A menacing sight looming on both sides of Interstate 95, the Bridgeport skyline seems to warn visitors to stay on the highway.
Dormant smokestacks, boarded-up factories and graffiti-covered buildings reinforce this city's image as Connecticut's embarrassment.The latest blow came June 6, when Bridgeport became the largest city to file for bankruptcy since the Great Depression.
"Bridgeport right now is a leper colony," Alderman Thomas J. White said hours before Mayor Mary Moran sought protection under Chapter 9 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
Bridgeport, a city of 140,000, is 60 miles north of New York City, overlooking Long Island Sound. It was a bustling industrial center and port during the 19th and early 20th centuries, but has been on the slide for decades.
Bridgeport was once filled with theaters where audiences saw plays and musicals before they traveled south to Broadway. In the 1890s, it had an amusement park complete with a carousel and roller coaster. The city's 1,300 acres of parks helped give it the nickname "Park City."
Its factories cranked out two-thirds of the ammunition used by allied forces during both world wars. Remington Arms Co., which closed its Bridgeport plant in 1989, was the largest factory in the United States when it was built in 1915.
Sewing machines, corsets, machine tools, cigars, toy trains were also once made here. But the factories began to close or move away in the 1950s as America's industrial age started to fade.
Bridgeport's hospitals and bank headquarters are its largest employers. Many of its blue-collar workers travel to nearby Stratford to work at Sikorsky Aircraft.
With the loss of jobs, the downward spiral into poverty began.
Today, Bridgeport has four public housing projects, but only one downtown family movie theater and one bookstore. Federal officials rank Father Panik Village among the worst housing projects in the country. The city's homicide rate was the highest in Connecticut last year, when 60 people were slain.
Bridgeport tried to make the transition from industrial city to corporate center. During the 1980s, nearly a million square feet of office space was built, according to Joseph McGee, state commissioner of economic development.
But Bridgeport's efforts were always overshadowed by Stamford, a city 30 miles to the south that has become a gleaming Mecca for multinational corporations, including Xerox and GTE.
Moran, who was greeted by shouts of support from passing motorists as she stood on a street near City Hall on Friday, says the bankruptcy filing is nothing to be ashamed of.
"This is not a dishonorable act," said Moran, a former businesswoman who was a neophyte politician when she ousted the incumbent Democrat in 1989. "We have brought national attention to the plight of urban America."
Part of Bridgeport's image problem stems from the stark contrast it provides to much of the rest of wealthy Fairfield County, according to Lennie Grimaldi, who wrote a history of the city.
Bridgeport's per capita income in 1987 was $10,534, third lowest in a state where the average was $16,094.
Yet seven of the state's top 10 wealthiest towns are located in Fairfield County, including No. 1 New Canaan, with a per capita income four times higher than Bridgeport's.
Bridgeport remains a diverse, largely working class city, scarred by deep pockets of poverty, Grimaldi said.