An out-of-state friend who scans Connecticut publications in search of Cohen columns asked me why Hartford didn’t seem to have a traditional chamber of commerce — you know, the kind of organization that held ribbon cuttings when the new shopping center or nuclear power plant opened in town.
As I was telling him the sordid story of the MetroHartford Alliance, I realized that many Connecticut folks don’t know the history of how the old Hartford chamber was transformed into an “alliance” of likeminded regional patriots and Hartford lovers.
The story goes something like this:
Long, long ago, Hartford was run by six or seven guys in suits, one city councilman with a lot of good friends at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and a school superintendent who was a master at snaring lots of murky federal grants that didn’t really require anybody to do very much.
And life was good.
There was a Hartford chamber in those days, so that the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker would have some place to hang out – but the real action was in the backrooms.
Finally the federal money dried up and the King of Connecticut executed all the Hartford and suburban chamber officials and created the MetroHartford Alliance, to which all were forced to pay tribute and to pretend that everyone loved Hartford and to pretend that everyone would compete in one big, fast, happy region, while the state subsidized downtown.
But some of the suburban princes rebelled and retained their own suburban chambers of commerce. They occasionally sent raiding parties into the city to steal television stations and insurance companies and middle-class homeowners and whisk them off to the suburbs, where they would pay tribute not to the Hartford royalty, but to the local Town Council or First Selectman.
Beginning Of The End
Eventually the Treaty of Good Feelings was signed, offering suburban chamber members the right to join the MetroHartford Alliance at a reduced rate, while retaining membership in their own local, subversive, disloyal chambers.
And for many years, the Regional Partner Program flourished, with grim-faced suburban bourgeois driving to Hartford to hear King Oz Griebel give speeches about the value of regional cooperation, as long as most of the subsidies and state largesse went to the city and its make-believe downtown. Everyone clapped, because, after all, they were “Regional Partners.”
But some in the King’s Court were restless. There was expensive staff to pay, lavish cocktail receptions, complete with scallops wrapped in legislative pork, to pay for — and some of these suburban peasants were sneaking in on the action at a discount.
“Cut them off,” King Griebel was advised. “Let them sit there in West Simsbury or East Glastonbury or wherever they are and sponsor their little barbecues at some car dealership’s parking lot.”
But Oz didn’t get to be King by being anybody’s fool. He knew that so ungracious a decision would cause discontent among the regional partners – and they might choose to go shopping in Manchester or West Hartford Center, instead of downtown Hartford.
He conceived a brilliant strategy that would jettison the discount suburbanites from the Regional Partner Program — but do so in such a way as to escape criticism.
And so, the decree was issued, not in King Griebels name, but in the name of a courier. The letter to Regional Partners let them know how much they had “taken advantage of the numerous networking opportunities” that had been offered them — but that it was time to grow up, to either pay full freight and join the MetroHartford Alliance as real, adult members — or to slink home to Podunkville and never see the bright lights of the city again.
And then, the master stroke. The suburban peasants were told in the letter that the Regional Partners Program would end on Sept. 31. That Griebel and his team are evil geniuses.
The suburbanites sat there, scratching their little heads, wondering exactly when Sept. 31 might be. And eventually most of them went mad from the stress – and were never heard from again.
And that is the story of the MetroHartford Alliance and the Hartford Chamber of Commerce and what will go down in history as Black Sunday/Monday, Sept. 31, 2007.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
