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When students and faculty at Connecticut College undertook a public history project to document New London's urban renewal upheavals of the 1960s, the goal was a website available to all.

But many who had been touched by the era also asked for a book covering the same ground.

"This was not part of our original plan, but we wanted to respond to that request," said Anna Vallye, assistant professor of art history and architectural studies, who led the project.

The website, called "Mapping Urban Renewal in New London: 1941-1975," was launched in 2020 and provided the first extended look at those fateful times, when swaths of the city were leveled and public housing projects rose.

The companion volume was just published by the New London County Historical Society. It presents the city's experience a different way, complementing the original project.

While the website reduces the complex story to detailed episodes, the book, "Urban Renewal and Highway Construction in New London, 1941-1975," comes at the topic from another direction, putting what happened into broader contexts.

The result locates mid-century New London in the sweep of history, suggesting that what took place was driven by larger forces. The book's nine chapters, written by students in one of Vallye's 2019 classes, give a more nuanced understanding of an event that lingers in public memory as largely negative.

"You often hear the same shorthand that's used for urban renewal across the country: greedy developers and power-hungry politicians ruined the city," Vallye said in an email interview. "It just did not go like that in New London."

Instead, she and her students found that New Londoners were invested in the process, attending meetings, speaking up, disagreeing, and working for the city's best interests.

"To me, that is incredibly inspiring," she said.

But somehow the memory of that community spirit was lost. The website rescued it, and now the book makes it part of a larger story.

The seeds of change in U.S. cities were planted well before the 1960s. The rise of the automobile hastened migration to suburbs and made highways essential to keep people coming back to shop. When they did, they found narrow streets with too little parking.

In New London, this was reflected in the first two projects of the era: the construction of the first Gold Star Memorial Bridge, accompanied by highway approaches later absorbed into Interstate 95; and the clearance of a patch of downtown between Tilley and Golden streets for a municipal parking lot.

In the early 20th century, disorganized growth in cities, fueled by huge waves of immigration, gave rise to social ills like squalid tenements and unsafe drinking water. The reforms of the Progressive Era led to the concept of urban planning, and planners absorbed moral imperatives, their goals framed in terms of the "common good."

That carried over into the urban renewal movement, which began with the Housing Act of 1949 and was animated by a military sensibility from World War II, when an invention called the bulldozer rose to prominence.

Maurice E.H. Rotival, who produced the Winthrop Urban Renewal Plan, the blueprint for New London's 1960s transformation, was guided by the same spirit as his Progressive Era forebears. He proposed abstract, big-picture goals like higher property values and better housing.

One of those goals, the "elimination of blight," had disproportionate consequences for the city's Black population, which faced more housing discrimination as it grew. Forced into poor living conditions, Black residents were then likelier to be targeted for displacement. Still, they were a minority of those uprooted in the renewal area, which was seldom the case in larger cities.

The rational approach to urban planning, influenced by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, emphasized rigid zoning of residential, commercial and industrial uses, as did Rotival's plan for New London. This, coupled with a "culture of clearance," meant the rejuvenation of cities would be undertaken with widespread destruction.

Casualties of that included historic buildings and the sense of place and community identity they provided.  A backlash resulted in changes like the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966.

A few years before that, an effort in New London to save buildings from the bulldozer would have created a "historic district" in the area of Huntington and Federal streets. Though a few buildings were spared, like the Greek Revival homes of Whale Oil Row, an official's sneering response to preservationists' plea captured the mood of the moment: "Your arguments suffocate in the thin air of academic nonsense."

The tide later turned, and the successful effort to save Union Station led to the creation of New London Landmarks. Historic preservation has been a force in the city ever since.

Another victim of urban renewal was wetlands, whose value wasn't understood. Seen as useless breeding grounds for mosquitos, they had been under threat since 19th-century laws called the Swamp Land Acts encouraged their destruction. Millions of acres were filled in before scientists established the role wetlands play in flood control, water purification and biodiversity.

New London had been losing wetlands since dimly remembered Bream Cove vanished in the 1860s. The destruction continued with the creation of I-95, which wiped out a section of Briggs Brook. Inner Winthrop Cove was also lost to redevelopment.

Ultimately, urban renewal in New London had the greatest effect on the people who lived through it. They included voters, whose early enthusiasm soured into disenchantment; merchants and taxpayers, who banded together for a stronger voice; African American activists, who pressed for desegregated housing; homeowners, who got paltry compensation for properties they lost; and renters, happy to move to bright, modern buildings.

When the Winthrop Apartments on Crystal Avenue opened in 1967, tenants were in awe. But vandalism, graffiti and maintenance problems arose immediately, launching a 55-year saga that ended just weeks ago, when the abandoned buildings were demolished.

They were among the most prominent reminders of the era, along with unlovely parking garages and desolate highway cloverleafs. As the book notes, redevelopment's legacy is incomplete, missing the never-built luxury homes and shopping centers that were also part of the plan.

Those things are hard to imagine, and they aren't the only aspects of redevelopment at odds with the mostly dismal memories it left behind. Today the effort might look like a reckless lurch into the future that trampled New London's proud past. But it was motivated in part by nostalgia, to restore the city's dying retail center "as it used to be."

It may be thought of as targeting poor Black residents in the name of progress, as was the norm in those days. But "slum clearance" was never New London's primary motivation, though the concept helped it get federal funds and sell residents on the idea. The project was first and foremost about shopping.

In retrospect, redevelopment may look like one giant failure, but amid unrealized goals were results like improved housing, better traffic flow and higher property values. Progress was messy and uneven, but it was real.

Still, Vallye believes that on balance, it was "a misguided and destructive program."

"Ripping out acres of residential neighborhoods all at once like that, displacing hundreds of families — that was a real violence and a terrible loss," she said. "Whatever benefits accrued ... in my mind don't justify the damage."

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