Posts Tagged ‘Bridgeport’

#ThrowbackThursday: What Your Town’s Downtown Looked Like in 1934

Thursday, May 16, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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A vintage postcard showing Main Street in Derby/File Photo

A vintage postcard showing Main Street in Derby/File Photo

Back in 1934, before Interstate 95 and other major connectors were built to patch together the disparate corners of Connecticut, the State completed an aerial survey of every inch of the Nutmeg State to document state land. The result is a massive amount of data that other states can only dream of. If you want to see what your neighborhood, block or street looked like 79 years ago, you can.

And now, thanks to a collaborative project between Trinity College and the University of Connecticut Libraries, Map and Geographic Information Center, how every square foot of this state has changed over the decades. The groups have stitched together the images and now offer a fascinating tool, which allows internet users to view any address in the state back in 1934, next to what it looks like now.

In some of these towns and cities, you’ll see a wholesale change, as farm pastures have been transformed into residential villages. In others, you’ll see the square boxes indicating houses in 1934 transform into a more urban, downtown commercial feel. And yes, the shady dots you see by the thousand in 1934 that have mysteriously disappeared by the 2013 version are trees. Some of the most interesting changes occur in towns where you can say major highways, like Route 8 or Interstate 95 pop up in the time between the two photos.

So without further ado, in honor of #ThrowbackThursday, here’s a peek at what the address of each Southwestern Connecticut town or city’s Town Hall looked like in 1934, and what it looks like these days.

And in case you’re curious, you can look up your own neighborhood (or anyone else’s for that matter) at the MAGIC website here.

 

Trending: Where the Renters Live

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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Across the nation, renters account for more than one in three residents of occupied housing units, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. But here in Southwestern Connecticut, the rate is a little bit lower at 28.8 percent.

If we were to compare the national rate of renters with the rate in a local community, Norwalk would be the one town in Southwestern Connecticut that comes closest to sharing the national profile. In Norwalk, 34.9 percent of occupied housing units are home to renters, while 65.1 percent are home to owners, making the city just slightly more renter-heavy than the nation, which hovers at 33.9 percent.

While there’s nothing incredibly out of the ordinary about the number of percentage of renters in Southwestern Connecticut when compared to the national figures, the growing share of renters in towns like Norwalk is climbing at a much faster rate than it is nationally. In 2005, only 38.6 percent of Norwalk’s occupied units were home to renters, but an addition of thousands of units to the rental market between then and 2011 helped push Norwalk ahead of the national average.

Similarly, other local cities have seen their rental rates increase at a faster rate than the rest of the nation between 2005 and 2011, according to census data, including Bridgeport, which has climbed from 51.1 percent to 55.4 percent and Stamford, which inched up a bit more slowly from 42.3 percent to 43.6 percent.

But what is it that keeps the overall share of renters in our area so low when such a large share of residents in the area’s biggest cities are renters? It’s those tiny towns, holding down the fort for owners. Fourteen of the 31 towns in Southwestern Connecticut have an 85 percent share of owners or greater, including the town of Easton, where only 2.6 percent of residents are renting.

Trending: When Women Become Moms

Saturday, May 11, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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FAIRFIELD – Marisa Torrieri Bloom sat on the kitchen floor of the house she rents in Fairfield, knees crossed and bending over, as she lifted a blue and green spoon to her 10-month-old son’s lips. It was dinner time in the Bloom household, and since her son, Nathan, was feeling under the weather, Bloom took the banana puree to a place he would be more comfortable than his high chair where he usually eats.

Marisa Torrieri Bloom spends some time with her son Nathan, 10 months, after work at their home on Andrassy Avenue in Fairfield, Conn. on Wednesday May 8, 2013. The Bloom family is part of a trend where couples are waiting until later in life to have children.

Marisa Torrieri Bloom spends some time with her son Nathan, 10 months, after work at their home on Andrassy Avenue in Fairfield, Conn. on Wednesday May 8, 2013. The Bloom family is part of a trend where couples are waiting until later in life to have children.

“I never thought this would be my life,” said Bloom, 37, who is originally from Silver Spring, Md., but spent her late 20s and early 30s living in New York City.

