Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • Page 99

Life and death in the Front Street neighborhood, and the tricks of collective memory Text by Susan D. Pennybacker Photo Research by Nancy Albert 1 I'ii yiuwij. jn Jim lv -r I y' -T I- 5 i I 1 i I i 'if i 1 i -A Peddlers such as this fruit and vegetable seller (below) of the 1920s were long part of the Front Street fabric, and you can call us to hear one man 's recollections from that era. Anthony Topagna, an Italian immigrant who arrived in America on July 4, 1920, shared his memories as part of an oral history program. fS To hear Topagna's account please call Courant Source at 246-1000 or (800) 246-8070.

The Source number is 3768. A touch-tone phone is required. The interview was done as part of the Hartford Studies Project's program organized by Steve Valocchi of Trinity College. The faces that greet us in these photographs are those of the immigrants who came to Hartford al the end of the last century. Some proudly declare their trades, shops, wares and pastimes.

Their children play in unpaved streets; the hawkers hustle chickens, flowers, produce and meat. Mothers and daughters mind their infants. These same streets shield prostitutes and house servants and politicians, tiny restaurants and sweatshops. They are home to" booksellers and laundresses and rabbis, small hotels, gambling joints and pool rooms. Vaudeville acts, melodrama, Wild West pageants and minstrel shows thrill the idle.

The police keep watch on foot, on cycle and on horseback. The wealthy come to do their daily shopping, side-by-side with Hartford's growing working population. The Connecticut River forever threatens to overflow its nearby banks and when it does, rot follows, while the fears of floods of biblical proportions linger and fester. Insurance companies, forges, small textile manufacturers, ironmongers, livery stables and wharf owners in the adjacent parts of city, bear witness hovering, watching and making a buck. Though Hartford Hospital, the Orphans Asylum, schools, places of worship and union halls are within walking distance, many residents do not survive into old age in this Front Street neighborhood before the First World War.

Italians and Irish, blacks and Jews, Poles and Russians, migrants from Georgia and the Carolinas, from China, Germany and Sweden, overcrowd the precarious housing stock. The first war brings prosper- ity for some but others labor under -the weight of continuing racial and -V. i i religious discrimination and the ab- sence of an adequate family wage. Medical care and schooling are fleeting, elusive. The pictures do not tell us of the fates of those depicted in them.

Many coveted the chance to move out of Front Street and took it if it Continued on next page 7995 7.