Bob Gryswecz
	Historian / Architect

I'm a professional architect. I actually design schools among other things.  I designed the Celentano School.  I am very interested in history, and the history of architecture, how history and architecture work together to tell you how New Haven came about, how people lived in the past, and things like that.

What does a historian do?

What does a historian do? Well, a historian tries to understand what happened in the past. The past can be yesterday. The past could be last year. The past can be hundred years ago. The past can be thousands of years ago. But the challenge is always to try to understand what happened, and why it happened, who made it happen...who, what, where, why, and when. It's like being a reporter, except more so.

Why is it important to learn about history?

You could be very calculating and say that at some point in your life you might be faced with the same question that somebody was faced with in the past. How they answer it? What did they do? I don't know if I have a good example for that but it could be useful, it tells you about who you are, who came before you and why the world is the way it is.

How do you find out what happened a long time ago?

Were all of you here today?  Okay, everybody was here. If you weren't here, what would you do to figure out, you would ask a friend.  Not all of your friends always pay attention, so you might ask a couple of friends.  Then you would average it out or taking together all of the things they said happened in class.  Now suppose you wanted to figure out what happened last year in this class.  This is fourth and fifth grade, right? Okay, so maybe you would get a sixth grader that was in this class and ask him or her, and if you wanted to be sure you might ask a couple of them.  Now suppose you wanted to know something that happened twenty-five years ago, that's a long time.  Maybe you would ask your parents, maybe you would ask your aunts and uncles, maybe you would ask your parents friends.  Your trying to find out somebody who was there, somebody who knew what happened because they experienced it.  Now that works until about 75 or 80 years ago.  Do you have great grandparents? Do your great grandparents have a hard time remembering things?  Yeah.  Because they have to remember a lot of stuff.  So you can ask them, but what happens if they forget?  Well, sometimes what you try to do, if your a historian, is you try and find a written record.  Once you go back so far, that its too far for anyone to be alive, like the revolution, when nobody was alive, so you can't ask anybody, so you ask books.  You can ask either books that are written about history which have in turn looked at what people wrote at that time, or you could look at the original records.  You could keep on going back and back and back. 

How can you find out what happened a long time ago when there are no written records?

So it becomes interesting, because there's nobody in Israel that's writing at that time, that's saying that we are around.  The kings were the only ones that wrote and only a few of them wrote, or the people who were working for the kings. So the further back in history you get, the harder it is to put together a story.  So if you go back further then that, like if you go back to the cavemen times, how do you know when the cavemen lived?  Well, they didn't write anything down. That's right, how do you know if they're real at all?  Let's first talk about how you might know how long ago they lived.  If they built a fire, and how would you know a natural fire against a man made fire?  Well, a man-made fire maybe would have some stones, and they wouldn't be all around, just in one little spot.  So if you had a little spot that was burned, you could measure in that, the carbon in the ashes, and you could tell about how old that was. So you could get an approximate, you wouldn't be able to say it was March twenty-third of fourteen million years ago, but you would be able to say fourteen million years ago verses thirteen million years ago.  Same thing with the Native Americans, they didn't have writing either, but you can go back, you can find their campfires, you can find things that maybe give you a clue.  Now how do you know if there were people there at all?  Well maybe they find rocks, and the rocks don't look like natural rocks, they look like rocks that maybe somebody hammered away at to make a arrowhead, or a hammer or a spear.  They look like man had shaped it.  So then you start looking and maybe you find a bone, you find a bone of a mastodon, or a bone of a deer.  And it's broken, and it's not broken as if it would break if a animal bit it.  But it's broken as if a man would, if he was using one of these tools trying to cut meat. So it's very careful detective work, and it's very fun.  What's your question?  Wouldn't cave drawings help a little bit in this?  Well, they tell you that there was somebody there, certainly a animal was not making this.  How much do they tell you about the dating.  Well, if there was some type of material in the drawings, for example, if they used some of the ash from the fire to make black, or they used a burnt stick, charcoal, to draw, you could date that. Not a rock. You see the trick is having something that has carbon in it.  We know how to date carbon.

How was New Haven first started?

There where settlers. There where people that came from England in 1638. That's almost 400 hundred years ago for those of you who haven't figured out the math. They had some people who came over first to find a place to settle. There was a nice harbor they found. There was land that they could farm. They found that there where indians that actually wanted them there, and so they came they sent back to England and said it was okay to come. So they came here in 1368 and founded the city. 

How do you find out about the history of a specific building or place, like our school?

