"Revisiting Our Neighborhoods" Through Hartford Memories

When the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford published Remembering the Old Neighborhood: Stories from Hartford's North End five years ago, they got such a positive response that they decided to compile another volume of memories of Hartford's Jewish past. The editors of that second volume, called Revisiting Our Neighborhoods: Stories from Hartford Past spoke about the book last Sunday at the
Hartford History Center at the Hartford Public Library.

Estelle Kafer, Executive Director of the JHSGH; Joan Walden, editor of Revisiting Our Neighborhoods; and Susan Viner, the book's researcher and project chair, talked about gathering stories from people who lived in Hartford from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Viner first explained why so many Jewish immigrants came to Hartford in the first place. When Eastern European Jews came to America, they landed in New York and Philadelphia. There they mostly settled into crowded rooms, working menial jobs for little pay. They quickly realized, Viner said, that the streets of America were not paved with gold.

But Hartford – a city with a population of only about 50,000 in 1900 - offered a chance at something better. Roughly 800 manufacturing companies were based in the small city, from major employers like Colt to more modest family businesses. These manufacturers needed workers.

And so the Jews made their way up the Connecticut River by boat, or came north by train, and found homes in Hartford's own "lower east side," the crowded and frequently flooded neighborhood along the river. They would later move on from the Front Street area, mostly into the city's north end and sometimes to the south. They couldn't go east, because that way was the river, and they couldn't go west, Viner said, because that was the domain of the rich.

Other ethnic groups made up the patchwork of Hartford's neighborhoods at this time, and their stories are also included in Revisiting Our Neighborhoods. African Americans, Italians, French Canadians, and Irish immigrants lived mostly in their own areas, where stores and restaurants offered familiar foods and their own houses of worship were located.

Each neighborhood was largely self-sufficient, but accessing goods or services that could not be found near home meant traveling downtown by bus or trolley.

Among the details Viner shared, those about that downtown trip – for which both men and women would dress up – elicited some of the loudest laughter and murmurs of recognition from the audience at the History Center.

Viner and Walden recalled more of the mundane details that fill the book. Contributors wrote of the sound of roller skates on the pavement, buying 8 O'clock coffee and State Line potato chips, and gathering at the pond house at Keney Park. Many of the shared memories involved food, especially the products of Hartford's many bakeries: rye bread, challah, and cake.

Walden described the process of editing over 100 submissions, which ranged in form from oral histories to lengthy written accounts. The details that struck her were those requiring precise memories of long-ago facts, like prices: contributors recalled the days when a comic book cost 2 cents, 5 cents got you a lemon ice, and a gallon of gas was 10 cents.

Although much had to be edited out for space, Walden said, said there is a plan to post the full stories online.

After a slide show of historic photos from the JHSGH collection, including one of a peddler with a horse-drawn cart and another of a Lag b'Omer picnic in Keney Park, Kerri Provost of Real Hartford shared her photographs of Hartford today. Most of the many synagogues that once served the Jewish population of Hartford are used as churches now, she said, and the people as well as the celebrations captured in her photos showed this demographic shift.But in the images, of the West Indian Independence Parade and Three King's Day, of street art and community gardens, there was the same sense of Hartford as diverse and ever-changing.

For more about the JHSGH and the books, visit their website.

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Submitted by Hartford, CT

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