Mayors’ Archives Find A Permanent Home

In a windowless room in the basement of a university library, four mayors who ruled New Haven for four decades are going down in history.

The room is on the ground floor of Southern Connecticut State University’s Hilton C. Buley Library. A New Haven ​“Mayoral Papers Collection” is taking shape there thanks to the hard work of SCSU librarians and archivists.

Along one wall, boxes are lined up on four rows of metal shelves containing the papers of the city’s longest-serving mayor, John DeStefano, whose tenure ran from 1994 through 2013. Two hundred twenty-seven boxes contain 100,000 pages of speeches, memos, newspaper clippings, bond agreements, flyers, inaugural gala programs, airport agreements …

… and contracts, such as this one for school custodians.

On the opposite walls a similar set of 90 ​“banker” boxes are in the process of being filled with the papers from the 2014 – 2019 tenure of Mayor Toni Harp. Harp was a ​“transitional” mayor between the hard copy-documented government era to the digital-first era …

… meaning many of her collection’s news clippings are printed out from the internet.

For now, the material from the 1990 – 1993 tenure of the late John Daniels sits on a table top. Daniels didn’t maintain any known archives. But the SCSU team tracked down and connected with a Daniels daughter who produced a binder with photographs and clippings in laminated pages along with some plaques.

The result is a more personal encounter with the life of the city’s first Black mayor.

And tucked into a corner is the emerging collection of papers from the 1980 – 1989 mayoral tenure of the late Biagio DiLieto.

DiLieto didn’t maintain an archive, either. But his economic development chief, the late John Sawyer, did. A dozen boxes worth. Sawyer’s wife Susan donated them to the SCSU collection, complete with annual reports, official documents, and slides (pictured). Another donor, Fair Haven-born attorney and author Neil Proto, who helped DiLieto successfully stop the construction of a shopping mall in North Haven, had already donated troves of historic documents to the university, including memos, articles, brochures, speeches, legal filings from key moments of the DiLieto era. He agreed to lend those documents to the mayoral archives.

This is all a work in progress: An emerging collection of archives from four mayors who steered and defined New Haven’s reemergence in the aftermath of the heady days of Urban Renewal and the subsequent hangover from racial riots, capital disinvestment, and suburban middle-class white flight.

You can feel the excitement and sense of mission of the SCSU team (pictured above) putting together the collection in this basement room. They’ve been developing this archive since 2014, beginning with DeStefano’s papers: Collecting, cataloguing, scanning.

They now have DeStefano’s material online. They’re working on the other three mayors’ materials. Two SCSU political scientists, Jonathan Wharton and Tess Marchant-Shapiro, conducted oral-history interviews and collected documents for the project.

In the process, the SCSU team is creating an indispensable resource for academics, citizen researchers, and anyone else who cares about New Haven.

“We have 40 years of city government and history here,” reflected Bruce Kalk, SCSU’s dean of the School of Arts & Sciences. 

SCSU Metadata Librarian Patrick Crowley spoke of the ​“democratizing effect of digitization.” Through digitization, the archive will be available to people throughout the world, whether or not they are affiliated with a major university or have the means to travel to view the material in person.

“This throws it open to everyone,” Crowley noted.

It all began when DeStefano, a meticulous record-keeper throughout his career, made the decision to donate his papers to SCSU instead of to Yale, where Urban Renewal Mayor Richard C. Lee placed his archives. DeStefano also had an extensive collection of newspaper articles about his career maintained by his mom from 1982 until her passing in 2017.

Asked Thursday why he chose SCSU, DeStefano noted that it is ​“a public institution.” He also spoke of the digitization of the collection ​“dramatically increasing its public availability.”

Neil Proto first suggested the idea of broadening the collection to include other modern mayors when, in the process of researching his book Fearless about A. Bartlett Giamatti, he discovered that neither Daniels nor DiLieto had ​“preserved or in any way deposited their official files and records during their time as mayor,” Proto recalled. Proto had worked closely with DiLieto on numerous projects, from his first inauguration to the groundbreaking case against the construction of a suburban shopping mall that could endanger city retailers.

“I had in my own personal files considerable documentation, news articles, and related historical and official documents, including some from New Haven’s city plan department and Yale’s archives, to write my book and the relevance of both men to New Haven history and Fearless’ purpose,” Proto recalled. ​“However, that vacuum was, I believed, substantially harmful to understanding them and the era of New Haven’s history that mattered to me, and would be helpful for the people of New Haven to know.”

No other repository exists to preserve the day-to-day record of the past four decades of New Haven’s development. The stories of DiLieto, Daniels, DeStefano, and Harp is the story of that period. Each of these mayors dared to dream big, to pursue plans to make New Haven more vibrant, more connected. Endowed with a dedication to public service, they embodied New Haven’s determination to defy doomsday death-spiral declarations about the state of urban America. They listened to the public, took bold stands, pursued ambitious projects, while never acting like they were the smartest person in the room (even when they were).

DiLieto oversaw the transformation of downtown from a ghost town into the state’s liveliest live-work-play urban core, a prototype for historic preservation and what became known as ​“new urbanism.”

Daniels oversaw the transformation of a brutal, bigoted, corrupt police force into a model for community policing. His administration’s development of a life-saving needle-exchange program for addicts became a national model, as did its partnership between cops and Yale child psychologists to help kids deal with the trauma of witnessing violence.

DeStefano’s administration took on the federal government to embrace immigration, welcoming newcomers who helped revive Fair Haven’s economy and enrich the city’s cultural and business life. With Yale President Rick Levin (whose two-decade tenure roughly coincided with his mayoralty), DeStefano forged a problem-solving town-gown relationship built on mutual respect and support, leading to labor settlements, a neighborhood-preserving homebuyer program, and the New Haven Promise scholarship program available to all New Haven public school students. DeStefano’s administration rebuilt all of New Haven’s schools. It worked with the national teachers’ union on a landmark evaluation system. His administration oversaw a perennially ​“troubled” public-housing authority’s transformation into a stable entity that converted crumbling, dangerous developments from West Rock to Dixwell to Fair Haven into stable, attractive communities.

Harp’s administration forged a nationally recognized ​“YouthStat” program helping students in trouble avoid the school-to-prison pipeline. Under her watch the city tore down a despised fence separating public housing from a suburban town; and found creative ways to capitalize on a building boom to open a downtown concert hall and to create a mini-neighborhood on a long-vacant stretch of land in the Hill. It nurtured projects (including the NXTHVN arts center, affordable-housing developments, and a rebuilding of the Q House and Dixwell Plaza) breathing new life into the city’s oldest Black neighborhood.

All four mayors made and learned from mistakes, of course. Amid pursuing grand schemes, they dealt daily with the business of government. They battled biblical blizzards and floods. They cut ribbons at store openings. They signed contracts and proclamations. They honored high school basketball and football champions, got yelled at by citizens angry over taxes or schools. That all mattered, too, and will be part of the mayoral archives.

The four mayors’ story is also our story, the story of modern-day New Haven. A story that, thanks to SCSU, will not be lost to history.

The SCSU team is planning an October event as a formal launch of the Mayoral Papers Collection.

In the meantime, you can access the indexed DeStefano papers online here. You can also contact Patrick Crowley to make an appointment to view the evolving archives in person. (Contact him .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).)