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In 2000, the City Council of New London, Conn., voted to take the final 15 homes from people in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood by force of eminent domain. Pfizer, the pharm giant, wanted to build a multimillion dollar research center adjacent to the teeming blue collar neighborhood and wanted more upscale neighbors.
Through incompetence, naiveté, corruption, or all three, the City Council did Pfizer's bidding. At that point more than 70 properties and many dozens of families had already been bought out – often intimidated by the bulldozers smashing the house next them – but a dozen homeowners had dug in their heels.
The holdouts against eminent domain found support from a libertarian law group and took the case, Kelo v New London, to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost. The same city that collected property taxes on these homes from these law-abiding residents for decades labelled homes as “blighted” when it suited corporate interests. The neighborhood was destroyed. The city gifted Pfizer a 10-year tax abatement to build their $250 million research center, and before the 10 years had passed, Pfizer sold out and left the city.
And left 90 acres of harborside desolation in what has been a neighborhood. New roads were built, and nothing happened. No luxury condos, no hotel, just shattered lives.
It’s 20 years after the predatory realtors began knocking on the front doors of homes there. The sprawling waterfront neighborhood is a vacant lot, covered in weeds and scrub.
I took these photos, and hundreds more, through the ordeal. And almost 15 years ago, I wrote this column for The Day of New London that projected on the mental bluescreen a reasonable outcome for the desolate city plain. Nothing has changed.
Fort Trumbull’s final scene
The scene dissolves from images of bulldozers pushing rubble to a long shot of a sunset sky framing a green meadow below. The soundtrack fades from the roar of diesels to the soft voice of a sparrow. The camera pans to a small brown bird hopping in an oak sapling.
We now script a final scene for the Fort Trumbull tragi-comedy.
The peninsula is quiet, save for chirping birds and the odd car motoring to the state park. The rocky upland knob near the park gate is a now burgeoning forest of oak and maple and sumac, thickets of raspberries bursting at its fringes.
Below, where blocks of homes once defined a neighborhood, spreads a seven-acre field of high grass, thistle and ragweed. The sign that stood for a decade promising "Jobs for your community" has collapsed, and eager milkweed push skyward next to its stumps.
The human actors are gone. The unelected deal-makers who dreamed up the redevelopment of the old neighborhood have moved on. The 80 families who once filled the peninsula are scattered, their houses flattened by eminent domain, their lilac bushes bulldozed under.
The cinematic high drama has played out: Susette Kelo cowering in her little house as wreckers smash the home next door ... police padlocking doors and dragging away the mayor who stood in civil disobedience against the ... the Supreme Court intoning from its marble halls that New London could destroy the homes. La commedia é finata.
The working poor in their powerlessness, the business leaders in their suits, the city councilors in their confusion – all the plot's principals are written out of its denouement. The placard-waving protesters and national TV crews have new agendas. Politicians decry new outrages. Attorneys charge new fees.
All have departed, and the oh-so-optimistic multimillion-dollar new streets of Fort Trumbull are empty. But the thickets are not …
Ironic story lines always imply a moral, and this one is clear: The future arrives without an urban master plan. Here is how the script should end:
While the grand Fort Trumbull project sat idle, its wrecking done but financing missing, self-appointed planners arrived daily. New urban homesteaders quickly saw the peninsula's best potential: single-family housing. They mated and nested and raised generations of young, animating the wasted land. Safeguarded by laws that do not protect human residents, the songbirds thrived.
One nesting pair of little birds – grasshopper sparrows – caught the eye of a bird-watcher. Within a few mating seasons, the pairs multiplied, state scientists arrived, and papers were probated. The land that once housed disposable people became "critical habitat" to highly valued endangered sparrows. Development is prohibited.
Like the Yucatan jungle devouring Mayan pyramids, thickets of birds reclaimed the abandoned peninsula.
The camera pulls back as a sparrow surveys its grassy realm from the signpost for Smith Street.
The End.
