You are excused for having missed this story. It was stuck below the fold in section B of the Hartford Courant on Wednesday, the place where you might expect to find the "Area Teen Makes Eagle Scout" kind of story, or those of similar gravity. The headline was this: "Front Street Takes a Housing Cut," and the upshot is that after 10 years of more or less unremitting nonsense from the mouths of significant personages, it seems that there aren't going to be any apartments built in the big gaping hole that is the Front Street part of the Adriaen's Landing fantasy world. Cited as reasons for this is the state of the economy, rising construction costs, etc., but why didn't the news surprise me, tucked away as it was like an embarrassing crazy aunt in the newspaper's attic? Why, when we last heard from developer Bradley Nitkin, and he said that construction would start in the spring (meaning, like, now) did I have the absolute, unshakable conviction that this, too, would turn out to be rubbish?

I guess it is because since 1998 — an entire decade — the whole Adriaen's Landing revitalization of Hartford traveling medicine show has been characterized by broken promises, missed deadlines, empty triumphalist rhetoric and the whittling down of what was always a grandiose idea worthy of Mussolini (who did, at least, make sure the trains ran on time, give him that, and he did drain the Tuscan marshes) into yet another nightmare of Hartford civic architecture. Over the weekend I went back and read some of the stuff that has been projected since 1998, when Robert Fiondella of the Phoenix Home Life Mutual Insurance Co. first pitched Adriaen's Landing. There was going to be a big cut in the flood control dike that would open the city to the river; there would be a stadium, and most important, there would be "housing, to bring thousands of young professionals and aging baby-boomer empty-nesters back to urban life," according to an article in the Courant at the time. In 2001, a group called Casden Properties Inc. wanted to build 400 units, but CCEDA, the state agency that is overseeing the project, thought that Casden was moving too slowly (cue the hollow laughter) and also that it wanted to build too many subsidized housing units as part of the package. I guess we didn't want that either, not quite the glossy, cosmopolitan vision we had in mind. And so Casden was asked to leave, to be replaced by Richard Cohen of Capital Properties, owner of Constitution Plaza. "This will happen. We are not going to fail in this endeavor," said Mr. Cohen when he signed his commitment to 200 housing units and 150,000 square feet of retail space. He said he would break ground in 2003 and there'd be an IMAX cinema and so on. I can't remember honestly if he was the one that also promised an ESPN sports center kind of place. Someone did, but nobody talks about that now. And then Cohen backed out in 2004. Enter Mr. Nitkin, who only wanted to build 60 apartments to begin with, but was then talked into 115. Who could have predicted, then, that eventually the housing piece would fall away?

Here's the problem. Front Street used to be an actual neighborhood with real people in it before it was turned into the breathtaking, Pyongyangian warren of towers that now dominate the downtown. The whole idea was to bring human beings back to the neighborhood, people who would walk around, maybe stroll down to the retail stores at the Colt development, or pop out to Main Street for breakfast. The people are what is needed to knit the center of town, Colt and the riverfront together. Without the people, you have nothing. What will Front Street look like on a Friday night now? It will look like the rest of downtown Hartford on a Friday night — empty and soulless.

The legislature and Governor John G. Rowland gave the green light to this project. Unfortunately for Governor Jodi Rell, she has inherited the mess. She's the boss. This is a project that is now too important to the future of the city, too big to be allowed to fail; and, without people — make no mistake — it will be a failure. Like it or not, in my view, the Governor must step up and prevent this from becoming a disaster. ¦

Write to us at editor@hartfordadvocate.com