Prometheus 6

At a series of public hearings in recent years, backers of the coliseum pitched redevelopment plans. But toward the end of a 2003 gathering, Mayor John DeStefano Jr. took the microphone. "Be realistic," he implored. "It never created any economic activity around it. It didn't even sustain a bar on the corner."

As in many Northeastern cities that were once industrial centers, the coliseum's plight was but one symptom of the city's economic crisis. Even the gun manufacturer that made New Haven famous -- the U.S. Repeating Arms Co., producers of Winchester, "the gun that won the West" -- has finally ended a 140-year association with the city by closing a factory that was once the largest local employer. It was New Haven's last remaining major manufacturer.

Urban Renewal's Final Implosion
By Jonathan Finer
Sunday, October 22, 2006; B04

NEW HAVEN, Conn.

Veterans Memorial Coliseum, which for the past three decades has occupied -- some say blighted -- a downtown block of this oft-maligned city, is expected to be demolished next month. Most of the musty building is already gone, including the oddly furrowed walls that once shook with cheers of pro-wrestling crowds and power chords from the likes of rockers Pat Benatar and Iron Maiden. Two banks of red-and-blue plastic seats jut diagonally from a rubble-filled foundation; workmen pick at concrete pillars with jackhammers.

When the coliseum opened in 1972, New Haven officials had hoped that the 10,000-seat stadium would usher in a more prosperous era for a city with high rates of poverty and crime. But by 2002, after too many seasons with too few paying customers, the massive building was shuttered; local authorities projected that it would lose $50 million over 10 years, and that tearing it down would cost a fraction as much.

The coliseum's destruction will be a depressing coda for Urban Renewal, the controversial nationwide movement that reshaped dozens of American cities from the late 1940s through the 1970s, claiming large swaths of rundown neighborhoods for huge government public works projects. Its foremost laboratory was New Haven, where officials spent $745 per resident on urban renewal projects from the 1940s through the late '60s, more than twice as much as the next most ambitious city (Newark, $277). The coliseum was the showpiece.