Magical History Tour Evokes Corsets, Slave Auctions, & Department Stores

New Haven shop girls could attain the Victorian hourglass figure they craved when Strouse, Adler & Company finally came up with an affordable corset with stays made from metal, not from expensive whale bone.

And when the very last slave auction was held on the New Haven Green, back on March 23, 1825, a mother and daughter — 40-year-old Lois Tritten and her 16-year-old daughter Lucy — were sold at a bargain price, two for ten dollars. Their buyer, Anthony Sandford, a member of Trinity Church and an abolitionist, immediately freed them.

Those revealing details of the social and political history of New Haven emerged before a rapt crowd of 60 attending the second edition of ​“Ideas on Foot,” a walking tour of downtown organized by The Ethnic Heritage Center as part of its offerings to the current edition of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

A tour of historic Lower Dixwell took place last week. Like Monday afternoon’s downtown tour, it was part of the Center’s Walk New Haven program, based on recently published guidebooks and walking tours of Dixwell, Downtown, and Wooster Square.

The program’s coordinator of the largely volunteer effort, former New Haven city planner Rhoda Zahler, said she’s been delighted by the turnout and ​“the interest in learning local history.”

Among those in the audience showing that interest was Woodbridge resident Joan Murphy (pictured). Murphy was born in Newhallville and raised in local Catholic schools, including Sacred Heart Academy, which was then situated in Wooster Square.

While in school, ​“I learned nothing about Wooster Square or other local history, and we were smack dab in the middle. I’m trying to make up for lost time,” Murphy said.

She had come to the right place.

In meeting rooms above City Hall’s atrium, the program began with brief presentations on the evolution of downtown by City Historian Judith Schiff; retired Hillhouse High School history teacher and African-American historian Robert Gibson; historian and Jewish Historical Society President Robert Forbes; and U.S. District Court Judge Janet Arterton, current chair of The Committee of the Proprietors of Common and Undivided Lands at New Haven.

The proprietors, not the city government, have owned the 16-acre Green since the early 17th century.

Arteton said it is an ongoing challenge to maintain the colonial values of the Green as a place for gathering and free speech but not for commerce — although, as city Economic Development Director Matthew Nemerson pointed out, the Green had been in centuries past a marketplace.

Audience members, as promised, were then divided into groups to take the ideas they had learned ​“on foot,” on three walking tours in the downtown area, based on Walk New Haven routes.

Gibson and Forbes took their groups to the Amistad Memorial, adjacent to City Hall and the site of the city jail where the Amistad captives were held in the summer of 1839.

Gibson traced African-American presence in New Haven from Colonial times, citing, among other important reference points, a plan to establish a black college in New Haven in 1831.

There was strong opposition from business people worried about ​“lowering property values,” he said, as well as from Yale officials concerned with offending the sensibilities of their students who hailed from the South.

In the end, the whole town voted, and the count was overwhelmingly against the black college, he added.

Gibson said there has not been a book on the African-American history of our city since 1940. ​“It’s about time someone did some serious research and wrote a book,” he suggested.

The next stop on the Gibson-Forbes tour was in front of the Exchange Building at the corner of Chapel and Church, where they pointed out the law offices of Roger Sherman Baldwin; he was the local attorney who took on the Amistad case and went on to become governor of Connecticut.

At the corner of Chapel and Church, Forbes caught the walking touristas up on New Haven’s once fabled department store history.

He pointed to State and Chapel where the city’s biggest department store, Shartenberg’s, stood — all 150,000 square feet of it — in 1915.

“Shartenberg was to shoppers what the Yale Bowl was to football,” Forbes said.

A few blocks over on Orange Street, a third ​“ideas on foot” group was being led by Ethnic Heritage Society member and volunteer Aaron Goode.

Orange Street, if you didn’t know, was named after Protestant William (III) of Orange, who ascended to the British throne in 1688, succeeding the Catholic King James II. James had been all set to revoke the Puritans’ charter for Connecticut. Who knows how history may have played out if James had carried that out? Perhaps we might today be part of Greater Virginia or Outer Maryland.

The third and final ​“ideas on foot” tour — this one of Wooster Square — unfolds on Wednesday, June 21, with folks meeting by the Columbus statue in the square at 5:30.