Below is Allan Appel’s latest entry in a yearlong series looking at the past 388 years of New Haven history, as America celebrates the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The event in question was so momentous it brought 175,000 people to line Elm City streets , including 18 special trainloads from New York to New Haven – the largest attendance at a single event in Connecticut history to date. So for today’s Semiquincentennial Quiz, can you name that event? Was it a) the L. Candee Company, established in our town back in 1842, which purchased Charles Goodyear’s vulcanization process, and had begun to produce rubber goods . . . was it their unveiling of the world’s most stylish water-proof galoshes? Or b) was it the M. Armstrong and Company Carriage Factory, at 433 Chapel St.’s gala product unveiling of a super-perfected elliptical spring, making for the smoothest, un-bounciest carriage ride ever, ideal for the hotel trade, or the happy family outing? Or might it be c) the unveiling of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument atop East Rock, on whose pedestal the olive branch-bearing Angel of Peace makes her point, oddly, by featuring on her shaft below images of battles past and long lists of names of the New Haven dead from the Revolutionary, 18l2, Mexican, and Civil wars? Yes! C is the correct answer, and as that singular day, June 17, 1887, unfolded 22 years after the end of the Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman and Phil Sheridan, storied Union generals, were New Haven’s honored guests and led the parade, starting from the Green toward East Rock. As this event and the galvanized municipal energy it reflected played out, you might even say it was as if the past were wrapping up the loose ends of memory and getting ready for New Haven’s future. The moving force behind the creation of the monument were the Civil War Union soldiers of our town and region, now in the prime of life, who had organized themselves into the redoubtable Grand Army of the Republic and into other fraternal groups — forerunners of our current veterans’ organizations. But even this powerful and influential group could not get their original plans for a monument to their fallen brothers approved because they, well, ran into zoning, preservation, and other problems. The vets had proposed originally a fountain to be situated on the New Haven Green on space occupied by the now-aging state house. But should or would that building be razed? That would make architecturally suitable space, perhaps, for the monument. Years went by, and the state house lingered, and the vets persisted but began to look elsewhere. It was fortuitous that a new park in East Rock had just been designated by the state, and local wealthy men named Farnam and English, among others, promised to take money from their own pockets to build roads up to the summit of East Rock, so that a parade of 20,000 people, on that festive June day in 1887, might promenade, with bands playing, and children’s choruses singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as they ascended. Parking apparently was not a problem at all. Barely nine months later, on March 12, 1888, another event that would also live on in memory arrived, barreling, walloping into the Elm City (and everywhere else on the East Coast) — the Blizzard of 1888. Dropping 45 inches of snow, killing 400 people, and cutting off all train service to New Haven for four days, that generational event was described this way in the New Haven Evening Register: “Winter saved its best trump for the last. It threw it to-day and won the pot. A bewildering, belligerent, blinding blizzard … If there was ever anything like it before in this part of North America, no one remembers. . . ” Click here to read an Independent story comparing the 1888 blizzard, which was almost immediately termed “the Great White Hurricane,” with Winter Storm Nemo, which struck New Haven on Feb. 8, 2013 with a mere 36 inches of the white stuff. The 1888 blizzard, a howling nor’easter, knocked out telegraph and telephone lines and prompted new thinking about the fragility of the city’s infrastructure. New Haven, and all the other industrial powerhouse cities, shifted to burying utility and other essential lines underground. And the initial impetus for thinking of creating subways, which began to emerge in New York a decade later, can also be traced to the damage and havoc caused by the blizzard. In New Haven, where the vital horse-drawn transit from Westville to Fair Haven was unusable for days, city fathers began to think of electrifying the lines and also of not piling up cleared snow in the middle of the street, as happened this year, in 1888, and made all transport impossible. The technique of keeping the streets open, as opposed to prioritizing the sidewalks, was one of the major lessons learned. The paper of the day also reported that while telegraph wires along with the small network of electrical lines in the center of the city were decidedly down, the blizzard seems to have oddly improved the nascent phone service. “Strange to say the local telephone service was never better,” so sent the paper’s report, “and calls were answered much more satisfactorily than on ordinary days.” The lines were repaired, the trains of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford