Slumming Around New London's Bradley Street

What used to be Bradley Street is no longer called Bradley, and it’s not much of a street. It curves from Eugene O’Neill Drive to the Parade, between parking garages and the backs of buildings. It looks like you’ve made a wrong turn, and odds are you probably have.

But if it’s not noticed or remembered much now, at least it has been often recorded. I didn’t know this street used to be here, off of State, parallel to Eugene O’Neill, which itself used to be called Main Street. But I realized that I kept seeing its name in all sorts of unrelated places. For a street one oddly-configured block long, it left a considerable impression. 

To the more affluent residents of the city it was a blight, a crime-breeding ghetto. Its denizens were blacks and immigrants, mostly Jews, Russians, and Poles, according to “Reinventing New London.” It's one of those little picture books that you see in Borders and assume are not very useful but in fact contain all sorts of photographic windows into lost worlds. That book also quotes a editorial calling Bradley Street “a stench in the nostrils of citizens” of New London. 

It also comes up in local Revolutionary War histories. Bradley Street was spared by Benedict Arnold's troops as they set much of the rest of New London on fire, because a loyalist and Arnold informant either lived there or informed the Regulars that  nothing on the street was worth burning. At that time it had about ten houses, and was known as “Widow’s Row.” 

It turns up in literature too, though not by name. When Jamie Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night talks about Fat Violet, the piano-playing prostitute he takes pity on, the character is describing a real person, whom playwright Eugene O'Neill knew or knew of from the years he spent at his family’s summer house on Pequot Avenue. In the play, madam Addie Burns of Bradley Street became Mamie Burns, who complains to Jamie about the state of her business. The Great God Brown also sets several scenes in a brothel parlor, based on a real New London bawdy house and described in detail in the stage directions.

There were brothels on other streets, but Bradley and the area around it, almost wholly made up of tenements and boardinghouses, often fronts for houses of ill repute, was their center. Like every Connecticut attraction since probably the 1600s, it was said to be the most happening red-light district “between New York and Boston.” 

Bradley Street is a part of New London’s law enforcement history, too, and not only because of its illegal activities. A police station opened there in 1898, replacing an earlier, smaller building in a different location. The crime fighters existed there alongside the crime for years, until the area was cleaned up as part of the nationwide movement to eliminate vice districts after World War One. 

Bradley Street was renamed North Bank in the 1920s, and then at some point during the urban renewal of the 1960s, it became Atlantic Street, a rather grand name for the non-entity of a road it is today. But now it is clean, relatively, and thoroughly lacking in either excitement or tragedy. If there is crime on Atlantic Street, it is not of the visible, colorful variety. But knowing the history of it makes driving along this concrete palimpsest almost entertaining, even now.