New Haven’s Dashed American Dream | The New Yorker

As a young man, Jim Goldberg, the acclaimed Magnum photographer, had an ambition: “to get out of New Haven as soon as I could.” As he explains in his vivid new photographic memoir, “Candy,” the Goldberg family business was candy distribution, and New Haven during his childhood, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, was an old American port city hustling into the future. The so-called Model City for urban renewal had an ambitious mayor, Richard Lee, who hoped to create the country’s first “slumless city.” Money and ideas poured into town like syrup, which then crusted over into new buildings and reconfigured neighborhoods notably lacking in beauty or communal cohesion. There were seizures, riots, flight, industry gone to rust, chronic poverty—the full box of urban bittersweet. Lee’s own verdict, years later, was, “If New Haven is a model city, God help America’s cities.”