The question about how you learn about history is a fascinating thing that hopefully you will think about it for the rest of your because it’s terribly important just like architecture is terribly important right?  Specifically how you would research that is in the 1980s there were some people did a survey of New Haven, not every building but maybe about a third or quarter of the buildings in New Haven.  It’s called The Historic Resources Inventory. You find copies of that. There are only a couple copies around.  There’s a copy in the city, at City Planning, there’s a copy at the New Haven Colony Historical Society, there’s a copy at the New Haven Preservation Trust, there’s one at the state.  So you would look in there, it’s listed by street and street address.  So if this was a James Street address, you would look under James Street and be able to find that.  If it wasn’t there, you could go to the New Haven Colony Historical Society. It is like a little library but they specialize in only in local history.  So they would have people’s papers.  There’s a thing called the Dana Collection there.  I don’t remember his first name, but Mr. Dana lived in the 1930 and created an immense scrapbook that of photographs and articles.  Anytime he saw something related to the architecture of New Haven or related to a specific building, he would cut it out and put it in the scrapbook. So now there's a record of what people thought in those times, what they were talking about. So it might be there, they might have photos or other stuff. More generally when your doing research you go to a library. You look either for what's called, now we're going to get into technical terms, secondary sources or primary sources. Primary source is you telling your story. Primary source is you writing your story. It doesn't mean it's right or wrong, but it's as close your going to get to what actually happened to what happened at that time. Secondary source is you reading his diary, and his diary and his diary and putting together all their stories. You as a secondary author are trying to figure out what of what they say is true and what isn't true. So you can always read secondary sources. But you have to realize that if you didn't like him you might not have taken any notes.

Why did so many companies build near the river?

Anybody know what that building is across through the windows there? It's apartments now, but let’s see if we can find the picture. But back when it was first built it was about one hundred years ago. And what was it then? It was a factory. They made hacksaws. They made blades for saws. The saws were made for cutting metal, saws were used for butchers that were cutting meat and they made other kinds.  They needed to get things too. So all of a sudden now that building is not just a building that you pass, you can say something happened there and that tells you more about who you are and what your community is. The park across the street was originally water or swamp or wetlands. But in the Civil War, that was where the soldiers were grouped together; where they stayed until they were shipped off to fight. It’s an interesting place and thousands of solders left from there to fight in the south. It tells you more about what your world about and why it is this way. One of the interesting things about New Haven and especially this part of New Haven, is there are a lot of factories and a lot of different things were made here. Nothing big such as steel beams and things like that, but a lot of useful things and a lot of small things like saws, like carriages, like boilers over on River Street. There are a lot of big buildings on River Street. They made boilers. Does anyone know what a boiler is?  It’s like a big teakettle in which you heat water to make steam.  That steam allows you to generate power to run machines and to heat things. The company that was there, Bigelow Boilers made boilers for all around the world and they shipped them out. Why are they on the water? Because they needed to get raw materials in. They needed to get coal, steel, and things like that. At the end they could be shipped in easily on the water. The boilers were very big and it was easy to ship out on the water down to South America. They could use them for making sugar and things like that.

How has the use of the river changed ?

How has it changed? You get to the nineteenth century and a couple of things happen. One is shipping becomes less important because we have railroads now and you can move more things by land. Then because boats get bigger and not all boats can enter New Haven's harbor. New Haven’s harbor is fairly shallow, so smaller boats could enter, but up until they started making the harbor deeper, which they call dredging. Dredging is where you scoop out part of the harbor to allow a channel. Then the big ships can come in. But bigger ships could not use New Haven as easily. So those are two things that mean you don’t do as much shipping. But you do start to get more industry by the water. Industry needs water for shipping its on materials in, and because the water is useful for cooling things, and quite frankly because the water is a convenient place to dump waste. If you make something nasty, you can dump it in the water and it goes away or you think it goes away. So for all those reasons the water was used that way. Interestingly, the water was not thought of as something that was where you wanted to live for all of these periods because things happened.  There were sailors there and sailors had tattoos and they were gruff and you didn't want to be near them, and there was junk there and when there was industry it was smelly. So the idea of having a beach house, people didn't think that was such a good idea, up until maybe 50-100 years ago. So the water was then used very utilitarianly. It was useful but not considered pretty. Now we think of the water as an amenity, as something you want to be around, where having a house on the water is something really special. You remember last year with the hurricane in Louisiana, a lot of houses were washed away, a lot of really nice houses that were right on the water were washed away, because people think it's really nice to be on the water even if it is not safe to be on the water. Now we are working towards using the water as something aesthetic that improves the quality of our lives, not just that we can get an economic advantage out of it.

Have the paths of the rivers changed in any way?