were back on track and on their schedules, while in town the horse railway, with the streets cleared, could now resume its work as the heart of the transit system of 1888. It could take a worker or shopper from Fair Haven to Westville, with a clattering neighing car arriving every 12 minutes or so, and the ride costing a nickel. “Such A man Was Lincoln. (Applause) Such a Man We Shall Have In The Person Of Benjamin Harrison. (Great applause)” After Nature had reminded everyone who was Boss, New Haven resumed its industrial hum, Yale history prof Rollin Osterweis chronicled in his Three Centuries of New Haven, published in 1938, such that the huge industrial advances, particularly a host of labor-saving improvements in the factories occasioned by the absence of so many men into the ranks of the Union army, were now scaled up in the city’s burgeoning factories. In 1888 our town was still the “arsenal” city of the North East with the Winchester Repeating Arms Company producing pistols and rifles galore, Sargent Manufacturing was producing dead bolts, mechanical doors, and cast-metal hardware of all kinds to supply the building boom. And then of course there was the carriage industry also thriving, the latter the General Motors of the era. New Haven, with its inventors and geographical position as a transportation hub, both by water and by rail, was perceived as a Silicon Valley type city; it was seen as the city of the future. And that’s one reason why six months after the blizzard, on Oct. 25, 1888, an aging but still physically and oratorically impressive Frederick Douglass, made his way to the Hyperion Theater. That was the grand opera house in town, on Chapel Street across from the old Yale campus, the site of the house of foundational-document-signer extraordinaire Roger Sherman and today’s Union League French eatery. That’s where New Haven Gilded Age glitterati — the factory owners, their lawyers and shareholders — might spend three hours of their leisure Saturday or Sunday of cultural time listening to arias. Yet on this date not opera but oratory filled the hall as Douglass, now living in the eponymous Washington D.C. neighborhood and still possessed of an impressive mane earning him the nickname of “the Lion of Anacostia,” electrified New Haveners. They were packed into the 2,200 seats at the Hyperion, and gripped by Douglass’s arguments in support of Benjamin Harrison, the Republican candidate for president. Douglass was so popular, the face of African American emancipation, achievement, and pride, that adoring crowds had greeted him at the spiffy French Empire style railroad station, built only about ten years before, and escorted Douglass the mile or so into town. There the superstar by all accounts did not disappoint, reminding the audience of the Black man’s contribution to the nation both in the late war, and from the beginning. But politics, especially the potential for its dark side, was foremost on his mind, with, for example, the withdrawal of federal forces from the South, which had occurred some ten years before as a result of a nefarious political deal that settled the election of 1876. Here’s an excerpt from local press coverage, resonant for today, of the kind of president, one with a moral center, that citizens in every age, but especially the gilded one in America, in Douglass’s view, were badly in need of: “The president of a country should be more than a successful politician. He should be a man who has a spotless character; who is possessed of a character that is the admiration of all men; who can be pointed to as an example of good and power; who can be respected by the lowest and the highest. Such a man was Lincoln. (Applause) Such a man we shall have in the person of Benjamin Harrison. (Great applause). . .” The other side of the Gilded Age, of course, was the rusty age, the age of hard, manual labor, of bending iron in the forge, of 14-hour days, and tough conditions like the experiences of New Haven stone masons and  bricklayers, who formed an early union, and who had in fact helped to build the Hyperion Theater itself back in 1880. The newest arrivals from economically collapsed southern Italy and Jews, beginning to flee persecution in Russia, often filled the lower tiered jobs at factories and on the wharves, with women and girls earning a half or even a third that of males. No wonder unions began to form to demand eight-hour days and advocating to get 14-year-olds out of the dangerous factory line and back into school. Strikes galore ensued nationally and New Haven and the region were also affected. In the nearest stats available for our year, in 1886, Connecticut recorded 144 separate strikes. The Knights of Labor, which began in New Haven ten years before, organized a massive strike action focusing on the carriage industry in town. That industry featured many skilled workers like carriage painters, trimmers, blacksmiths, other cast-metal workers, and they were, to say the least, under-appreciated. The initial strike lasted for months. At the tavern, or coffee shop, or on the strike line, workers might have read of Jack Ripper. His homicidal exploits that year in London, told in grisly detail in the papers, earned him the dubious distinction of being the world’s first documented serial killer. Violence of a far