🔒New book examines role of industrial decline in New Haven crime

Is every crime story at its heart a business story?

That’s the question posed by New Haven-based author Nicolas Dawidoff in his new book, “The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Justice, Violence, and the American City.”

Dawidoff, a nonfiction writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker and New York Times Magazine, trained his reporting skills on his hometown of New Haven for the book, released this fall to positive reviews. The subject is the 2006 murder of Pete Fields, a West Haven resident who was sitting in his car in the violence-plagued Newhallville neighborhood when he was shot in an attempted robbery.

A 16-year-old from Newhallville, Bobby Johnson, was convicted for the crime but exonerated nine years later after police interrogation tactics that resulted in a false confession were exposed on appeal. The likely actual killer — another young Black man from Newhallville — was shot dead soon after Fields’ murder, Dawidoff writes.

Instead of writing the book as a true crime story, Dawidoff said he decided instead to take a deep dive into New Haven’s story, interviewing more than 500 people over eight years.

“My intention was to examine one tragic event as a means of explaining the deeper relationship between American social history, economic history and contemporary gun violence,” he said in an email interview.

“Too often people regard tragic contemporary problems as somehow rooted in the present, as free-standing, as even the fault of suffering people, not as the unfolding result of big, powerful social forces,” Dawidoff said. “To grow up in New Haven, to visit cities like Detroit or Minneapolis or Trenton, communities across this country, is to see the neighborhood consequences of industrial ruin.”

New Haven’s industrial past

A big chunk of the history outlined in the book is the city’s industrial past — more than 700 factories were operating in New Haven between the Civil War and 1900. In the 20th century, gun manufacturer Winchester Repeating Arms grew to dwarf them all, employing 13,667 people in Newhallville at its peak during World War II.

The factory grew and shaped the neighborhoods around it, creating a new American paradigm, Dawidoff said.

“What made New Haven distinctive was the variety of innovative work that happened in the city — the innovative manufacture of a vast range of products like carriages, guns, clocks, corsets etc. — which, in turn, created innovation in how people lived,” Dawidoff said.

With its dense neighborhoods constructed close to well-paid jobs, New Haven helped set up the national template for quick social mobility.

“People took entry-level factory jobs, and then bought small Newhallville houses, moved up and out,” he said.

Those jobs eventually drew tens of thousands of Black workers from South Carolina and elsewhere in the South to New Haven — shortly before those factories started scaling down in earnest, Dawidoff writes.

“It was only when deindustrialization devastated New Haven (and so many cities like it, with neighborhoods resembling Newhallville) that such places of opportunity and uplift declined into isolated communities of struggle,” he said.

What was left of Winchester Repeating Arms eliminated its last 198 jobs in New Haven in 2006 — the year of Fields’ murder. Over the decades of downsizing, thousands of area families were left without work and trapped in decaying, despairing neighborhoods.

“For me, neighborhood gun violence is an extreme response to lack of opportunity — to the loss of entry-level work for undereducated, unskilled people who used to achieve uplift for their families through industrial work,” Dawidoff said.

The loss of factory work has had a lasting impact into the present day: Gun violence continues to plague New Haven, with nonfatal shootings up 5% as of November 2022, compared to 2021, even as homicides fell by 62% year-over-year, according to New Haven Police Department statistics.

In later sections of the book, Dawidoff takes a close look at the myriad challenges facing the estimated 100 people released from prison every month back to New Haven.

That potential workforce faces 625 “collateral consequences” from the state of Connecticut after a felony conviction, including being barred from professions like those of barber and plumber. Johnson’s struggles to find work and some semblance of peace after his exoneration are outlined in heartbreaking detail.

The dramatic and lasting impact of deindustrialization in New Haven is worthy of more in-depth study with the goal of improving prospects for the descendants of those factory workers and the well-being of the entire city, Dawidoff said.

“My view is that a great, extraordinarily wealthy American research university, like Yale, which specializes in the study of complex problems, and which inhabits a community where its very neighbors struggle such that hunger is rampant among children living blocks from campus, could do much public good by creating an institute for post-industrial studies,” Dawidoff said.

Yale’s School of Management has expressed interest in exploring the topic in more depth, he added, and city leaders seem eager to make positive changes.

“I think of New Haven as a place absolutely shimmering with the opportunity to pursue big, important changes for the betterment of the country,” Dawidoff said.