The paths haven’t exactly changed, but the size has changed. Actually, this would be a great class project since I saw that there was a map downstairs. If you got historic maps, for example. These are the nine squares of New Haven. It has a plan that is nine squares centered around the green. Well, this the original nine squares and there was originally right parallel to State Street a little stream in the seventeenth and eighteenth century very useful for carrying supplies over to all the store stops on State Street. That is now gone. That stream became the Farmington Canal.  Then the Farmington Canal became the railroad line that is there now, so that body of water isn’t there at all. There was another stream that went up parallel to George Street and that was where tanneries and things were.  So again how did you use the water?  You need the water for making cow and horse hides into leather and you need the water to make them and you need the water to dump the waste material. That is gone too.  This is where the Oak Street connector is where Rt. 34 is. So those are completely gone. Here is Criscuolo Park.  This is an 1870 map and you can see that the park didn’t go all the way out.  That was all sea marsh then. So the border of the shoreline has moved. And if you were to have a class project to take maps like this, to chart the shoreline, you would see it is continually moving out and out and we are losing the marshes. Now the most recent of those is where Ikea is. In the 1940’s, that was all swamp, all salt marsh. Soil was brought in to build the highway on, and to allow those buildings to be built. The harbor was almost twice as wide. A lot more was water, shallow water, which is why Long Wharf was there. Long Wharf was built very early in 1700. It was built so that they could get out to where the ships could actually dock, because the ships couldn’t come into those areas that were semi-marshy. They built a pier that was a better part of a mile lo

Does New Haven have any historically famous buildings?

This is a map of the city. It is color coded according to when the buildings on each property were built. If it is red, it was built before the 1800s and if it is orange, it’s from 1801 to 1825. Yellow is 1826 to 1850, and blues are all of the 20th century.  We think of New Haven as a really old city that goes back almost 400 years. But in fact, even though we are almost 400 years old, almost all of our buildings are a hundred years old or less.  Now a lot of the buildings are important for various reasons, but some of the most significant ones are actually the modern buildings. If you go around Yale and some places like that, the Beinecke Library, the Whale, the hockey rink, those buildings are famous internationally. We have a lot of buildings that are important for our city, a good number that are important regionally, some that are important nationally, and there are a few that are important internationally. Some of those modern buildings, Yale Art Gallery, the British Art Center, those are internationally famous buildings. So one of our more recent history, pieces of architectural history are our modern buildings, those that were built after World War II.

Is New Haven known for making anything?

They made hacksaws there, back in the early 21rst century they made things to help build things. They made sharp tools. Now the thing that New Haven does most is make people sharper. Make people smarter. If you were to take all of these student from all the public schools, and the private schools and all the teachers and all the staff and all the college students in New Haven. If you were to take all those people, it would be half the population of the city that’s involved with making people smarter. So your responsibility is to get smarter.

Did any famous events happen here in New Haven?

You don't know about Cinque and the slaves that were brought here in the 1830's?  You go down to city hall there's a statue of Cinque outside of City Hall.  That's very important because that was one of the first times that it was determined legally that people were not just property. That black people were not just property, that they were people and they had their rights just like anybody else.  That's an over simplification, but it's a good start.  So big things can happen here but little things can happen here.  On the green, there is a little plaque on the corner of College and Chapel streets, that says that the first bicycle in America was ridden to the green from Ansonia in 1866.  So the first bicycle, from very important to just very interesting.  Supposedly the first hamburger was at Lois’ Lunch. Those things are hard to prove, that's history.  How do you determine something like that? So someone says that it was the first hamburger and you go back and see if anyone mentions hamburgers before a certain point.   But there’s no real way, you know somebody doesn't take a piece of paper and file it in city hall saying, you know, "I have designed the first hamburger," or "I have made the first hamburger."  So you never really know those things for sure.

Can you show us how Yale developed on the map?

But in 1717, the very first building was built for Yale right there. Up in until 1825, this block which is Chapel to High Street was all Yale. Now Yale is all of this, all of this block, and all of this block, and pretty much all of this block. All in here. The hospital and the medical school is over here, and there are some pieces over there.

Do you have any interesting stories about New Haven Colony?

In New Haven on the green there are three churches. You might not know that the three churches were all built at the same time, between 1812 and 1815. Does anyone know what was going on in this country, the United States, between 1812 and 1815? Exactly, there was a war going on, the War of 1812. We were fighting Great Britain. In fighting Great Britain, the British had a very strong navy and we had a very weak one. So they put ships all along the coast, all along Long Island Sound, and kept the people who lived here from trading, from selling their farm products, from selling anything they could make or grow. They kept them from shipping them out and they also prohibited anything coming in. But the story is that what they were trying to do is make sure we didn't prosper, and make sure we were hurt. However, what was said was that the commander of the British navy in Long Island Sound said that if there was material for churches, bricks, trees, stuff like that, he would allow it to come through because he thought that anything that would get the residents of New Haven to go to church had to be good. So, to me, that's funny. But the interesting thing about it, if you think about it, it is called a blockade and you don't let any ships in or go out. New England lived by trade. We had to sell things, we didn't have a lot of material ourselves. We prospered by selling things and getting things and reselling them. In a time when presumably we were supposed to be economically hurt and not have a lot of money, we had enough money to build three new churches. The three biggest buildings in the city at the time meant that we weren't doing so badly.