“If you’d told me a few years ago that right now I would be in Fairfield County about to buy a house with a little baby, I would have thought that was the most boring thing ever,” she said.

It doesn’t seem so boring this Mother’s Day. These days, it’s pretty blissful — and a little stressful, when she factors in her full-time writing job and part-time gig as a guitar teacher. And after worrying whether she would be able to have her first child at age 36, Bloom said she is thrilled to have Nathan and her husband Zack by her side.

Here in Southwestern Connecticut, women have children later in their lives than in most other parts of the country.

The Bridgeport-Stamford Metropolitan Statistical Area — which covers the same ground as the footprint of Fairfield County — has the second highest percentage of 35- to 50-year-old mothers in the nation. In total, census data shows that a little more than 36 percent of Fairfield County mothers who gave birth within a recent year were in that age bracket, lagging slightly behind the No. 1 metropolitan area: Boulder, Colo.

Nationally, the figure is much lower, at about 20 percent, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

“I’ve been working in the Stamford area since 1995, and we have many women who are 35 to 45 having children — not necessarily their first child — but many women having a child then,” said Dr. Elisabeth Aronow, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Fairfield County OB-Gyn, who spends most of her time practicing in Stamford and Darien.

Darien’s rates of new moms between ages 35 and 50 are even higher than the Fairfield County norm. Of the 25 towns in Southwestern Connecticut with at least 100 births in a recent year, the town had the second highest percentage of moms in that age bracket, at 64 percent. It was barely outranked by New Fairfield, where 66.9 percent of births were to women between ages 35 and 50.

Part of the reason there is such a high percentage of older women having babies is likely because women begin the motherhood process at a much later age in Connecticut. While Aronow noted that not all children delivered to an older mother will be the first child in the birth order, the most recent data available from the National Center for Health Statistics shows Connecticut and New Jersey were tied for having the second-oldest average age of a mother at first birth in 2006, at 27.2 years old, just behind Massachusetts’s 27.7 average age.

That year, the average age across the nation was 25, but while the NCHS said there are no more current figures for state-by-state breakdowns, the national average has continued to creep up slowly in recent years, to 25.4 years old in 2010 — a trend that a NCHS spokesman said is likely to be mirrored in Connecticut.

The reason for older moms in the Nutmeg State is multifaceted, but in a paper published by the Pew Research Center on Friday, Gretchen Livingston, a senior researcher at the Washington, D.C.-based “fact tank” wrote that a record share of new moms are now college educated, which can have a significant effect on the age at which mothers give birth.

In 2011, roughly two out of three mothers had at least some college education, up from about one in two in 1990, according to Livington’s report.

“And I would expect that in more affluent areas, where women have more education, it’s not a surprise that they would tend to be older when they have babies,” Livingston said Friday morning.

Fairfield County women, on the whole, are more educated than women across the nation. In this area, 39.7 percent of women who are 18 or older hold at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 25.7 percent nationally.

Not only does earning a four-year or advanced degree often lead to delaying a marriage or the decision to become parents by several years simply to make time for education, there is also a high correlation between well-educated couples and the traditional order of marriage followed by parenthood, Livingston said.

Especially in Southwestern Connecticut.

“A number of people wait,” Aronow said. “Having children is one along the list of things to be ready for. It’s ‘We need our dog. We need our house, and then we can consider having children . . . I think there are many people around here with that Type-A personality, and everything has a time and an order for it to fit in.”

Marisa and Zack Bloom, both of whom hold a master’s degree, followed that order in their relationship, and after beginning to date in May 2008, when Marisa was 32, they found the pressure mounting to kick things into high gear. They were married in August of 2010, and began trying to conceive after about a year.

“I was very tense about the fact that I would be getting married at 34, and 35 was like this number I had in my head: ‘Must start before I turn 35. Must start before I turn 35.’ So I feel like it did start getting more prominent in the back of my head,” Marisa Bloom said.

“I mean, my parents were at my throat. They were like, ‘You know, we had two kids by the time we were 33,’” she said with a laugh.

When Marisa was born in 1976, the average age for a mother to give birth for the first time was 24.6 years old, and her mother was a few years older than that. Nathan is the first grandchild for Marisa’s parents in Maryland, and Zack’s parents who still live in Wilton where he grew up.

