Below is Allan Appel’s latest entry in a yearlong series looking at the past 388 years of New Haven history, as America celebrates the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Dressed in woolen coats, thick white stockings, and other colonial style gear, in the spring and into the late summer of 1938, New Haveners could be spotted sweating and promenading about the Green. They were participating in the relentless year-long New Haven Tercentenary, the celebration of the 300th birthday of our fair plantation, as the Puritan founders termed their 1638 arrival — a planting, in ye olde years gone by. Beginning in April 1938, to mark the red-letter moment in civic history, there had been prayers, speeches, pageants, and parades, and the school kids of the city had even contributed to baking their own birthday cake to present to Mayor John Murphy. There were business and entrepreneurial pop-up events, a celebration of local commerce and invention, and a genuine all-hands-on-deck attempt both to celebrate and to unite the city — now home, thanks in particular to Italian immigration, to upwards of 160,000 souls. Yet something ominous was rolling their way, and they had no idea. For, roll the clock barely a few months forward, in the weeks after a wet and sweltering August, and on Sept. 21, 1938, just east of the city, the worst hurricane in memory struck with massively destructive winds and no particular interest in Cotton Mather or John Davenport; nor even in that old bakery that Salvatore “Sally” Consiglio, Frank Pepe’s nephew, had spotted and was thinking of buying on Wooster Street. Purchase price: $500. While New Haven itself escaped severe damage to life and buildings, the ground had been so saturated by rains in August, the high winds of the hurricane toppled nearly 5,000 mature elm trees, which for decades had given the city its arboreal identity and its nickname. When the storm subsided, 600 were dead throughout New England, serious sections of the New Haven Shoreline railroad tracks lay twisted, and thousands of structures flooded and flattened in towns east of the city all the way to Old Saybrook. There, in one of the communities closest to the Sound, where Katherine Hepburn’s family had lived for generations, the already famous actress was captured in a photograph sitting on a toilet amid the debris of her family house’s complete destruction. A gala, red-letter celebration of achievement on the one hand, followed by natural disaster of unprecedented force and destruction? A coincidence? You wonder what the Puritan divines would have made of the juxtaposition? Just accidental irony? Or punishment for the hubris of the extravagance of the Tercentenary Year hoopla? For how the festivities concealed, for example, cheek by jowl with the city’s wealth and bluster in certain quadrants, not excluding Yale — where students had just moved into fancy new colleges — that the Depression’s unemployment and poverty remained grievous. For example, 37 percent of Dixwell business storefronts were still closed and shuttered, and breadlines still common in a Depression that had not left. None of that had been swept away by the Hurricane of 1938, “The Long Island Express,” so nicknamed for how swiftly the winds tore across New England. It was the worst natural disaster (well, maybe with the exception of the loss of the “Ghost Ship” in 1645) in all 300 years of our fair settlement’s tenure on God’s green earth. Such thoughts percolate as one goes through accounts and the sobering photo images of New Haven in 1938. Chief among the sources is a large volume, Three Centuries of New Haven, 1638-1938 by Yale Prof. Rollin Osterweis. That history, published years later, in 1953, was in effect commissioned through funds left over in the treasury of the New Haven Tercentenary Commission. Osterweis informs us that although the population had been soaring since the turn of the century, the current 163,000, he writes, should be viewed in light of some 300,000 more residents living in the city’s expanded “trading area.” That is the suburban towns that were, until after World War Two, still depending on going into New Haven for shopping. “Visitors to the Elm City in 1938,” he writes in the penultimate chapter of the book, “found a fascinating mixture of modern life and ancient landmarks, testimony to a present and future as well as to an historic past.” Yet among the 400 factories and specialty shops galore among our surviving venerable old structures, he continues, “the central Green, the ancient colonial market place, still retains its glamour as the chief link with all that had gone before . . .  