Wooster Square Historic District

The Wooster Square Historic District is an attractive and unique residential community located a few minute walks from the center of New Haven. During the middle of the nineteenth century it was a fashionable residential area which ship captains and wholesale grocers found themselves conveniently close to their places of business.

The development of the square occurred primarily between the years 1830 and 1870. Some of the most notable buildings in the area were erected in the 1840s and are the work of the well-known New Haven architect Henry Austin.

Wooster Square received its name from Major-General David Wooster who maintained a warehouse on Wooster Street prior to the revolution, and who lost his life in 1777 in Fairfield while leading his troops against the British. Until 1825 when the city and Wooster Place purchased it built, the square was a field used for ploughing contests. By the 1840s it was a fashionable residential area which attracted many of the prominent citizens of the town.

Before the turn of the century the growth of industry around the square made it an increasingly less attractive neighborhood for the socially prominent and home ownership began to come into the hands of the Italian American families many of whom were able to make a living by using their homes as stores. Adaptation to commercial uses and the low incomes of the new owners downgraded the neighborhood so that by the 1930s urban renewal plans called for total clearance and later plans for the new interstate 91 would have routed the highway through the park.

None of these things happened, however, due to a fortunate concatenation of circumstances in the nineteen fifties which permitted the beginnings of neighborhood renewal. The Wooster Square Project emerged in 1958-60 as a major focus of the New Haven urban rehabilitation program at a moment when external events combined to spark a community-wide conviction that the neighborhood was worth saving. Some of the events which contributed to this conviction were projects by architectural students at Yale who created models for a restored Wooster Square, the intangible but real drive which Italian-Americans have for home ownership, the relatively high earnings during World War II which had permitted savings, and the public endorsement of the architectural potential of the neighborhood by the New Haven Preservation Trust. All these provided vital impetus in a period when low interest rehabilitation loans and grants were still not available to help the homeowners.

From the point of view of public participation in the project one of its most important aspects was the construction of the Conti Community School a first of its kind when it was completed in 1965; another was the rehabilitation of Court Street tenements which were the worst housing in the area. This involved investment of public funds and their resale to private owners. These demonstrations of support, excellent community relations, and the advice of a young architect from Yale, gave form to the desire of individuals to use their own savings to upgrade the status of the community. In the process of the celebration and encouragement of the area, the New Haven Preservation Trust published two volumes dealing with the history of Wooster Square and its architecture. These were circulated to residents and to city officials. The appointment of a Historic District Study Committee followed, and when other legal requirements had been met a mail ballot revealed that the historic district had the support of a great majority of neighborhood residents.

The Wooster Square Area project was an effort of national importance. Though possibly atypical because of the raw materials valuable architecture, the mores of the Italian American community, the vitality of Mayor Lee’s urban renewal administration it nonetheless demonstrated to the nation’s city planners a new potential for the rehabilitation of deteriorated neighborhoods. Wooster Square has historical significance in its embodiment of the architectural trends and fashions of the nineteenth century and its social history as well. The social importance of the self-made men of the period is demonstrated by the architectural individuality of the buildings they inhabited.