Can This Town Be Saved?

The historic town of Guilford offers an experiment in making aerial photography and cultural landscape history available to citizens and policy makers. Founded in 1639, Guilford occupies about fifty square miles of land, stretching from beaches and rocky coves along Long Island Sound to salt marshes and fields inland and high bluffs in the northern end of town. Its population was stable at about 5,000 from the mid-eighteenth century until the 1960s, when Interstate 95 made the town more accessible to New Haven and other Connecticut cities. It has grown to about 20,000 as a prosperous part of exurbia.(9) State data shows it to be 96 percent white and solidly middle class, with per capita income in 1998 at $32,841. Housing units are 89.7percent single family, and the average house price in 1996 was $196,553.(10)

At the center of the town is a splendid, large village green of almost eight acres , surrounded by four churches, many small shops and historic houses (mostly now used as offices), as well as the Guilford Free Library and the Town Hall.(11) High school graduation takes place on the Green, as well as an annual parade before the harvest fair, reminiscent of older processions of the trades. In an era when the "New England town" is routinely reinvented as kitsch in theme parks, malls, and themed restaurants, Guilford offers the real thing. But Guilford is also engaged with the automobile culture that prevails in most of the 169 cities and towns in Connecticut.(12) Both nationally and statewide, most new commercial real estate development comes in the form of low-density, low-quality buildings, designed for rapid depreciation, surrounded by acres of unrelieved parking, tied to locations around freeway off-ramps. The Connecticut Department of Transportation (DOT) is relentless in its push for more paving--more lanes on highways, bigger access ramps, wider arterials--the environment that architectural critic Jane Holtz Kay, with an eye to the paving lobby, calls "asphalt nation."(13)

The scale and beauty of a historic town or historic district 350 years in the making can be destroyed in half a year by cheap, inappropriately sized, automobile-oriented construction. Guilford has over 450 preserved buildings dated between 1639 and 1940, including one of the largest groups of eighteenth century houses in the United States. There are four National Register historic districts: the Green (also a local historic district), plus North Guilford, Clapboard Hill, and Leete's Island Road. All are significant for their landscapes as well as their buildings. Guilford is also home to three exits off I-95. Traffic is on the increase and bad projects flourish in a good economy. Which side is winning? The town founded in 1639 or the asphalt nation of 2000?

Page 4