Here’s to the messy but always hopeful history of Frog Hollow.
Introduction
IN WHICH THE AUTHOR EXPLAINS, WHY FROG HOLLOW?
Hartford, Connecticut, was established in June 1636, when a group of Boston-based Puritans followed the Reverend Thomas Hooker, a fifty-year-old orator who earlier had fled England under the threat of prosecution. The band of one hundred or so traveled for two weeks toward a Dutch settlement on the banks of the Connecticut River.
The Dutch weren’t the first inhabitants of the area. The first recorded residents were the Suckiaug people, a small tribe that somehow managed to score fertile bottom land crisscrossed by heavily traveled trails. That meant trade, and wealth, for the natives. The Dutch eventually left the area for what is now upstate New York. The Suckiaug (there are multiple ways to spell that) assimilated or moved on as well. The English remained, only to be joined eventually by a variety of people, who brought sights, sounds, and smells from around the world.
And so it has gone for Hartford from the beginning, sometimes because newcomers were seeking something better, and sometimes because newcomers were forced out of their homes by famine, flood, or war. This is a lot of ground to cover, historically speaking, and I am going to tell this story the only way I know how, journalistically, with the stories of people.
Hartford, located slightly north of dead center in the state of Connecticut, is a town of just over 123,000, with all the challenges a midsized city can claim. The neighborhood of Frog Hollow is located just to the southwest of dead-center Hartford, next to downtown and grand state buildings. Frog Hollow is thirty-five square blocks laid out over seventeen acres and home to just over 16,000 residents. A marsh gives the neighborhood its name, though subsequent generations once claimed that the “frog” came from the influx of French Canadians who began moving to the hollow in the 1850s to work in the factories. Perfect Sixes—brick apartment buildings that are three stories high, with two units per floor—line the streets with a beautiful functionality that is almost Shakeresque.
Those bricks are good quality. The wooden floors, if they weren’t gummed up with a shag carpet in the 1970s, are attractive oak and pine. They stand as monuments to factory owners who wanted their workers to live well so that they could work well.
For most of Hartford’s commuters anxious to get to work and then home again, Frog Hollow is trash blowing on the streets and men hanging out on Park Street. The schools are challenged to take in some of Hartford’s poorest students and prepare them for success. If you’re zipping by and only half paying attention, the place has a rundown feel; but this scrappy little plot of land has a history packed with innovation and technology birthed by wave after wave of immigrants. Frog Hollow has historically been the entry point for families wishing to participate in, and benefit from, the opportunities offered in a city. They’ve wanted, generation after generation, to have a shot at the American Dream, even before anyone thought to call it that.
We won’t agree on a definition for the American Dream. For my generation it included home ownership. Today’s Millennials aren’t so sure. But James Truslow Adams, a former banker who became a Pulitzer-winning author, came up with a workable definition in his 1931 book The Epic of America. Adams wanted to name the book “The American Dream,” but his publishers advised against it. No one, they said, would spend three dollars for a book with “Dream” in the title during the worst of the Depression. Undeterred, Adams used the phrase “American dream” thirty times in the books’ pages, and Epic became an international bestseller. The American Dream, wrote Adams,
is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.1
Despite publishers’ concerns, the idea was precisely the rallying cry Americans wanted. In his introduction to Epic’s 2012 edition, Howard Schneiderman, a Lafayette College professor of sociology, wrote that the book couldn’t have been better timed. Its hopeful note resonated with readers, and Adams’s “famous metaphorical phrase took off like a rocket.”2 Adams gave them hope. This was America. The possibilities were endless.
The idea still has resonance. Ask any random group about the American Dream, and you’ll hear about social mobility and the opportunity to pull one’s self up by one’s bootstraps, to overcome inexplicable odds, to fashion a life out of one’s own vigor.
