Urban Renewal on Oak Street

Community Before Demolition

Two pictures of the Oak Street community before demolition. This area was known as New Haven's lower east side. It was a place where immigrants could get a foot hold on the city. By the 1950s, it was fifty percent black. Approximately two thousand persons lived there in five story walk-up apartments, above street level shops and markets. When Mayor Richard C. Lee used Federal funds to bulldoze it, fifty percent of its white and ten percent of its black inhabitants moved to the suburbs. The rest of the black community resettled in the Hill, Dwight, and Dixwell neighborhoods.

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