Divided By Pavement: The history of New London’s roads and highways

New London, being the smallest city in Connecticut, and Connecticut College, being the small liberal arts school that it is, seems to have an abundance of highways intertwining them. The histories of Route 32 (Mohegan Avenue) and Interstate 95, however, have changed and evolved much since the College’s founding in 1911. With the help of the Kurumi Connecticut Roads historical website, the Connecticut Department of Transportation and John J. Rudy’s Reinventing New London, I was able to piece together the history of these roads.

When Connecticut College was founded, there was no need for a walking bridge spanning a four lane secondary highway that separated its upper campus from its lower waterfront campus. Mohegan Avenue as we know it opened as a four lane boulevard in New London and Waterford in 1940. Before that, and for the first three decades of Conn’s existence, Route 32 was known as “The Mohegan Road,” which ran between New London and Norwich. It was the second turnpike created in the U.S. when it opened in 1792. It followed Williams Street and Old Norwich Road, and looked like much more of a quiet country road than the back road of Williams Street does today. Rudy explains that this stretch of The Mohegan Road, because of its steep hills and dangerously sharp curves, led to the 1930s “planning and design… for a new, wider route closer to the Thames River.” After construction was completed in 1939, Route 32 moved to its present day route and the old route became Route 32A. However, Route 32A was cancelled in 1943, leaving Williams Street and Old Norwich Road as they are today.

When Conn first opened, The Mohegan Road was one of the major routes into the city of New London. The Boston Post Road – a seventeenth century mail route and one of the first roads in New England – was another. It was called New England Route 1 from 1922 to 1926. In that last year, when the U.S. route numbering system began, NE-1 became a part of United States Route 1, which runs from Maine all the way down to Florida. The Thames River drawbridge was another means of access to New London. Constructed in 1889, what was at the time the longest double track drawbridge in the world was a railroad bridge until 1919. That year, it was converted to a highway bridge when the new Thames River railway bridge was opened. At this point, the US-1 route changed to follow Bank Street, State Street and Main Street to Chrystal Avenue, leading to the Thames River highway bridge. The Mohican Groton ferry, which had been running on the Thames River since the seventeenth century, shut down in March of 1929, ten years after this new railway bridge was opened and the old one was opened (marking the first time that people could walk or take their cars to Groton – although, as Rudy noted, “there was often a lengthy wait while boats passed through the open draw”).

The Thames River highway bridge began to age, so after a bill first proposed in 1927 was finally passed in the Connecticut state legislature, a new fixed span bridge was built during 1941 and 1942. It opened by November 1942. The $6 million, one-and-one-eighth-mile-long new bridge was dedicated in February of 1943 as the Groton-New London Bridge, which US-1 then ran alongside. In 1951, it was renamed as the Gold Star Memorial Bridge, in honor of those who had lost their lives in World War One, World War Two and the Korean War.

Since the 1920s, the Post Road (US-1) was burdened with an overload of traffic, as it was the only route that ran along the shoreline towns. In an effort to remedy this problem, the Merritt Parkway was built in the 1930s (it became Route 80 east of New Haven and Route 84 – now Route 184 – east of New London) and opened for use in 1940. However, traffic was still a pressing issue in the area, so in December of 1944, the US-1 route was approved to become an interstate route by the Bureau of Public Roads. The route is quite similar to that of present day Interstate 95. In August of 1957, the American Association of State Highway Officials approved the route for I-95 (along with Interstates 84 and 91).

In order for I-95 to materialize, however, US-1 had to be widened. Consequently, in 1943 when the Gold Star Bridge opened (with a small stretch of US-1 freeway on each side), there were interchanges created at Route 32, Bridge Street and Route 84 (now Route 184) at Route 12. Most of I-95 opened as the Connecticut Turnpike in 1958 (now the Gov. John Davis Ledge Turnpike). The New London section opened in 1964. Due to increased traffic, a second highway bridge –almost a replica of the Gold Star Memorial Bridge – was opened in the 1970s right next to it.

In 1975, the New London section of I-95 was reconstructed to manage traffic between Route 32 and the Interstate. This reconstruction accounts for the weaving of roads in front of the Lyman Allyn Museum, the front lawn of which used to extend much farther than it does now.

The construction of New London’s roads has transformed both our campus and the city of New London over the past century. While we might prefer that Mohegan Avenue did not divide our campus in two, or that various junctions stemming from I-95 did not isolate Conn from downtown New London, we must admit that these infrastructure developments have granted us access to the city and our College on the hill.