Raucous Fun Prohibited

Hartford needs an attitude. Sort of like Cohen.

You know. Cohen has an attitude.

Cohen has a swagger, a self-confidence, a sense of fun and wonder. You take one look at Cohen and you know what you’re getting. And, you’re glad.

What you don’t get from Cohen is self-doubt. Cohen is not torn by conflicting visions of what he wants to be, of who he is, of whether his mom would be proud of him.

That’s sort of what Hartford needs. The city needs a sense of itself, a confident reason for being.

What we have at present is a messy metro psychology, in which Hartford is like an over-eager lapdog, running from human to human, willing to be almost anything they want, in return for a pat on the head.

Looking For Fun

But, if you try to be everything to everyone, the end result is that you will lose on all fronts. Somewhere, there will be a locale better than you, at each thing you are trying to be.

For instance, Hartford’s occasional notion that it will be a “24-hour city,” in which hordes of young professionals will stagger from bar to bar, in between trips to the art galleries and theater companies, is, perhaps, a bit overwrought.

The city is doomed to cope with a transient commuter population of 86,000 actuaries who leave work at 4:20 p.m. and go home to Newington to watch the 5 p.m. news on television, so they can be asleep by 8.

West Hartford Center is a bit more fun, South Norwalk is much more fun — and New Haven, blessed with Yale University, is a lot more fun. Since very carefully considered Connecticut regulatory tyranny applies the same restrictions on Hartford as it does on Voluntown or Bozrah (the bars close too early, for one thing), no city in Connecticut is wildly, ridiculously fun. Hartford? That may not be its appropriate vision.

Yes, yes, there are loud, raucous bar-type downtown restaurants that teeter on the edge of fun, but the concentration of such stuff is insufficient for the city to be a fun palace. And, Hartford just isn’t like that.

Neither Cool Nor Snobby

The Riverfront Recapture folks got it just about right when they cancelled the Grand Prix ChampBoat races along the Connecticut River in August because one of the sponsors was Knockout magazine, which publishes pictures of girls with Cohen-like sex appeal and not many clothes. There was a risk that some of the Knockout girls would have actually showed up at the races — threatening a level of fun that Hartford simply couldn’t handle.

Remember, this is a city that not so long ago cracked down on ice-cream truck vendors, because their music and bells were too loud.

Again, there is nothing wrong with being anti-fun, just as there is nothing wrong with vowing to create cities that are, as the governor of Michigan once put it, “so cool, you have to wear shades.” The problem comes when you are neither cool nor snobby-suburban dignified.

To be fair, many communities have this kind of struggle with themselves. The Expresso Gone Wild club in Belfair, Wash. (town nickname: the Slippery Slope Toward Hell) was ordered by county commissioners in August to do a better job of covering up its dancers, who were teetering on the edge of being erotic.

Needless to say, in Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine’s “Best Cities to Live, Work and Play” article in July, neither Belfair nor Hartford made the cut.

The winner? Houston, home of “no rules” and the “biggest damn liquor store on the planet.”

Big deal. That’s not so great. Hartford is less humid. Ha, ha. And Hartford has a Cohen column.

Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.