Snorewich

I grew up in much-maligned Norwich, Connecticut. It’s a town of about 35,000 on the intersection of three rivers in the eastern part of the state. In spite of its strategic importance, it has never amounted to anything. The people who live there are affectionally referred to as Swamp Yankees.

If you’ve ever heard of Norwich, it’s probably because it’s the answer to a trivia question: what city did Revolutionary War traitor Benedict Arnold hail from? Yes, you guessed it: Norwich. And it has been all downhill since.

I’m being glib. Norwich has had a handful of golden ages over the years. Connecticut boomed during the postwar period, home to General Electric, Sikorsky helicopters, a bunch of defense companies, and a lot of manufacturing. Not to be partisan, but then the Democrats took over, imposed an income tax of 3%, and it has gone up from there. To be precise—the income tax started under a Republican governor—Lowell Weicker, the air quotes “maverick” Republican, who later became a U.S. Senator. He was succeeded by John Rowland, who went to jail for corruption, and Republicans have been effectively discredited in the state for three decades. The income tax is not especially high, at 6.99%, at least relative to New York and New Jersey, and in fact it is one basis point lower than South Carolina’s, which has been solidly red for a couple of generations.

The demographics are interesting. The median resident of Norwich is a woman in her fifties with an L.L. Bean sweater, turtleneck, little dog haircut, and comfortable shoes. It’s still predominantly white, although a large Asian community put down roots there after the casinos were built in the early 1990s, which has provided much-needed diversity. Like any small town, there are doctors, lawyers, and small businesses. There is a hospital. Norwich, like the rest of the state of Connecticut, is flooded with non-profits, mostly specializing in health care and addiction services. The last bit of manufacturing in Norwich was a Thermos plant that was active in the 80s and 90s—several of my grade school classmates’ parents worked there. It’s predominantly Catholic, with people of Irish, French, or Polish descent, and as such, it’s an oddball mixture of people who are left-wing politically, but who are also pro-life.

There is a lot of intellectual capital in Norwich, which is an ornate way of saying that there are a lot of really smart people. It’s true. Partly this is because of the high school in town, Norwich Free Academy, which is open to the public but is managed by a private corporation, taking in tuition dollars from the surrounding towns, and remaining independent from political influences. NFA, as it is known, is one of the best high schools in the country, with an incredible arts and music program, but is also strong in English as well—the novelist Wally Lamb was my teacher one year, though we had our differences. You might think that because the local school boards have no say in the curriculum that it might be immune to progressive influences. Au contraire—it is one of the most progressive schools around. Conspicuously, NFA has a pretty terrible business department, and growing up in Norwich, it was as if the private sector didn’t even exist. Most students went onto become teachers or social workers, or talented artists. Wall Street and the stock market were just an abstraction. It never occurred to me that I could work there.

And this really is the essence of Norwich—its hostility to private enterprise. If you go to Norwich, you will see that there are big box stores, like Home Depot and such, but they set up camp right outside of city limits. The politicians have a status quo bias, and are very much opposed to any sort of development, outside of the occasional pizza joint. Everyone likes to talk about the potential of Norwich’s downtown, with its beautiful turn-of-the-century buildings in some architectural style that I cannot quite place, and it would actually be a pretty amazing financial center, given that Norwich is equidistant between New York and Boston, and the level of education of the people who live there. But instead, it is like the Tenderloin, and looks like those videos you see of Market Street in San Francisco getting passed around right-wing Twitter, with homeless people zapped on fentanyl staggering around like the walking dead. And if you leave downtown and you drive up the east side into Greeneville, a minor borough of Norwich, it is like entering a time warp, being transported back to the early 1950s. A historic preservationist would say that it is perfectly preserved. To give the politicians credit, they haven’t wanted anything to change in Norwich, and as a consequence, nothing has changed. But there has been a lot of depreciation along the way.

Local politics is a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. There is poverty, and crime, and very little is done about it. A few years ago, I heard that the city budget was $169 million, which is humongous given the size of the population. Property taxes are high and going higher. The city employs an army of inspectors to harass local businesses. And again, this isn’t a left-right issue, this is an issue that is peculiar to the culture and history of Norwich. It is simply averse to private enterprise. The third-to-last time I was there, there was a burgeoning food truck scene adjacent to the town of Yantic. The politicians passed an ordinance and banned the food trucks. I could talk like a financier and say that they are diminishing economic vibrancy, but really what they are doing is fucking ruining the place.

The intellectual capital of Norwich is incredible. You can’t go there and not see the potential. The irony is that all the surrounding towns and cities (save for New London, which suffers from the same myopia) have blossomed in the last 30 years. I should mention the casinos. Norwich was home to the first major tribal casino in the country: Foxwoods, which was followed up shortly thereafter by Mohegan Sun. For a short period of time, if you wanted to play craps in the U.S., you had three options: Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and Norwich. That was an economic shot in the arm. But the casinos fell victim to competition, from other tribal and non-tribal casinos across the country. And even though there was a short-term boost to the economy, it never fundamentally altered the culture of the place—on 8 miles of access road to Foxwoods, out in the country, not one new business was put on that access road in 30 years. Not a gas station, not a convenience store—nothing. Either nobody had the idea (which is possible) or local governments simply prevented it from happening. It is also possible that the casinos cut some kind of deal with the town that prevented any businesses from being placed there. I don’t know. But if you’ve ever been to the area, and you’ve driven towards the casinos, you’ve seen these giant gleaming skyscraper hotels protruding from the landscape—with nothing but woods around it.

I have long thought about moving back to Norwich in retirement and running for mayor. It would be the easiest job in the world—but also the hardest. Easiest, because you could fix half the problems on day one—fire two-thirds of city employees and cut taxes in half. Hardest, because it takes decades to change the culture. How do you convince 35,000 people that the business of Norwich is business? How do you convince them that prosperity is a good thing? How do you convince them of materialism? How do you convince them of change and progress? How do you convince them to abandon their nostalgia for the old days, when the old days are the bad old days? How do you convince people that their beloved town has gone nowhere in sixty years, and the rest of the world has passed it by? Can’t you see it, when you have to drive 20 miles to someplace like Plainfield to go to a Best Buy?

A lot of this is aesthetics. People don’t like looking at gas stations and big box stores. And a lot of this is anti-big business—small business is okay, of course (unless it’s food trucks). I can easily make the argument that big business is preferable to small business. Big business can hire lots of people, after all, giving them something to do. It can operate at economies of scale, and sell goods more cheaply. And it can contribute more to the local non-profit organizations that they treasure so dearly. Lots of politicians campaign on change—but it usually ends up being change in the other direction. Change can be messy and painful, but so worth it.

My wife grew up in a similar sad sack town—York, in the agricultural region of South Central Pennsylvania. We used to compare notes on how crappy our hometowns were. If you remember, the rock band Live composed a song about York called Shit Towne. The interesting thing is that the fortunes of York and Norwich diverged wildly after that song was released. York is now an affluent bustling metropolis, and a bedroom community of Baltimore, where rich refugees fled to escape high Maryland state taxes. I’ve been back to York several times in the last 30 years, and I have seen the progress, and I can see what low taxes and pro-growth policies can do. Everything is so nice there. Everything is new. The band actually moved back to York, years later, after disparaging it on their album. I would like for Norwich to be as successful as York. Turnarounds are rare, but they are possible.

What Norwich needs is a little bit of greed. Too much greed can be bad, for sure, but a little bit is healthy.

Go fuck yourself,

Jared

Music recommendation: Live – Shit Towne.

P.S. We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards will always be free. Please forward to whoever you like.