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Danbury,       Connecticut

Introduction

The Developer

The Residents

The Member

The Architect

The Numbers

Danbury

Danbury

Developer Mark Nolan

Danbury is a city of about 45 square miles, at the heart of the Housatonic Valley. Danbury and the surrounding 10-town region has a median income of $98,200.

This provides the region with diverse socio-economic levels, but it also means the area has diverse businesses, which has been a key to our success over the years.

Danbury was primarily a center for the hat industry in the early 1900s. And as that industry began to fade, Danbury reenergized itself. It became more diverse and built corporate parks to attract and retain new businesses.

Today, we are home to pharmaceutical companies. Union Carbide has been here for a number of years and is going through a transition. There are various defense technology companies, semiconductor producers. These industries provide the nation and the world with parts and components. You can drive down the street and find five different companies — none in the same industry — that all contribute to the region's economy.

Our region has enjoyed a tremendous amount of growth. I believe we are second or third in the state in median income. But we have a large number of people at the middle-income level and really need to make sure the region provides for them.

That's what I hope will be done with the region's smart-growth efforts and housing and economic developments that we're working on.

Architect Lewis Zurlo

Downtown Danbury.

I certainly have seen Danbury go through a large change. They said the hatting industry died with the election of John F. Kennedy. He was the first president to stop wearing hats. He was kind of the last straw, because he never wore a hat, whether it was rainy or windy. People kind of imitated him a little bit. Even the people who were still wearing hats decided, well, maybe I don't need to wear one if he doesn't need something like that.

Whatever was left of the hatting industry in Danbury died, and the downtown, to a certain extent, also died.

But as time went on, the mayors began to bring in more and more industry. It was sort of a white-collar town at first. Then the industry kind of revived the tax base. We had a company like Union Carbide put their headquarters here so that Danbury gradually became an up-and-coming town with new industry.

That helped to spur on all kinds of programs to improve downtown Danbury. The first ones were restoration and preservation projects. I was part of the preservation trust in town for 20 years. We restored a lot of old buildings and cleaned them up and put some money in them.

Then I had some opportunities to work for the banks in town. We did a very large building downtown, which we called the Galleria. We had hoped it would be commercial or retail space on the lower level and offices above. But it didn't really work out that way because a new mall opened on the outskirts of town and a lot of the retailers left downtown. That building is very successful, but it's all offices now.

We're in a whole new phase now. What we have now is a lot of immigrants from South America and Asia. We have a large Brazilian population moving into town and they're not reluctant to take storefronts to try to make a go of little businesses — little restaurants and clothing stores and so forth.

So the town is again changing in that the immigrant population downtown is almost starting to dominate it. I think that, without the immigrants, the town might have been much worse off, because most of the businesses had gone to the malls or the strip malls.

Now the immigrants are downtown making a go of it. It makes for a very interesting town with a lot of interesting kinds of restaurants and stores that we didn't have before. So that seems to be where it is now, and I don't know where it's going next.