The Immigrant Factory City

Between eighteen seventy and nineteen ten, Bridgeport grew from a small port city of roughly twenty-five thousand people into the largest industrial center in Connecticut, with a population exceeding one hundred thousand. The growth was built almost entirely on immigration. Workers came from Ireland, Slovakia, Hungary, Germany, England, Italy, and Poland, drawn by the factories that kept expanding along the Pequonnock River and the harbor.

The neighborhoods they built still carry their names. Hungarian immigrants settled the West End in the eighteen eighties, forming mutual aid societies, the Rackoczi Hungarian Aid Association in eighteen eighty-seven among the first. Slavic immigrants from what is now the Czech Republic and Slovakia clustered in the East Side near the cartridge works and sewing machine factories. Italian workers settled in the South End near the harbor. Each community built its own churches, its own shops, its own social infrastructure.

In eighteen ninety-four, members of Bridgeport's Slavic community met with a Russian Orthodox priest and founded Holy Ghost Russian Orthodox Church on the East Side. That congregation became the mother church of all Orthodox churches in New England, one of the organizational anchors of Orthodox Christianity in America, born out of a factory neighborhood in Bridgeport.

The electric plug outlet, the kind that every appliance in your house or your car uses, was invented in Bridgeport in nineteen twelve by Harvey Hubbell II, who had founded his manufacturing company here in eighteen eighty-eight. The world's first mutual telephone exchange opened in Bridgeport in eighteen seventy-seven. The first Subway restaurant opened in Bridgeport's North End in nineteen sixty-five.

Bridgeport did not just absorb the energy of industrial America. For several decades, it generated it.