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.
The harbor was long the homeland of the Quinnipiac people. In 1638 a company of English Puritans led by the Reverend John Davenport and the merchant Theophilus Eaton founded New Haven, and the surveyor John Brockett laid out its nine-square grid around the Green — the first planned town in America. For a time it was its own colony, a strict Puritan theocracy, until it was folded into Connecticut in 1664 and later shared the role of state capital with Hartford. The elms its settlers planted arched over the streets and gave the city its enduring name, and Yale College arrived in 1716. Out on the water, the harbor made New Haven a trading and oystering port, and in the nineteenth century a center of manufacturing.
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.
