Long before it became the birthplace of pizza in America, Wooster Street trumped Henry Ford as the first place in the country to boast an assembly line, at Brewster's Carriage Factory in 1809.

By the 1840's it had become a fashionable residential area for the prominent citizens of the town. But soon factories began to move in, with their noise and smoke. So the bluebloods moved out and the Irish, and then the Italians, moved in. Many of these immigrants made a living by using the street level rooms of their homes as storefronts.

Thanks to choices New Haven made in the 1950's, the Wooster Street area became a laboratory for neighborhood renewal instead of the site of an interstate highway. The street level shops of last century's immigrants have become the restaurants of today's Little Italy.