Have there been any big changes?

The biggest thing that you could probably say is looking at the water and we’re talking about the oysters and how oysters were so terribly important.  Just realizing that new haven was either first second or third in oyster production in the whole country.  It went to almost nothing by World War II.  Because of all the pollution in the water, you just couldn’t grow oysters here anymore.  And now the oysters are coming back.  They’re nowhere near what they were before, but there coming back.   And in fact you see, there is a gentlemen, he lives right up about here, who is experimenting with farming oysters not at the bottom of the sound, but in cages or boxes that are suspended in the water.  So that’s probably one of the biggest.  Again you see real sensitivity to environmental things.  As another example, schools, the city is rebuilding all of the schools now and it’s a very big project.  But the last time we did this as a city was in the 1970s.  At that time, we took a lot of parkland, to build schools.  The Wilbur Cross, Hill House were both built on parkland.  The Columbus School was built on parkland.  A lot of schools were built on parkland.  You can’t do that anymore.  So just in the last thirty years, we’ve become more sensitive and said that park land is important to preserve and so you can’t take some and use it for building.

How about changes in population?

Well, the first settlers were from England, of course. We had Native Americans here who lived generally on what's called the Eastern Shore over in this area. There was a small group of them here. But English came first. It was pretty much all people from England and particularly people who were looking for religious freedom. This is why they were coming here, because they had particular view of how they wanted to worship, and they didn't want anyone else to interfere with it. That was in the 1630's, and pretty much up until about maybe 1800's. So the first hundred and seventy five years there may be a few people from other countries, but basically they were all from England. After the revolution, the first part 19th century, in the early 1800s the Irish started coming. The Irish came because they had very bad economic problems in Ireland, and people were starving.  There was economic opportunity here, and they came and they were workers who dug ditches, who actually dug a very big ditch the Farmington Canal in the 1820's which went from the harbor ultimately all the way all up to Massachusetts. Then small numbers of other groups came, but it wasn't really until after the Civil War, about the 1870's, that groups started coming in any large numbers. Germans and German Jews, Jewish people from Germany, were coming in the 1870's. Then the Italian started coming about the 1870's 1880's 1890's. People from Eastern Europe from Poland were coming in the 1890s and 1900s.  Up until about World War I, about 1910-1915, there was always a small number of African Americans in New Haven, but the small number was always about 2-4 percent, a very small number.  But starting about World War I, a large number of African Americans started coming from the South, as they did to other northeastern cities for jobs. A lot of times you come because you think you can live better in some new place. In the last thirty years, people from South and Central America and from Mexico, Hispanic American, are coming here. When I came to New Haven in 1975, New Haven was about one third African American, about one third Italian American and about one third everything else. Now how has history changed?  Even within one person's life time, now New Haven is about one third African American, one third Hispanic, and one third everything else. So a lot of the Italian Americans have moved out, moved on, or whatever, and a lot of Hispanics have moved in.  So those are big changes.

What did immigrants to New Haven do?

Again, a lot of the immigrants that came in the early 20th century were building things. Some were stone carvers, they actually moved from stone carving up in Vermont where they have a lot of stone and they quarried stone. They would hire stone carvers up there and places like here where we were building very nice buildings, and we needed some good stone carvers.

How has transportation changed?

if you were the age of your grandparents, their parents may not have had cars. Back around World War II most people still didn't have cars or before that, you had to take a trolley. You either walked or took the trolley. If you went back another fifty years before that, you didn't even have electric trolleys, you might have horse trolleys. A little bit before that, they didn't have even horse trolleys. So for example, I think the first horse trolleys came right after the Civil War and part of the reason that almost all of New haven is dark blue, or blue rather than yellow or orange, is because we need someway of getting around. If you lived out here or down here and you had to work down there, and you had to walk, it wasn't that practical. You could walk a mile a day, you could walk a mile and a half, if you walked two miles a day, that was a lot each way to work. So you probably wouldn't do that. You would live within a mile of where you worked. So most of these areas developed because there was the ability to get around.

Have you seen any other changes in your life time?

Well, O.K. The highways go back to my lifetime, but I was not in New Haven then, that sort of counts but only half counts. You're certainly seeing things be cleaned up. If you were to go over to Front Street, and if you go down Chapel to where it ends at the Quinnipiac River, all that area which is all along here, which is now a park. In the 1970's that was still scrap yards. That was like what you see on Chapel Street behind those fences, you know just junk? That was cleaned up and turned into a park. So there are things like that, that are changing. Generally the waterways are becoming more recognized for their ecological importance and their aesthetic importance.