Since 1640, the New Haven Green and its surrounding streets have been the center of New Haven’s cultural, religious, and commercial life. This concentration of public functions and spaces in the city’s downtown brought together citizens from diverse cultural backgrounds, despite the obstacles created by racial and religious discrimination. This walking tour will highlight examples of sites that reflect the pre-1970 experiences and contributions of the five cultural groups that are currently members of the Ethnic Heritage Center. Additional downtown tours are listed at the end of this overview New Haven’s first settlers were Puritans from England led by Theophilus Eaton and John Davenport. They established the original nine squares of their planned Christian utopia near settlements of the indigenous Quinnipiac people, who brought deer meat and other wares to the New Haven Green to trade with the colonists. Even after a reservation for the natives was established on the eastern shore of the harbor, the Quinnipiacs and colonists continued meeting in the nine squares for commerce and political negotiation. These interethnic encounters were complex and sometimes exploitative: some Quinnipiacs were converted to Christianity and worshiped in local churches, while others were subjected to punishment by local courts, or even enslavement.
From the early days of New Haven Colony, Blacks were present in the downtown area. Some were free, while others were enslaved to the local white elite. The Wadsworth map of 1748 records the presence of a free African-American farmer named Jethro living in the northeast quadrant of the nine squares. The African Ecclesiastical Society, later to become the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church, was organized in 1820 and purchased a church on Temple Street four years later. At the same time, a community of free Blacks established itself on the eastern edge of downtown. New Haven’s William “King” Lanson, a successful builder/contractor, owned a boarding house that was frequented by white and Black clientele.
Many important episodes in the Amistad story took place in downtown’s public buildings between 1839 and 1842, including the African captives’ imprisonment in the City jail. A memorial commemorating the Africans’ struggle for freedom was erected in front of City Hall in 1992. Downtown New Haven contains more than half a dozen sites on the Connecticut Freedom Trail, established in 1996 to recognize places associated with the abolitionist movement, civil rights movement, and African-Americans’ struggle for freedom and dignity in Connecticut. The Exchange Building is also a site on the Connecticut Freedom Trail. It housed the law office of Roger Sherman Baldwin when he represented the Amistad Africans and worked with John Quincy Adams in preparing their case before the United States Supreme Court, which decided on March 9, 1841 that the African captives were free.