less dramatic nature — roving groups of young kids, especially from the first wave of Italian arrivals, who had not secured work and no resources — irritated and scared local residents. Far more serious on the violence scale, also according to some sources, were instances where the factory owners and the bosses hired members of the small recently arrived and growing Italian immigrant community to break up the strikes. As the striking workers at the factories tended to be comprised of earlier arrivals such as immigrant Irish and German workers, ethnic animosities could also flare. The phrase “economic inequality” made its first documented appearances in academic journals around this time as sides were digging in, group against group, but largely labor versus capital. While there’s no record of bombs being thrown or confrontations between strikers and the police turning lethal in New Haven in 1888 as had occurred in Haymarket Square in Chicago just two years before, or of anarchists attempting assassinations along “Quality Row,” the line-up of the gaudiest of city mansions on Elm Street across from the Green, still the gaping inequality bred serious tensions in town. According to research from the Yale-New Haven Teachers’ Institute, one press story from the era does a good job of capturing how the class-ethnic-and-labor-fueled anxiety permeated all levels of society: “The tension in the city is palpable. Church leaders like Rev. Newman Smyth of the Centre Congregational Church are lecturing us, claiming strikes ‘kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.’ Business owners are actively recruiting non-union strike-breakers—often new Italian immigrants desperate for work—to break our lines.” [1, 2]. Just the list of skilled activities represented in the early documents of the Trade Council of Connecticut, an umbrella group for unions, established in 1881, gives a good sense of the range of stuff that was being manufactured and maintained in town and the range of people who did the work and were striking for humane conditions and pay: “Bakers, confectioners, joiners, cigar makers, carpenters, iron moulders, plumbers, gas fitters, steam fitters, and pressmen.” In the 1880 census there were only about a hundred Italian families noted. But by1900, Connecticut was surpassed only by Rhode Island and Massachusetts, in the percentage of foreigners in its population — the two largest groups being Italians from economically collapsed Southern Italy and Jews fleeing the pogroms in Czarist Russia. The Knights of Columbus, the Sons of Italy, and Bnai Brith were among the early mutual aid societies that began to form up to meet needs that nobody had planned for. A City Beautiful On the plus side, bridges were being built and repaired, and even acquired, like the Tomlinson Bridge spanning the Quinnipiac River, which was still in private hands at the time, having been established by an enterprising Isaac Tomlinson, in 1797, first as a ferry crossing the Q. Streets were being extended north and west, and the city’s first public library had just opened in the block of Chapel Street between Church and Orange. The library was immensely popular, the local press reported, with 3,500 books available for circulation, and 26 newspapers and 80 periodicals — an impressive number for a town that had grown rapidly but still had peaked this year at about 100,000 souls. These materials were available in the new library, a humble second floor space rented in the Townsend City Saving Bank building, built by Henry Austin, at 793 Chapel St. Willis K. Stetson was the first librarian. The library stayed there for 24 years until, as part of the City Beautiful movement, a new home was created in 1911 for the Ives Memorial Library, the system’s main branch, which stands today at the corner of Elm and Temple Streets. To create the space for the Cass Gilbert building to rise, city officials razed the  home of Judge William Bristol, the Nathan Smith House, and other elegant mansions along what had been “Quality Row.” In the early 19th century Bristol had been a mayor of New Haven and Smith a U.S. Senator. The people must read and be educated — and in no small part because the glories that were Greece and the grandeur that was Rome just might keep them from joining the union or, worse, becoming dangerous radicals and revolutionaries. And they needed and deserved a kind of people’s palace for books. The times indeed were changing. The Independent’s next time-traveling stay-over will be New Haven 50 years after the blizzard, which had became known immediately as “the Great White Hurricane” of 1888. Make that 1938, which also happened to be the 300th anniversary of the founding of our town. Hold onto the interior strap or rail of your brougham or your fast little phaeton or your show-offy brougham — your New Haven-made carriage (seat belts not being provided at the time) — and stay tuned. See below for previous articles in this series. America At 250 … And New Haven At 388 On Preachers “Fence Viewers”: New Haven’s First Centennial Year It’s 1788 And Hamden Votes NOT To Ratify The U.S. Constitution How They Marked New Haven’s 1838 Bicentennial Amistad Revisited Civil War Is Everywhere The post “Great White Hurricane” Meets “The Lion of Anacostia” appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less