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.
Today New Haven is the Elm City still — a harbor-and-ridge city of museums, theaters, and the most argued-over pizza in the country, anchored by four centuries of history. Its story runs from a Quinnipiac homeland through the first planned city in America, the regicides on West Rock, and a Long Island Sound port. Our New Haven designs gather that identity into wearable form — the Elm City, the nine-square Green, the oyster shore. From the nine-square Green to the regicides' cave on West Rock, wear a little of the Elm City's four centuries.
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.
