It is difficult, when visiting Hartford today, to imagine that at the end of the nineteenth century this was one of the richest cities—per capita, the richest—in America. Samuel Colt and the manufacturing innovations that he and his contemporaries pioneered beginning in the 1840s fueled a remarkable prosperity that inevitably led to the success of merchandising enterprises such as G. Fox & Co. and Brown Thompson. The proud stores they built (designed by the likes of Cass Gilbert and H. H. Richardson), as well as parts of the Colt factory (whose blue onion dome is familiar to drivers on I-91) still exist and fortunately are protected landmarks, but they are now either partially shuttered or serve much-diminished functions, generating a fraction of the wealth they once produced.

Hartford is, in fact, a prototypical and depressing example of the decline that so many mid-size American cities experienced in the decades following the Second World War. Unlike Boston or New York, whose structural fabrics had sufficiently consolidated, these smaller centers were unable to resist the mindless highway construction that sliced through their urban cores and accelerated the headlong rush to suburbia. In Hartford, a population that numbered almost 180,000 in 1950 is now diminished by nearly one-third. The drop in per-capita income has been even more dramatic. When and how this erosion may eventually be reversed is still being debated. There are encouraging signs, however. One of the more conspicuous was on full view this September when the Wadsworth