The pressure didn’t seem as heavy for Zack, who is seven years younger than his wife, and celebrated his 30th birthday last summer.

“I never had any pressure. I just knew I didn’t want to be an older dad when my kids were in high school and college, and I knew that people around here get married later, so this is more normal,” he said. “I’m a high-energy person, so I wanted to be able to play sports and be an active father with my kids. And in my late 20s and early 30s, I figured then I would be in my late 40s or early 50s when they’re in high school and college, so I could still be cool.”

The timing worked out for the couple, who said they plan to begin trying for a second baby in a few months, when Marisa has finished nursing Nathan.

“It’s funny, like would I space it out if I could?” Marisa asked. “That’s such a hard question to answer, because I don’t have the option of not spacing it out. But it’s good, fortuitous, that I want to try this summer because there really is no other choice.”

It still comes as a shock to Marisa when she examines her life from the outside. After living in the New York City bubble for so many years, where she felt like she was “living in an ageless place,” she still has trouble realizing she is 37 already — and that life is more baby gates and feeding time than Brooklyn bars and concerts.

“Life actually began for me when I was 30,” she said, spooning out another dose of the banana puree, some of which had made its way into her long blonde hair, courtesy of Nathan’s sticky fingers.

“We just had an offer accepted on a house in Fairfield,” she said. “It’s weird because now I feel like I really am a grownup. I have the house, a kid, a husband. It’s like it’s all complete.”

maggie.gordon@scni.com; 203-964-2229; http://twitter.com/MagEGordon; http://facebook.com/TrendingWithMaggieGordon

Trending: Where the Working Moms Live

Thursday, May 9, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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WorkingMom

Mother’s Day is coming on Sunday, and in honor of the holiday, we decided to take a peek at mothers around Southwestern Connecticut to get a sense for how they compare to mothers across the country.

Nationally, about 6 in 10 new mothers are a part of the labor force, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Here in Connecticut the rate is a bit higher, at 66.9 percent. But you’ll find a lot of variation from town to town — some that you would expect, and some that you wouldn’t. For instance, would you have guessed that working moms are actually less common in Stamford than they are in New Canaan?

We picked through census data to compare the rates of working mothers across the 31 towns in Southwestern Connecticut, but there were a few towns we had to leave off the list, due to a low number of births, which could skew the numbers (Easton, Monroe, Redding, Seymour, Sherman and Weston all had fewer than 100 births registered in the newest census data set and were left off the analysis). On the whole, Southwestern Connecticut lined up with the national trends; 14 of the 25 towns had a higher percentage of working moms than the national average.

But there were also some outliers. Across America, there is only one state with fewer than half of new moms in the labor force: Utah, with 49.1 percent. But here in Southwestern Connecticut, there are six towns with figures even lower than Utah’s, including Westport, which had the fewest working new mothers at 34 percent.

Stay tuned for a special Sunday edition of Trending in this week’s paper for more on motherhood in Southwestern Connecticut!

Trending: Where students ace the APs

Tuesday, May 7, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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APSchools around all of Southwestern Connecticut are quieter than usual this week as students hunker down for the annual Advanced Placement tests.

APs are challenging exams given to high school students after they’ve completed coursework for what is essentially a college-level class. And if the students pass (with a score of 3, 4 or 5 out of 5), they’re eligible for college credit at most major institutions. But passing an AP exam isn’t always an easy thing to do.

We searched through records from Connecticut’s State Department of Education to see just how well students in the southwestern corner of the state are doing on these tests. It turns out they’re doing better than students across the state, on whole. According to test data from the 2011 academic year, which is the most recent year on file, 18.7 percent of Connecticut 12th graders earned a score of 3 or higher on at least one AP test that year. But here in Southwestern Connecticut, 21 of the 36 high schools had higher percentages than that, including two schools where more than half of the senior class did so. See how your school stacks up here:

What $1 million will buy you in Southwestern Connecticut

Thursday, May 2, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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In Newtown, the median value of an owner-occupied home is $463,400, but there’s still a healthy selection of homes closer to the top of our price range, like this contemporary four-bedroom. The house, which is listed at $999,900, sits on 4.85 acres of land, and offers 6,547 square feet of living space.