and on the lower Green, court officials continued to tack legal notices onto a weather-beaten post, as they had been doing since time immemorial.” He concludes: “The major themes which had persisted throughout the community’s history had survived to the Tercentenary Year: the importance of religion; the zeal for education; and the dual drive for economic advancement and civic improvement.” On the education front, for example, he points to the junior high school’s arriving on the scene, an innovation to improve the transition from elementary to secondary school; to the local major employer, Winchester Repeating Arms Company, being integrated into the national Olin Arms Company, but Sargent’s remains under local management. Significantly, he concludes that unlike many other New England towns, in 1938, “no single industry was dominating the scene.” While Osterweis describes the extensive pageant in the Yale Bowl in April, after the kick-off tercentenary parade, as well as a Progress Exhibition, in which local businesses showcased their inventions and their wares, his chronicle misses mention of what looms like a digital hurricane, every bit as earthshaking as the Long Island Express of 1938. That event unfolded during the celebration’s Progress Exposition, in June, where the tech-curious of 1938 gathered to behold New Haven Mayor John Murphy appear on something called a television screen. As if to demonstrate the deep-rooted spirit of entrepreneurship always present in New Haven, the broadcast featured not only the mayor on a primitive TV, he appeared alongside a still working model of a mechanical stone crusher invented by Eli Whitney Blake in 1858. Nothing much happened with TV in New Haven, or elsewhere in the country as that development was interrupted by the exigencies of World War Two, but digital life in New Haven had begun. Also of long-term significance, though un-related to the Tercentenary, in July of 1938 the Board of Alders voted to create The Housing Authority of New Haven. It was one of the first public housing authorities in the country. The action came with a federal mandate and funding based on the federal Housing Act of 1937, so that the city might begin to eliminate what was termed “unsanitary” tenement dwellings and to build low income housing. With more New Deal money that flowed, HANH, which is now Elm City Communities, built Elm Haven in 1940 and Quinnipiac Terrace in 1941. It’s hard to exaggerate the significance — to the participants in particular — of the Tercentenary. The city leaders, always steeped in the religious past, were clearly also aware of the widening class divide in town, and along with that the ethnic and religious divides that raised the question whether the future of New Haven would continue to resemble the past, or depart dramatically. To bridge the gap, or at least to allay some of the sociological anxiety, they strived symbolically in the celebrations to be more of what we today call inclusive. The official parade pointedly featured a large contingent of newer arrivals, Italian immigrants marching along with the heirs of Davenport and Eaton. And on the second day of official celebrations, which had begun on April 25, the day of the landing of Theophilus Eaton’s party, a religious service convened in the Yale Bowl. It was billed “The New Haven Tercentenary Community Praise and Memorial Service for People of All Faiths” and Catholic and Jewish clergy participated, a priest from St. Aedan’s and the rabbi of Mishkan Israel. They were also having fun as well, as this April 25 New York Times description of a Center Church service that day featured a good-hearted replication of Puritan religious practices: Center Church in this city, the original religious unit of the colony . . . this day worshiped with armed guards alert for possible traditional Indian attacks, and tything men pacing the aisles, their tip staves ready to prod dozing adults or bring to order mis- chievous youngsters. An official Tercentenary medal was struck featuring on one side John Davenport preaching his first sermon, and on the obverse the famous three-churches on the Green, but with the new, just risen modern buildings of Yale rising in the background. You can’t win them all. Osterweis concludes his chronicle quoting in full  the official “Tercentenary Ode” commissioned for the occasion from then famous American writer, and Yale grad, Stephen Vincent Benet. It’s not a very good ode, as few occasional poems are, but it does feature these two stanzas in the middle that to me, quite remarkably for this occasion, tell the truth of New Haven’s origins, confess some sins, and leave us aspiring to keep at doing better over the next, say, 300 years: Right and sure of Zion -they were that- and we know it wellThe exile oppressed the exiled, the righteous harried the justAnd the souls of the unredeemed were brush for the fires of hell —-It is not for that we praise them, though they would think that we must Not that but the vein of iron that lasted the winter outThe women who longed for England and died on the stool of birth,The mortal courage and failure, the mortal patience and doubtAnd the vision of something greater, not yet built on earth. See below for previous articles in this series. America At 250 … And New Haven At 388 On Preachers “Fence Viewers”: New Haven’s First Centennial Year It’s 1788 And Hamden Votes NOT To Ratify The U.S. Constitution How They Marked New Haven’s 1838 Bicentennial Amistad Revisited Civil War Is Everywhere “Great White Hurricane” Meets “The Lion of Anacostia” The post Tercentenary Hallelujahs And A Hurricane appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less