If, as Einstein said, insanity is a matter of doing something over and over again and expecting a different result, it’s a wonder that Hartford has only one street named “Asylum.”
But at least that’s the right address for the Hartford Civic Center, for which XL Capital owns naming rights at the moment, where hockey promoter Howard Baldwin proposes that someone else should spend more than $100 million on renovations in the name of economic development that would lead to restoration of big-league hockey in the city.
Been there, done that, and got … the worst urban poverty in the country.
Yes, for a few of the boom years of the late 1980s the big-league Hartford Whalers might fill most of the Civic Center arena’s 16,000 seats on a good night. But the team never made money and by 1996, the team’s last year in Hartford before moving to North Carolina, state government was subsidizing it by $32 per ticket and writing off more than $60 million in loans to the team. The hockey fans were mostly suburbanites who, after partying downtown, went home without a thought of actually living in a jurisdiction where more high school students were dropping out pregnant than graduating. The struggling city’s greatest recent achievement has been the installation of a sound-monitoring system to triangulate gunshots.
A few years ago state and city government had a chance to renovate and expand the Civic Center but decided instead to build another convention center and retail district near the Connecticut River at “Adriaen’s Landing.” The people who show up at “Adriaen’s Landing” don’t just leave the city when their event is over; they leave the state too. The retail buildings across the street stand empty, monuments to Connecticut’s chronic misdiagnosis of its urban problem. Hartford is no better off for those playgrounds for outsiders.
Yes, an arena for University of Connecticut men’s and women’s basketball, minor-league hockey, concerts, and such may be an essential element of regional community. But hockey is not only an acquired taste but also a very expensive one, something whose civic utility amid a near-depression now might be doubted even by boosters and shills who have been hit a few times in the head by a puck.
Why is Hartford, once nearly the richest city in the country, nearly the poorest now? Why have government’s efforts to remediate poverty in the city only worsened it? Why has Connecticut generally been declining economically and in population for several decades?
These are the compelling questions. The answers may not be fully understood but Hartford’s experience shows that they have nothing to do with convention centers, sports arenas, and hockey. Those things are just distractions — and distraction seems like their primary purpose.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
