New Haven's stories run with the harbor and the ridges. They'll tell you the elms once arched right over the streets, which is how the Elm City got its name. They'll tell you about the Great Shippe that sailed for England in 1646 and was never seen again — except, the legend says, as a phantom ship in the clouds over the harbor. They'll point up at West Rock and the regicides' cave, and down at the brownstone lighthouse on the Sound, and then they'll argue, at length, about whose apizza is best.
The Elm City — America's first planned city, nine perfect squares laid out around a green in 1638. New Haven sits on Long Island Sound between the twin traprock ridges of East and West Rock — the Elm City of Connecticut. English Puritans laid it out in 1638 as the first planned city in America, nine squares around the New Haven Green, and within a generation it was hiding the men who had signed a king's death warrant in a cave on West Rock. Co-capital of Connecticut for the better part of two centuries, a Sound port lit by an 1847 brownstone lighthouse, and the birthplace of New Haven-style apizza. This page tells the story of the Elm City.
Why People Visit New Haven Connecticut
People come to New Haven for the layered history and the harbor — the first planned city in America, the regicides' cave, the lighthouse on the Sound — and for the museums, theaters, and the apizza the city argues about endlessly. It is compact, walkable, and deep: four centuries of New England on Long Island Sound.
