Walking America: Bridgeport to New Haven (CT)

From Housatonic Community College to Yale: A 20 mile walk along I-95.

Bridgeport and New Haven are mid sized post industrial towns that have dealt with a lot of the same struggles. Loss of industry, depopulation, “white flight to the suburbs”, loss of revenues, crime, drugs, inequality, depopulation, and corruption.

Most people know them by driving over them on I-95, which plows through both, with little regard for what it is plowing through.

The biggest difference between them is New Haven has Yale, while Bridgeport has only state schools, like Housatonic Community College and University of Bridgeport. Lots of people want to go to Yale, but few do. Everyone who does is celebrated for it, and so lots is written about it. Lots of people go to state school’s, while few are celebrated for that, beyond by their parents or children.

Yale, and its 42 Billion, has kept New Haven relevant and relatable to the elites. Bridgeport, however, is nothing but a problem for them to try and solve. Somehow. With whatever urban planning scheme is in vogue at the time. Tax empowerment zones. Sports stadiums. Low income housing. More tax breaks. Different low income housing. All have been tried, most fail, and each has left its mark on Bridgeport, which is like an archaeological strata of urban experiments. The city is littered with the attempts to “solve it.”

The result is an oddly dense, but empty, downtown. Dotted with massive government buildings that empty after work hours. There are neighborhoods, which are jammed up against I-95, or access roads to it. Many of those neighborhoods are now Latino, with the influx of Puerto Rican’s from New York City made easier by the commuter rail lines that parallel I-95.

New Haven is very similar, but it has Yale. So those problems are either less obvious, or more damning, depending on who is doing the looking.

Between Bridgeport and New Haven is twenty miles of dense intertwined suburbs of strips malls, cul-de-sac dotted neighborhoods, villages determined to stay villages, marshy wet lands, beaches, and I-95’s parent, U.S. Route 1.

Walking between the two is not easy, and in parts close to impossible. I-95 is a monster that dominates everything around it, caring little for anything but being easy to get on and off.

U.S. Route 1 has few sidewalks, tiny shoulders, and absolutely no regard for pedestrians. The areas side streets, branching off into hills or towards beaches, wind this way and that, plunge up and down, and have no or tiny shoulders.

My walk began near Housatonic, on the other side of I-95, then headed north to Barnum Avenue, along its length, before fifteen miles on U.S. 1, with a few detours here and there. It was not a pleasant walk, although there is lots to see. It is a brutal landscape of immediate convenience. Fast food franchises, malls, furniture stores, auto body shops, apartment buildings, and lots and lots of access roads to I-95.

Yet, like in any environment where people live, there is still plenty of community — Bars, bowling alleys, gyms, churches, and people going about being people. Which means being social.

I had intended the walk, somewhat gimmicky, to talk about our countries educational differences. But that isn’t what I thought about for the twenty miles, because once you get a few blocks away from Yale, or Houstanic, neither matters. West New Haven is the same as East Bridgeport. Both have the usual signs of lower income urban areas. Churches, liquor stores, low income housing, some older building falling down, a few non-profits, street memorials to the slain, and bunch of people making the best of what they can.

Instead, what I thought about was how we build roads, especially interstates. How we choose, or how it is chosen for us, to live. How we always build communities, despite the roads, despite the sprawl, despite the consumption.

The landscape I was walking through was my own little hell — A nightmare designed for cars, not people. Even the few wealthy spots were built around the interstate, and the various railroads going through them. Yet nobody I met seemed to think that. Not surprisingly. This was there home, and they liked it.

The guy standing on a spillway over a smelly inlet surrounded by garbage taking a smoking break was happy. Or at least content. The guy fishing off to the side also seemed pretty cool with where he was and what he caught.

The group of older couples walking the Connecticut Post Mall¹ in the morning were very happy where they lived. They didn’t mind making loop after loop in a building they had to drive to.

I want a park, or a yard, or a track. They had the mall.

The young lady waiting at the bus stop, to go to a job interview, seemed unfazed by it all. When I asked her, while we waited togeher, did she like where she lived, she simply said, ‘Sure. I wish the bus would come sooner though.” Same.

The man whose house was literally against I-95, its noise retaining wall a fence for his backyard, didn’t mind it at all either. “This is a nice neighborhood. I have everything I want here. It’s quiet here. There’s a Mcdonald’s, Dunkin Donut, and mall a few minutes away. When it snows, I tell my friends this wall is like from the Game of Thrones.”

He was mostly right. The neighborhood, which lies along I-95, was quiet and peaceful. Beyond the huge wall passing through it, and the occasional sound of a downshifting Semi, you would have no idea an interstate was a stones throw away.

Not every neighborhood has the clout to get a noise retaining wall built, but even before the wall was built he liked his location. “I see deer every morning.”

Different strokes for different folks, as they say.

To it’s credit, the people in charge know the area is un-walkable, so the bus that zooms up and down U.S. 1 is pretty regular, and currently free. People hop on and off all the time using it to shuttle distances they would otherwise walk. An older man, hobbled with age and past decisions, gets on in front of a discount liquor store, carrying two huge boxes of Bud. He gets off a few stops later, bringing the boxes to a group sitting in the shade of an auto repair store. A young man rides from New Haven to a McDonald’s, putting on his work outfit as we get closer. Kids heading to the mall pack on mid way, and are all loud and excited like kids always are. A guy, who I somehow bump into at least four times during my walk, rides it often, jumping on and off, to do whatever he does. Including spending 45 minutes in the McDonald’s bathroom.

The young women I waited with for the bus, got on, did some paper work along the ride, got off to go to her job interview. A few hours later we met again as she was running across the same intersection I was, hoping to beat traffic without the benefit of a pedestrian walk signal.

She laughed as the annoyed motorist, microseconds after the light turned green, honked at us. When we finally made it, she was still laughing, then smiled at me, and said, “They don’t give a damn about you on this street.”

No. No they don’t.

Some people have no choice where they live, and have to deal with that, and why not laugh. Because what else can you do?

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The Walk

More pictures

All are available to download at the link below. Some are from prior trips to the area, mostly in 2016

All these pictures, and a lot more, are available to be downloaded here:

Click for links to pictures

1. I did this walk over two days, partly due to a soar ankle, and partly because the walk itself was so hard. I ended the first day at this mall, and began it again a day later, at the same mall. I ended up really liking the mall. But I like malls. While I prefer markets (like in Lima), that isn’t the reality of much of the US. People make the best of what they have, regardless.