The New Haven Register Has Left New Haven

On my first day of work at the New Haven Register — Feb. 28, 1977 — I had a four-minute walking commute from my brownstone apartment around the corner on Trumbull Street. I took a right onto Orange Street and there, on that block, was the Register’s three-story red brick building. I rode the clunky funky elevator to the second floor and entered a humming newsroom.

TAP!TAP!TAP!TAP!TAP! This was the sound of dozens of reporters hunched over their electric typewriters, pounding away on their stories, overseen by their editors — many of them puffing away on cigarettes or cigars and calling out for “copy!”

Could there be a more exciting place for a 27-year-old cub reporter newly-arrived in New Haven?

While working on the day’s stories we could occasionally gaze out the windows to the Audubon arts district and the city beyond it. We practiced “shoe leather journalism” — we were within easy walking distance of the New Haven Green, City Hall, Yale University and the city’s many great bars and restaurants. Those bars were important to us; that’s where reporters and editors gathered after deadline to talk about the day’s events, to gossip, to flirt with each other (many of us were not yet married), to exchange ideas about the next day’s events and assignments and to muse about the state of the city, the state, the nation or even the world.

The bars we inhabited included Malone’s Three Steins, Kavanagh’s and the Jury Box. We could also walk to Pepe’s and Sally’s for world-class pizza and pitchers of beer.

In those days New Haven had two daily newspapers: the morning Journal-Courier and the afternoon New Haven Register. Both were put together and printed at 367 Orange St.

People from the community stopped in often to place an ad, to drop off a death notice for a family member or to give a news tip to a reporter.

When the Jackson family, who owned those papers, bought a former shirt factory on Sargent Drive overlooking I-95 and moved us there in May 1981, I was upset. What? Drive to work? Drive to my assignments? Leave downtown? On that sad final day of work on Orange Street we toasted the old joint over beers at Naples Pizza, a few blocks away.

We adjusted. We were still in New Haven, putting out newspapers with one another.

All things must pass. 367 Orange was torn down, becoming a parking lot, then a large condo complex for rich Yuppies. The Jacksons sold out to a corporation. In 1987 the Journal-Courier ceased publication and the Register became the morning paper. There were staff cutbacks, waves of lay-offs. In 2014 the printing press was dismantled and the remaining editorial staffers were moved to the second floor of an office building on Gando Drive off I-91 near North Haven. (See photo above). Technically we were still in New Haven. But it felt like suburbia.

And now even that is gone. Earlier this month the Hearst chain, owners of the New Haven Register and eight other papers in Connecticut, moved its Register reporters and editors to — Meriden. Fifteen miles away from New Haven. This was strictly an economic move, as Hearst last year bought the Record Journal, which has a headquarters in Meriden.

We know this is the trend for newspapers these days. It’s happening everywhere. What’s even sadder than the New Haven Register leaving New Haven is the Hartford Courant, now owned by Alden Capital, eliminating its newsroom completely. Years ago the Courant left its large building in downtown Hartford. Courant reporters work out of their homes.

The New Haven Register’s move has not been reported in the New Haven Register. Were the owners too embarrassed? You had to read about it in the New Haven Independent and the Yale Daily News.

I cannot imagine driving to Meriden to write stories about New Haven. I’m glad I left the Register four years ago amidst a pandemic that forced me to work “remotely,” apart from my colleagues, so far removed from those collegial glory days.