This home in Newtown is listed just below the $1 million mark. Check out the slideshow below to see what that budget gets you in every town in Southwestern Connecticut.

A couple weeks ago, we looked at what the average New Englander’s home-buying budget of $260,000 would get for house hunters in our neck of the woods. In case you forgot, there wasn’t really much to offer in most towns. So last week, we upped the budget to a half-million dollars and saw a lot more variety around the area, including some real gems.

But in some of the towns, there was still a limited real estate pool to pick from (Location, Location, Location…). So here we go again, upping the budget once more to take a look at million-dollar listings across the 31 towns in Southwestern Connecticut. In some towns, we couldn’t even find homes to max out our budget, while others only scraped the tip of the iceberg for some of the high-price housing stock.

Check out what we were able to find in every town in our area.

Trending: Where the Growth is Slow

Wednesday, May 1, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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In 1960, more than one in four residents of Southwestern Connecticut lived within Bridgeport’s city boundaries. But decades of population loss in the area’s largest city, coupled with thriving suburban communities, have removed the Park City from its throne as the center of this corner of the state. In 2010, about one in eight Southwestern Connecticut residents called Bridgeport home.

It’s still the area’s largest city, but Bridgeport’s claim to that title appears to be approaching its expiration date. In 1950, the city had more than twice as many residents as Stamford. Sixty years later, the 75,000-resident gap has narrowed to 20,000 residents, with Stamford poised to overtake Bridgeport in a few years.

A postcard, featuring a historic image of downtown Bridgeport, at the corner of Fairfield Avenue and Main Street.

A postcard, featuring a historic image of downtown Bridgeport, at the corner of Fairfield Avenue and Main Street.

That tale of two cities is due in part to the recent surge of residents Stamford has experienced, growing by 20,000 residents in the past 30 years, but mostly it’s a story of Bridgeport’s struggles through deindustrialization and the drug wave that invaded the city’s streets a few decades ago, two misfortunes that pushed Bridgeport to the bottom of the barrel in terms of Southwestern Connecticut’s population growth in the last half-century.

As the Southwestern Connecticut region grew by 42.2 percent between the 1960 and 2010 decennial census reports, Bridgeport is one of two cities that have shrunk in that time, losing 8 percent of city residents; Ansonia is the other, having lost 2.9 percent. At the same time, 15 of the 31 towns in the area have at least doubled.

But Bridgeport isn’t alone in its population decline. Between 1960 and 2010, the American population increased by 72 percent, but many towns along Connecticut’s Gold Coast found their populations ticking upward in small increments — some by design.

In Darien, the town’s population only increased by 12.5 percent during the 50-year-period, while Greenwich’s increased by 13.7 percent, lagging far behind the national growth of 72 percent.

“Limiting development, imposing minimum lot requirements and not having a whole lot of developable land available has always been a technique by which to raise the cost of admission into a town,” said Steven Lanza, executive editor of The Connecticut Economy, a quarterly publication published through the economics department at the University of Connecticut.

“Obviously, residents would love to be able to move into a Greenwich or a West Hartford, or something where public services are high and schools are good, but the cost of admission is buying a home” due to a very limited rental market, he said.

Bridgeport’s population figures faltered as factories shuttered and the rust set in during the latter half of the 20th century, much like many other cities in the Northeast. Cities such as Schenectady, Syracuse and Scranton lost 24, 32 and 31 percent of their populations, respectively, between 1960 and the turn of the century, accounting for a far faster flight than Bridgeport’s 11 percent decline.

In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Bridgeport saw the lion’s share of its businesses seep out of the city boundaries, to suburban office parks in neighboring towns such as Trumbull and Fairfield, and in many cases, residents followed, said David Kooris, Bridgeport’s director of planning and economic development.

But deindustrialization was just the beginning of the problems for the once booming city along the Sound. With the loss of businesses, the city’s tax base shrunk, passing responsibility for funding public programs on to the taxpayers that remained.

“The higher taxes drove out the middle class and the upper class into the suburban areas with lower mill rates,” said Thomas W. Bucci, an attorney in the city who served as Bridgeport’s mayor from 1985 to 1989.

And just when it seemed like Bridgeport was ready for a comeback in the late 1980s, it was knocked off its feet again by a massive drug wave, which held the city hostage for several years.

