![]() ![]() The central east-west artery leading through the district to this new park, Martin Street, was totally redesigned, emerging as a broad avenue featuring a large central esplanade. Working in conjunction with Donald Grant Mitchell, the designer of East Rock Park (1880), one of the New Haven’s most prominent landscape architects and a leading advocate of the City Beautiful movement, the City reserved land along both sides of the West River for a large park based on the East Rock model. The influence of City Beautiful in New Haven is nowhere better demonstrated than in the approach that the City took in fostering the development of its expansive Alms House Farm holdings as a residential subdivision in 1889. City Beautiful projects were designed to achieve an harmonious balance between the natural and built environment in an urban setting, drawing heavily from such precedents as the grand boulevards and linear gardenways built in Paris in the late 1850s and ‘60s under the auspices of George-Eugene Haussman the large public parks designed and built under the supervision of Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux in New York City (Central Park, 1858) and Brooklyn (Prospect Park, 1867) as well as such classical Renaissance themes as rhythmic architectural continuity in streetscape design. After 1889, the area experienced a virtual explosion in lot sales and house construction.Īs in many American communities, the tenets of urban planning and design embodied in the City Beautiful movement made a significant impact on New Haven during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite this decision, the relocation of the Alms House to Springside Avenue in Westville did not take place until 1888-89. It was also decided to subdivide the remaining land for sale to individuals as building lots. In a town meeting that year, it was voted to purchase a farm in Westville and move the entire complex out of the Edgewood area. The bulk of the remaining acreage associated with the Alms House, however, was retained by New Haven until 1874. This demand for new housing sites was fostered by the population growth associated with the developing carriage manufacturing industry in the area known today as the Dwight Street Historic District, the western side of which abutted the Alms House farmlands.įollowing the opening of the Third Alms House facility, the town sub-divided and offered for sale roughly 50 acres of Alms House farmland abutting the western side of the modern Dwight district (between Winthrop and Sherman Avenues, south of Maple Street) for housing development. The move resulted from pressure on the town to open up land along the eastern fringe of Edgewood for residential development. In the 1850s, New Haven erected a new (Third) Alms House facility near the western end of Martin Street (now Edgewood Avenue). ![]() It covered more than 250 acres of land between Sherman Avenue and the West River. The farmland originally associated with these buildings, known as the Second Alms House, was extensive. New Haven first erected buildings for use as an alms/work house at the eastern end of the modern Edgewood Park district in 1800. One of the principal reasons for the sparse settlement in Edgewood throughout the 19th century was the existence of New Haven’s large Old Alms House Farm complex in the heart of the district. The building stock consisted of approximately three dozen houses plus associated outbuildings, located along the southern, northern, and eastern fringes of the Edgewood area. Maps dating from the 19th century indicate that most of the area’s settlement had taken place in the area by the early 1870s. Like many of the areas located along the fringe of New Haven’s urban core, most of the district known today as Edgewood was thinly settled and semi-rural prior to the end of the Civil War. The district is roughly bounded by Boulevard, Derby, Sherman, West Park, Whalley and Yale Avenues, and Elm Street. Its initial development was actively fostered by the City and guided in its overall deign by the planning tenets of the late 19th-century City Beautiful movement. ![]() The Edgewood Park Historic District is one of New Haven’s best preserved residential neighborhoods. ![]()
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