CTRSVP
Connecticut, Post Kelo New London, Fort Trumbull & Eminent Domain
Plaintiff's Homes and Properties
Although I already have the Kelo house posted, the interesting thing about this photo is the new Pfizer Global Research facility in the background. Many, if not most, opponents of the wholesale demolition of the Fort Trumbull neighborhood believed that Pfizer was behind it all.
 | Michael Joplin "Gov. M. Jodi Rell ordered the New London Development Corp. Thursday to rescind the relocation notices it sent to some property owners at Fort Trumbull, and her staff suggested that she — like some city officials — had lost confidence in the agency's management of its $73 million redevelopment project..."
| Every single one of these homes has been demolished with the exception of the Kelo home which was taken apart board by board and restored in another section of town. Susette no longer lives there but the site is being maintained as a historic site and a symbol of the Fort Trumbull homeowners battle to save their homes. As Anne Baldelli, Associate Editorial Page Editor for The Day, said in her column The Buzz, The Book, The Battle - "...And now, with the book being featured on ABC's 20/20, in the February issue of Ladies Home Journal, and on the Glenn Beck radio show, never mind the buzz ambassadors, New London will forever be known as the city that bulldozed homes to create a vacant brownfield."  |
From A Local Observer
"The Little Pink House," Jeff Benedict's much-anticipated exposition regarding Fort Trumbull's sad saga of diametrically opposed forces , is a read that merits attention, particularly from those who are adamant that they know the truth and that their opinion of the matter is clear-cut. A close friend for four decades of one of the plaintiff's in Kelo vs New London, I commend Mr. Benedict's narrative, which artfully conjectures that the crux of the matter might now conspire against its continuation throughout our land. As much as anything else, this book demonstrates that The Whaling City remains, as does the national fabric, a weave in which the gilted threads of Higher Income Persons (as in HIP-little-city) execute visions that exclude those whom they might view as beneath them with an audacity that seems a disease of their vaunted net worth. "The Fort" was a rough-and-tumble place, where my friend's bodyshop was a cut-rate business and its residents were at home with demographics that, it was thought, made it immune to gentrification, that social virus that is contagion among the upwardly mobile who expect government to vaccinate them against the undesirable. "Taxes and jobs," the conventional political mantra, has proven, in this case, a paean to insensitivity as gross as the profits of ill-gotten gains, as bereft of redemption as were the founder's outcasting of natives who fashioned "worthless" wampum from shells along its shore. This is a book as spellbindingly telling as Joshua Hempstead's diaries; but a tale we might wish were fiction. It seems written to bemuse as much as to inform, to caution as much as to relate. It succeeds in a manner fair-and-square. I would urge intelligent readers to acquaint themselves with its import and imprint. East Lyme's Mr. Benedict has again graced his topic with sagacity and guts. It's one man's telling; but that it is well-informed is, evidently, doubtless.
