Today’s Times reports that there’s a world wide movement to liberate the rivers that flow through many of the world’s cities. Over the course of the last century many were covered with concrete.
When I was a kid there were sections of the Park (or Hog, depending on your taste) River that were still running free in Hartford. By the time I graduated from High School, the river was gone. Mark Twain built his house to evoke a riverboat, with one section resembling the pilot house facing the river, which flowed by his home. The house survives, but the river is gone, except in memories.
There was a brook that flowed near our house on Bulkely Avenue in Hartford, which is also now completely covered. It’s hard to understand the mindset that led to the burying of all those rivers. No doubt it’s part of our compulsion to try to control by brute force.
Wouldn’t it be nice if Hartford recaptured its rivers and streams, or at least some of them. When we made the city more livable for the automobile, we made it less livable for people. In Hartford, the burial of the rivers was only a small part of the overall plan to drive people out of the city. The river that used to split the city was covered with concrete, and at the same time the city was split anew, with dire results, by the interstates that cut the city off from the Connecticut River and split the city in two from the east to the west. If there had been a conscious plot to destroy the city, it wouldn’t have had to change the Hartford Redevelopment plan a bit.
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