Urban makeover

Beset by violent crime and poverty, this capital city for decades has seen its middle-class workers flee to suburbs after dark, leaving its center an empty canyon of buildings surrounded by some of the most troubled neighborhoods in the Northeast.

Now Hartford is trying to bring them back. State and city officials have poured a billion dollars in government funds into downtown Hartford over the past five years, with the goal of attracting white-collar professionals and middle-class empty-nesters. The money has put cranes on the horizon for the first time in decades to erect a convention center and hotels, as well as luxury apartments and retail space for what city officials hope will create a residential hub -- a kind of Beacon Hill on the Connecticut River.

''We are a city with typical big-city issues like poverty and crime," Mayor Eddie A. Perez said. ''But instead of having flight, we need to retain as many people as we can."

For a metropolis that has long lived in the shadows of its suburbs, it is a radical notion. It means not only changing the face of the Hartford, but also the way Connecticut thinks of it. Hartford, Perez says, must be transformed from workaday office space to a community where people want to live.

Some have bought into the concept. A small band of urban pioneers has traded cul-de-sacs for city boulevards on faith that a long-promised rebound is in the offing for a city once feared beyond redemption.

The other night, Richard Mulready, 60, a real estate company president, left his downtown Hartford office, picked up Italian takeout and went home. Not by car down Route 44 to one of the many wealthy enclaves outside the city, but just a few blocks on foot to ''55 on the Park," a former telephone company building remodeled as a residential high-rise.

The art-deco residence overlooks Bushnell Park, a sculpted landscape, that was once a centerpiece of Hartford's bygone glory, and is now a focal point of the city's effort to resurrect its downtown.

''Hartford's not there yet," Mulready said, standing in the lobby of the building he has called home for nearly two years after moving from West Hartford, a suburb. ''We are ahead of the market by a few years, but, I tell you -- I like my four-minute walk to work."

While downtown is rich in cultural offerings like museums and theater -- vestiges of Hartford's heyday 100 years ago, when manufacturing and insurance helped make it one of the wealthiest cities in the nation -- the people who fill the center by day disappear at night. An estimated 122,000 workers shuttle into the city each weekday, yet its downtown residential population is estimated at 1,500, the smallest of any neighborhood in this city of 125,000.

Other New England cities have grappled with similar challenges. Worcester and Providence are two former industrial centers that have endeavored to remake their images.

Hartford's shortcomings are all the more striking against the backdrop of its teeming and affluent suburbs, places that help make Connecticut's per capita income the highest of any state in the nation.

Mayor after mayor has promised to recapture Hartford's prosperity, which began fading midway through last century and was lost when the middle class fled, accelerated by race riots, in the 1960s.

The goal of restoring Hartford has been made more elusive by successive crises and missed chances. Starting in 1970, it was the elimination of factory jobs as manufacturers closed shops. In the 1990s, white-collar jobs disappeared when the city's economic pillar -- the insurance industry -- consolidated. The city suffered a great psychic injury, as well as losses in potential revenue, when the New England Patriots decided not to relocate to Hartford in 1999.

Today Hartford regularly appears on lists where no city wants to see its name: first among major US cities in ''socio-economic stress," according to the American City Business Journals; seventh on a list of the most dangerous US cities, according to an analysis of FBI statistics by Morgan Quitno Press, a national survey firm.

City officials say they have made aggressive efforts to reduce crime. Hartford recently installed a respected police chief and last year recorded its lowest homicide rate since 1992, along with a 16 percent decrease in violent crime, reversing a spike the year before.

It is Perez's approach to development that represents the most radical departure from past city administrations. For years, the city invested in building housing for the poor, creating one of the largest stocks of affordable housing in the Northeast. As a result, Hartford has the second lowest home-ownership rates in the nation, rivaled only by Newark.

The administration has turned that policy on its head by opting to subsidize housing for the middle class and well-to-do rather than the poor.

''We realized that we couldn't keep doing the same things and expect the city's fortunes to rise," said Matthew Hennessy, the mayor's chief of staff.

The idea is to use the rejuvenation of downtown as a stimulus for a larger turnaround. By luring the middle class to the center, government officials hope to draw boutiques, coffee bars, and restaurants to attract larger enterprises and boost tax revenues.

City officials say the tipping point may already have arrived. While the initial downtown projects were leveraged with public dollars, recent undertakings have been private ventures -- a change city officials attribute to the escalation in real estate values.

But concerns over the staying power of Hartford's redevelopment were raised when Richard Cohen, the private financial backer, recently withdrew from Front Street, a major retail project pegged to serve the convention center and business district.

''It's going in the right direction," Fred Carstensen, director of the Connecticut Center for Urban Analysis, said of Hartford's plans. ''But the question is whether you can sustain it."

Others question whether too much time has passed -- whether people have become used to downtown as a place where people work but do not play, or stay.

Rob Miller, manager of the student eatery at Trinity College, a private school in the heart of one of Hartford's struggling neighborhoods, grew up in Connecticut and recalls day trips to Hartford's downtown for shopping and dining excursions with his mother.

But times have changed, Miller said. Suburbs have built stores and restaurants that rival anything available downtown, eliminating suburbanites' need for the city.

''It's been so long that it's had nothing," said Miller, 40, who makes his home in the suburbs after two years of downtown living that ended when his car was broken into a second time. ''How are you going to compete with the suburbs now that they are all built up?"

Even the people who have moved back acknowledge that downtown has a way to go. There is no grocery store within walking distance of the 30-block district. On Sunday morning, there is no place to buy a newspaper, and Starbucks, residents lament, is shuttered.

''It's very frustrating," said Laura Althoff, 34, a psychotherapist who works for Aetna and moved to downtown in July from New York. ''It's like a ghost town on weekends. The joke is: Hartford is close to a lot of things, like Boston and New York."

Yet among these urban pioneers there is an eager curiosity about the shape their new neighborhood might someday take.

Dick Reinhart, 68, an architect, and his wife Susan, 63, acting director of the Antiquarian & Landmarks Society, made their home in the suburb of Farmington for 40 years.

They raised three children there. Last year, they decided they wanted to be closer to the city's cultural offerings. Today they rent, with an option to buy, a loft-style apartment they designed themselves, with wide windows and sweeping city views.

''We already thank ourselves," Dick Reinhart said.

He would like it better if Hartford had more foot traffic on weekends, and perhaps brought the downtown population to 5,000.

''Like a little Boston," he said.

Sarah Schweitzer can be reached at schweitzer@globe.com.