work and shopping opportunities in the city.
In Connecticut, the impact of automobility on the movement outward from city to suburb after 1920 can be seen in the increase in population of small towns around the state adjacent to larger cities. One of the largest transformations took place in the town of West Hartford, whose 1920 population of 9,000 grew to 34,000 by 1940. Similar if less dramatic growth occurred in numerous other communities around the state, where population growth over the decades previously measured in hundreds of persons now commonly numbered in the thousands. For example, from 1920 to 1940, the population of Waterford increased from 4,000 to 6,600; Farmington, from 3,800 to 5,300; Stratford, from 12,300 to 22,600; and Hamden, from 8,600 to 23,000.53
The percentage of the state’s population living in Connecticut cities peaked in 1920 at 63 percent. Thereafter, the percentage declined at a slow but steady pace, as towns that had been rural and agricultural in character, continued to grow more quickly than the state’s urban core. The process of suburbanization that began in the 1920s would accelerate in the postwar decades, so that by the year 2000, with the state’s total population having increased (fourfold) to 3.4 million, only 37 percent of Connecticut residents would live in cities. By any measure, it was one of the most amazing transformations of the Connecticut landscape in history—and it was automobility (the automobile plus megagovernment-sponsored highway building) that made it possible.54
There was recognition among engineers and city planners as early as the 1920s that the dispersal of population from Connecticut cities represented more than just a move to the suburbs. They began to see how the movement of people out of the cities created a new political entity on the landscape: the region, a multitown locality that reflected the economic interdependence of the newer suburb and the older city. It can be said that the idea of regional planning took hold in 1922 with the creation of the Committee on a Regional Plan for New York and Its Environs in New York City. Over the next decade, this group surveyed the growth needs of not only the city itself but adjacent portions of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut as well. Their work sparked early planning efforts in Fairfield County. It would take several decades for the concept of regional planning to spread to the whole of Connecticut, but in the end it is this process of regionalization, creating a new political entity out of city and suburb combined, and not suburbanization alone, that best describes the transformation of the Connecticut landscape in the twentieth century.55
CONNECTICUT CITIES: ORGANIZING THE LAND
Even as the move to the suburbs was underway, Connecticut cities began to adopt progressive cures of their own to lessen the ills of urban living for those left behind. By beautifying public places and rebuilding urban centers in a neoclassical style, the progressive reformers believed they could inspire higher moral values among the populace. The first expression of the Beaux Arts style in America—named after the school in Paris where architects were trained in such designs—was at the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, and the concept of city planning in the Beaux Arts style was soon adopted by many American cities, including Chicago in 1896, Washington, D.C., in 1901, and San Francisco in 1906. With impetus from the City Beautiful movement, the city of Hartford created the nation’s first City Planning Commission in 1907, and other Connecticut cities soon organized similar commissions: New Haven in 1910, Bridgeport in 1913, and New Britain in 1915. By 1946, twenty-seven cities and towns in Connecticut had planning commissions.56
While the planning process helped cities focus on the need for open spaces to provide relief from urban life, and wider streets to accommodate faster-moving automotive traffic, the long-lasting contribution of early city planning was in the concept of zoning, or dividing up the landscape according to how the land was to be utilized. Zoning typically restricted each parcel of land in a community to a specific type of use—residential, commercial, or industrial—while establishing building lines and height limits to control the size and location of structures on the building lot, and street lines to delineate the location of new roads. The first zoning laws in the Northeast were adopted in New York City in 1916.
With the Hartford City Plan of 1910, city planning began in Connecticut. Hartford Commission on the City Plan
There was, however, immediate concern that restricting the use of privately owned land through zoning might be unconstitutional. For example, were not the creation of building and street lines the equivalent of land taking, and should not a land owner be compensated by the town for that portion of his property that he could no longer build on? The Connecticut Supreme Court tackled the issue early on in Town of Windsor v. Henry D. Whitney, et al. In that case, the court determined that such zoning actions were “a legitimate exercise of the police power of the State, as distinguished from the power of eminent domain,” under which an owner must be compensated for land taken for public use. In what became a landmark decision on the matter, the court concluded that “the State may regulate any business, or the use of any property, in the interest of public health, safety or welfare, and without making compensation, provided this is done reasonably.”57 The constitutionality of zoning was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Company in 1925, which made zoning a legal expression of a community’s policing powers as long as it was applied without prejudice to the entire community and not only to certain property owners.
The Connecticut legislature endorsed zoning for specific Connecticut cities beginning in 1921, and four years later passed general legislation that empowered all Connecticut cities, towns, and boroughs to create zoning agencies to control the bulk and use of structures in their communities, as well as the density of their population. The concept of zoning as an adjunct to progressive city planning proved particularly popular in Connecticut. By 1946, more than half the towns in Connecticut had zoning commissions, many of which were combined into a local planning and zoning commission. As one report noted, “There is no state in which zoning has proved more acceptable.”58
While planning and zoning allowed cities and towns to organize the landscape according to progressive principles, neither resolved the most egregious problem of city life: unfair and undemocratic representation in state politics. According to the state constitution, Connecticut towns had either one or two representatives in the General Assembly, regardless of population. As a result of the urbanization of large cities after the Civil War, Connecticut’s system of representative government, a holdover from colonial times, abrogated the political rights of the majority of the state’s residents. For example, by 1889, the demographic changes that occurred during the nineteenth century allowed 11,851 voters living among sixty small towns to elect a total of seventy-six representatives to the state’s General Assembly, while the 17,827 voters then living in New Haven could elected only two. And the discrepancy became more disparate as urbanization progressed. In 1900, the town of Union with a population of 400 persons had two representatives in the state assembly, the same number as the city of New Haven with a population of 108,000. It is no wonder that Connecticut’s unbalanced system of representation became known in progressive circles as the “rotten borough” system.59
In 1901, progressive reformers took up the cause of “rotten borough” politics by calling for a state constitutional convention to address the issue. However, when the convention was organized the following year, its composition reflected the very problem it was called upon to resolve: regardless of its size, each town could send only one delegate to the convention! To no one’s surprise, the convention achieved little. One delegate commented boldly on the heart of the problem, if not its legal ramifications: while it is agreed, he said, “that town representation is illogical … [and with] no legal justification … it is a sentiment which should be cherished and perpetuated.”60 In the end, the convention penned a new draft constitution that increased urban representation slightly, but in a subsequent referendum the voters turned down even this modest improvement.
While Connecticut
