42. Oak Street Connector,
New Haven, Connecticut

Aerial view (right)

43. Projection of Proposed Throughway,
Connectors, and Enlarged Streets,
New Haven, Connecticut

Plan (bottom right)

New Haven Redevelopment Authority

The Oak Street Connector in New Haven is a typical American urban highway of the freeway building era (Figure 42, right). The city is sev- ered. Its edge becomes a long ribbon unraveling into the countryside along the freeway. Parking becomes a city problem and a principal com- petitor for land. Housing for lower-income fam- ilies is lost forever, or at best for decades. The daily ebb and flow of commuting produces mas- sive lines of traffic, long time and space separ- ation of work from residence, and a downtown deprived of maximum potential commercial, re- tail, and entertainment vitality. If New Haven did not have Yale University downtown, a massive employer and generator of funds and activity, then it, like so many smaller and medium-sized cities around the country, could have been sapped fatally by the puncturing gash of the highway. Compared to the growing life of cities, the necrosis process is short. An urban freeway takes about a decade from the decision to build to the opening of the road. In this case, the deci- sion occurred in 1951, the highway was financed in 1955, engineered in 1956, constructed in 1957-58, and opened in 1959. Within another decade this road, like others around the country, had induced major peripheral development within New Haven and extensive concomitant secondary and tertiary land development be- yond the city in a wide area. The urban highway is never an isolated incident (Figure 43, bottom right). It must be linked to other highways. Heavy traffic is not dissipated, as originally intended by the urban freeway; rather, more is generated. Therefore a network plan is required when a highway is considered. The network becomes not only a dominant control over the city, but also a self-fulfilling prophecy of greater need for more concrete to contain more traffic.