There is a particular kind of document that New Haven has produced roughly every twenty-five years since 1910: the plan for the Mill River. Reading them in order is a good way to understand how the city has thought about water, industry and its own future — and how consistently it has known what it ought to do.
1910: Gilbert and Olmsted
Cass Gilbert and Frederick Law Olmsted prepared the city's first modern plan, presented to the Civic Improvement Committee in 1910. It proposed an inner circuit of parks, parkways and reservations linked by paths that would never have to cross a highway.
On the Mill River specifically it asked for a buffer of open land along the water, instead of the artificial vertical walls the city was already starting to build to control the river's course. It warned that the buffer would also hold back the coming density of double-decker housing. And it noted, in 1910, that pollution was already a problem at low tide.
The city built the walls.
1942: Rotival
Maurice E. H. Rotival prepared a new comprehensive plan in 1942, and it belonged to a different century of thinking: the city reorganised around the automobile, with arterial roads cut through where they were needed.
The road that wasn't built
In 1942 city planners first floated an arterial road running over the Mill River and through East Rock. It was reconsidered on and off into the 1950s. By 1959 and 1960 the parties involved broadly agreed on the route.
Then it became a fight. Residents and park groups called it a waste of good parkland; the state highway department called it an integral part of the system. A Save Our Park Committee formed and the East Rock Connector was stopped. Interstate 91 still went through and took about ten acres.
1987 and 2013
The Mill River Municipal Development Plan of 1987 and the Mill River District Plan of 2013 both start from the opposite premise to Rotival's: that the river is an asset rather than an obstacle, that industrial land near water is worth reclaiming rather than expanding, and that people should be able to get to the water's edge.
The thing they all agreed about
Every one of these plans, across a century of otherwise incompatible assumptions, says some version of the same sentence: people should be able to walk along this river.
It took until now to build it.
The sign at this spot
The full sign, in English and Spanish. Zoom in to read it.
This sign is still a draft. The hatched boxes are photographs that have not been sourced yet.
Sources and further reading
Where a link goes to a scanned original — a newspaper page, a map, an engineering journal — it is the actual document, not a summary of it.
- Report of the New Haven Civic Improvement Committee, 1910 — Gilbert and Olmsted
- Mill River District Plan, 2013
- Mill River Trail Framework Plan
- The East Rock Connector — Connecticut roads
- Mill River Watershed Based Plan — Save the Sound
Research and credits
Historical research for the Mill River Trail signage was carried out by Colin M. Caplan of Magrisso Forte and John R. Logan, with contributions from Jason Bischoff-Wurstle of the New Haven Museum and walk notes by Steve Hamm. Images are credited individually. Locator maps are drawn from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.