ACHESON DRIVE AND THE FINAL BLOW

IMAGE FROM: 1945-46 Highway Commissioner’s Biennial Report (CT HIGHWAY DEPT, 1946)

When Connecticut state highway department officials decided in 1946 that Route 9, which had traversed several different local roads on its way from the heart of Connecticut to the shoreline, needed to be upgraded, they saw themselves as acting in the public’s interest.  In the 1945-46 Highway Commissioner’s Biennial Report they wrote: 

“The route through Middletown represents a critical bottleneck under summer conditions and has long been source of great annoyance both to the travelers on Route 9 and the people of Middletown who have had their Main Street tied up with the ‘Shore travel.’”[1]

They were not destroying part of a city or severely damaging its link to a rich cultural past.  They were following national trends and satisfying the growing demand for more and better roads.  (It is not for this investigation to determine who was responsible for that demand – be it automakers, construction lobbies, unions, politics, Americans’ love affair with individualism and independence, or some combination of these factors.  It is merely necessary to note the existence and scale of that demand.)  So, the automobile was here to stay and Middletown’s waterfront district would be transformed. 

In the early part of the twentieth century Middletown’s immediate riverfront was occupied by commercial ventures.  On Water Street, which ran along the river in a path similar to that which would be covered by Route 9, a coal yard, a numbering machine company, a toy manufacturer and a concrete plant were housed.[2]  Tenements, which would later be deemed “slums” by urban renewal advocates in the 1950s were also present on Water Street.  They too would be victims of the construction of Acheson Drive in 1950 and 1951, the portion of Route 9 that cuts through downtown Middletown. 

The story of the demise of these tenements is not unrelated to the story of Route 9.  Each project was embraced with such ease because neither was asking the people of Middletown to give something up that they had not already.  The whole waterfront had ceased to be an integral part of Middletown’s vital industry and identity decades before the 1950s.  There was, in effect, no waterfront to be lost.  Politicians were unafraid to condemn dirty, crime-ridden slums and equally unafraid to align themselves with the progress that was promised by a new highway in and out of Middletown.  The river no longer held sway in a place where it was once the source of all vitality.

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