Christopher Peak Photo
Kinga Obartuch, at right in photo, explains her proposal to City Plan commissioners.
New Haven may soon dig up remnants of the original Long Wharf buried in the harbor thanks to the work of one enterprising intern.
The intern, Kinga Obartuch, a rising junior at Yale majoring in American studies, is spending her summer at the New Haven City Plan Department, where one of her tasks is writing a grant application for an archaeological survey of the waterfront.
Obartuch is seeking $30,000 from the State Historic Preservation Office, which can be matched by the city’s coastal bond funds. With the money, the city will try to determine the length that the pier once stretched into the harbor at low tide and take core samples of historic remnants. The findings will be used to compile a long-term preservation plan and add some interpretive signage in the area.
Obartuch’s application will still need to go before the Board of Alders for approval. With it, she’ll have a letter of support from the City Plan Commission, which signaled their approval at its Wednesday night meeting.
New York Public Library
The harbor and Long Wharf, viewed by a photographer from Whitney, Beckwith & Paradice.
Long Wharf is nearly as old as New Haven itself. The state held public lotteries in 1754 and 1772 to help cover the costs of “David Wooster’s wharf.” After British troops used the docks to moor their ships and invade town in 1779, local government got involved in the wharf’s management and voted to extend it into the Sound with an 80-square-foot stone and wood embankment.
As the city’s maritime trade boomed, sailors from Boston and Barbados, New York and London arrived in the port. Exports of lumber, vegetables, cattle and horses shipped out, while imports of sugar and molasses from the West Indies filled another 1,500-foot extension of the wharf, undertaken in 1810.
A decade later, Long Wharf suffered a devastating fire, when 30 stores and warehouses burned to the ground. But it came to its final end after another century, with the rerouting of Route 1 and construction of I‑95 in 1949. Dredging narrowed the harbor and an industrial park took root on the new ground.
“A concrete pier was built on top of it, but the remnants are probably underneath the fill,” Obartuch explained.
An excavation of that history is particularly important now as the Elm City attempts to reconnect to its waterfront with the opening of a modern boathouse on Long Wharf Drive next year. City Plan Director Karyn Gilvarg pointed out that if the city seeks to further improve the area, it will need to prove that any construction or repairs won’t negatively impact historic structures before it can win government grants.
A little bit of little know history about the Long Wharf …
William Lanson, a remarkable black entrepreneur who contributed to New Haven's civic growth in the first half of the 19th century, was probably born free around 1785, perhaps in Derby. CT. Lanson along with other family members moved to New Haven about 1803. Within the short space of seven years, he had become the city's principal wharf builder, an enterprise underwritten by his ownership of a large quarrying business. In 1810, Lanson was the only contractor able to complete the complicated 1,350-foot extension to the town's Long Wharf. As Lanson later recalled, he had special scows (flat-bottomed transport boats) built capable of carrying 25 tons of stone at a time, stone which he and his laborers quarried from the Blue Mountain in nearby East Haven. The huge stones were loaded on to the scows on the river from a wharf carefully designed by Lanson to accommodate their great weight. Working relentlessly, even on "the darkest nights," Lanson finished this vital civic project.
Also, in 1825, Lanson was contracted to build the retaining wall for the harbor basin into which the boats traversing the newly planned Farmington Canal would empty.