“No one foresaw the crack epidemic, the explosion,” Bucci said.

“It was a huge setback. Neighborhoods that were on the verge of improving – the ones on that fine line – were taken over by drug gangs,” he said. “For a while, it was just open season in the city, our murder rate must have gone from 20 in 1987 to like 60 the following year, and it all had to do with that crack epidemic hitting the streets.”

According to data from the FBI, the crime level rose more gradually, though the increase was still huge. In 1985, the city reported 30 homicides; in 1990, the number was up to 57. It peaked at an all-time high in 1993, when there were 60 murders recorded in Bridgeport, according to the FBI’s uniform crime reports.

Now, Bridgeport is beginning to bounce back. After losing 11 percent of its population between 1960 and 2000, the city felt its first uptick in a half-century during the decade between 2000 and 2010, growing by 3.4 percent. And crime rates are down significantly: there were 22 homicides reported in 2010.

“I think Bridgeport has turned a corner, reputation wise and image wise,” said Bucci, adding that “at this point in time, it would be very easy for Bridgeport to fall backward, but I don’t see that happening. I see activity, I see commercial development, and I see growth even though the financial times are very difficult.”

That growth is an uphill battle for civil servants such as Kooris, who are attempting to market Bridgeport as an urban hub for millennials to call home. Some trends are on his side, he said, noting that “for the first time in a generation, the path the nation is on takes people directly to Bridgeport and places like it,” as people begin to move away from the suburbs and back to urban centers in droves. But it’s still not easy going for a city that has become notorious for its seedy reputation.

“There’s definitely a perception problem, without a doubt … with people who haven’t been down here in 10 or 15 years who have no idea what it’s like today,” said Kooris.

“There are a half-dozen buildings downtown that have come online in the last six or seven years that are completely filled with young professionals who have moved here from the city,” said Kooris.

There are more in the pipeline, which Kooris said will help put Bridgeport back on the map as a place to live for young professionals looking for easy access to transportation and downtown living in a more affordable setting than Manhattan and even Stamford.

The progress on that front is already measurable: In 2006, 13.8 percent of the city’s residents were between ages of 25 and 34, but by 2011, the age group had grown steadily, increasing to 16.7 percent of the city’s residents.

“We absolutely love it here,” said Madeline Rhodes, 27, who moved to Bridgeport from her native Westchester County along with her boyfriend in 2008. The pair lives in a loft they purchased on Lafayette Avenue. The residence is new, but the building is old; before it was flipped into a housing unit, the large brick building was the site of the Warnaco factory, which was the largest undergarment manufacturer in the nation.

“A lot of people, when we first told them we were moving here, were questioning why,” said Rhodes, who said the city’s affordability was the key attraction for the young couple, who was able to find a 3,500 square-foot home they purchased shortly after completing college.

“Our families were worried about our safety and the potential of the city. But we fell in love with the home, the fact that we’re less than a minute away from the water, and just this beautiful city waiting to be rediscovered,” she said. “I guess you have to be a certain kind of person to move here, in that you have to be ready to push hard and fight for this city, and feel like you can help make a difference here — but we love this city, and we’re all in this together.”
maggie.gordon@scni.com; 203-964-2229; http://twitter.com/MagEGordon; http://facebook.com/TrendingWithMaggieGordon

Trending: Where the ‘stressed’ live

Monday, April 29, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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Feeling stressed? Well, you’re not alone. Across the state of Connecticut, 43 percent of residents said they feel stressed on any given day, according to a poll released by Gallup last week. That places the Nutmeg State in the Top 10 most stressed-out states across the country.

Wonder where stress is likely to be the worst in our area? We sorted through stacks of census data to compare the number of hours workers in each town put in at their jobs every week, in an effort to pinpoint the towns that are likely to have the most-stressed citizens.

On average, Connecticut workers clock a total of 38.2 hours of work every week, according to the census data. But here in Southwestern Connecticut, we spend extra hours behind our desks than our neighbors around the state. We found – among other things – that workers in 22 of the 31 towns in Southwestern Connecticut worked more than the state average. How many hours a week do the people in your town work?

Let us know how this stacks up against your personal experience in the comments section below.

 

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